Shiryō

A bamboo shoot had pushed up through the eye socket of a skull lying in the grove, and the traveller who found it stopped, worked the green shaft loose, and set his own rice down beside the bone. That night the dead man came to thank him, and paid the debt in full. The tale sits in the first book of the Nihon Ryōiki, compiled between 810 and 824, which makes it one of the oldest ghost stories anyone in Japan wrote down, and it was not told to frighten a soul. It was told to shame the reader about gratitude. Even the shiryō of bare white bones does this much, the compiler observes, so what excuse has a living person for forgetting a kindness?

The word itself is plain. Shiryō is the soul of a dead person, written with the character for death and read shirei just as often. Japanese dictionaries set it directly opposite ikiryō, the soul of someone still breathing, and then add the second sense without pausing: the onryō of the dead, the thing that attaches itself to a person and works tatari. Both senses are old and both are live. The Kōya-bon text of the Heike Monogatari, from the early thirteenth century, has a line about Taira no Kiyomori in which his living spirit and his dead spirit alike are to be soothed, as though the man were a danger in either condition. He was.

What the sources will not supply is a body. They describe habits instead, and the habits are specific. A new shiryō is said to drift about near the house it came from. Older ones keep to particular places, graveyards and shaded ground, and particular hours, night and the thin light of morning and evening, and in some accounts particular seasons. When one shows itself in human shape it looks like any other yūrei, but the more common report has it arriving as something airborne. Birds, butterflies and moths carry the dead, and a snake in the wrong place at the wrong moment is read the same way. A white moth batting against a paper screen in August is not a neutral event.

Before any of that, someone climbs onto the roof and shouts. Tamayobai, the calling of the soul, means going up to the ridge and yelling the dead person’s name into the air in the hope that the shiryō will come back down into the body it has left, and death is only admitted once the shouting has failed. Then the household starts working in the other direction. A temporary gate is built for the coffin to pass through and broken up immediately afterwards, so the spirit cannot find the door it went out by. The party that carries the body away comes home by a different road. The soul, meanwhile, is understood to sit on the ridgepole of the roof for forty-nine days, above the smell of cooking and the noise of people who are already talking about something else.

After the forty-nine days it goes to the mountains. In parts of Fukushima it climbs to a Hayama, a hill just above the village, and once it has been cleansed there it moves on to Gassan or Haguro-san to settle. The temporary tablet comes off its stand and goes into the butsudan. Elsewhere the itinerary is stranger and much more urgent: many districts held that the shiryō sets out at once for Zenkō-ji in Shinano, which is why a death bento is packed the moment the breathing stops and left out for the journey, rice still warm for a traveller with no hands. Around Kansai the road runs instead to Myōhō-san at Nachi, or to Daisen in Hōki. On Okinawa some places say the spirit spends those weeks going back and forth between the house and the tomb, unable to choose.

Then comes the long arithmetic. At the thirty-third or the fiftieth anniversary the family holds the last rite, the tomurai-age, called toikiri in some regions. The grave marker is laid flat, a living cedar is planted in its place, and no further offerings are made. The buddha becomes a kami, people said. What that means in practice is that the shiryō loses its individuality: it stops being a particular person with particular grievances and merges into the sorei, the household’s ancestral spirits, and from there it protects its descendants instead of troubling them. The anthropologist Sasaki Kōkan describes the whole sequence as a slow shedding of death pollution, and notes how closely it mirrors an infant being raised to adulthood under the care of relatives. Okinawan bone-washing and the double burials recorded among the Toda and Kota of India do the same work by other means.

Not all of the dead are equally dangerous, and Japanese folklore is unusually precise about which ones are. The spirits that harm people are mostly strangers, unconnected by blood, and the worst of them are those who died badly and out of turn. Ancestors, by contrast, generally turn on their own only when the offerings have been skimped. Neglect is what makes a ghost dangerous. The reckoning runs differently in other traditions, and the comparison is instructive: among the Tallensi of West Africa a dead father’s spirit is strong enough to kill his own child, while in China the ancestors are overwhelmingly kind.

The powers follow from all this. A shiryō can possess a person and make them suffer, and it can send illness, ruin and death into a house. Particular deaths produce particular specialists. Those who starved in the hills become gaki and cling to whoever passes. Those drowned at sea become funayūrei, who come alongside a boat asking for a ladle to bail with, and the seaman’s answer is to hand over one with the bottom knocked out, because a sound ladle in a dead man’s grip fills the hull. The spirits of the high-born and the powerful are held to be stronger than anyone else’s, which is why the standard remedy for them is not exorcism but promotion: build the shrine, make the offerings, and the grudge is converted into protection.

The limits are the same in every case, and they are limits of attention rather than force. A shiryō is potent while it is raw, unfed and unfinished, and every ritual aimed at it is a way of running down that clock. Memorial services purify it. The mountain purifies it. Bon brings it home for a few days on a welcome fire lit at the grave or on the hillside, then sends it back. And at the fiftieth year the marker comes down, the cedar goes in, and nobody needs to say the name again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a shiryō?

A shiryō is the soul of a dead person in Japanese belief, and by extension the vengeful spirit of the dead, the kind that attaches itself to a living person and afflicts them. The word is written with the character for death and can also be read shirei. Japanese dictionaries give both senses, the neutral soul of the deceased and the malevolent haunting one.

What is the difference between a shiryō and an ikiryō?

A shiryō is the spirit of someone who has died, while an ikiryō is the spirit of someone still alive that has left the body and gone wandering. Japanese dictionaries list them as direct opposites. The same person could be feared in both conditions: a line in the Heike Monogatari says that Taira no Kiyomori’s living spirit and his dead spirit both needed appeasing.

How long does a shiryō stay near its house?

Forty-nine days is the usual figure, and during that period the spirit is said to rest on the ridgepole of the roof or hang about the property. After the forty-ninth day it leaves for the mountains, and the temporary memorial tablet is moved into the family’s butsudan. On Okinawa some communities say it spends those weeks travelling back and forth between the house and the tomb.

How do you stop a shiryō from causing harm?

You feed it and mourn it on schedule. Memorial offerings gradually cleanse a shiryō of its death pollution, and funeral practice adds physical precautions, such as building a temporary gate for the coffin and then destroying it so the spirit cannot retrace its route indoors. For the spirit of a powerful person the answer is grander: enshrine the dead as a kami, and the hostility turns into protection.

Do shiryō stay dangerous forever?

No. At the thirty-third or fiftieth anniversary the family performs a final rite, lays the grave marker flat and plants a living tree, after which no more offerings are made. The shiryō loses its individual identity at that point and merges into the sorei, the household’s ancestral spirits, becoming a guardian of its descendants rather than a threat.

Related Entries

Yūrei, Onryō, Ikiryō, Goryō, Funayūrei, Gaki, Ubume, Hitodama, Onibi, Oiwa, Datsue-ba, Shinigami, Preta, Manes