Initially, Hiroka believes he can outrun his crime. He changes his name, shaves his forelock like a ronin, and settles in a distant city. However, the first haunting is subtle: he sees his wife’s reflection in a sake cup, hears her sleeve brush a shoji screen, smells her perfume on a windless night. The author employs a technique of uncertain haunting —neither Hiroka nor the reader can be sure if these are real ghosts or hallucinations. This ambiguity is crucial: the text refuses to grant Hiroka the comfort of knowing he is externally persecuted. Instead, it traps him in the worse possibility that his own mind has become the haunt.
Unable to bear the uncertainty, Hiroka seeks out a blind biwa player who chants the Taira no Kiyomori tale. In a masterful intertextual moment, the biwa player performs a passage about Kiyomori’s fever dreams, in which the ghosts of his enemies appear. Hiroka, hearing this, breaks down and confesses his crime to the musician. But the musician reveals himself as a transformed manifestation of the murdered husband—not the cuckold, but the man Hiroka killed mistakenly. This revelation collapses the distinction between art, dream, and reality. The biwa player’s song was not a performance but a summoning. toudou hiroka no reiyuutan
Introduction In the vast landscape of Edo-period literature, the yomihon (reading book) stands as a sophisticated genre blending didacticism, historical fiction, and the supernatural. While the names of Ueda Akinari and Santō Kyōden are well-rehearsed in literary histories, a lesser-known gem, Tōdō Hiroka no Reiyūtan (c. early 19th century), attributed to the prolific but often anonymous author Shikitei Sanba (or a close disciple), offers a uniquely psychological exploration of guilt, haunting, and spiritual redemption. Far from a simple ghost story, this narrative weaves Confucian ethics with Buddhist cosmology, using the motif of the reiyū (spirit journey or spirit encirclement) to dramatize the internal landscape of a transgressor. This essay argues that Tōdō Hiroka no Reiyūtan functions as a moral allegory in which the supernatural is not an external terror but a projection of the protagonist’s unprocessed trauma, and that the narrative’s true horror lies not in ghosts but in the inexorable return of repressed memory. Historical and Generic Context To appreciate Tōdō Hiroka no Reiyūtan , one must situate it within the late Edo yomihon tradition. Unlike the earlier kibyōshi (illustrated chapbooks) aimed at adult humor, yomihon prioritized complex prose, Chinese-style narration, and moral seriousness. Works like Akinari’s Ugetsu Monogatari (1776) had already established the ghost story as a vehicle for exploring mono no aware (the pathos of things) and karmic consequence. However, Tōdō Hiroka no Reiyūtan distinguishes itself by focusing less on the victim’s haunting and more on the perpetrator’s psyche. The title itself is revealing: Reiyūtan can mean “tale of a spirit journey” (as in a shamanic voyage) or “tale of being encircled by spirits.” Both readings apply—Hiroka is literally haunted by the ghosts of his victims and metaphorically encircled by his own guilt. Initially, Hiroka believes he can outrun his crime