Who Is The Elder Lady-in-Waiting (a Ghost)?
A ghostly lady who serves the Heike
The Elder Lady-in-Waiting (a Heike Ghost)
The Elder Lady-in-Waiting is an older woman in "The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi" who serves people of high rank. She is really a Heike ghost. In Japanese she is called a rojo, the old title for a woman who ran the inner household of a samurai or noble family.
She is the one who greets Hoichi when he is brought to the mansion. She asks him to perform the Battle of Dan-no-ura. After everyone listening cries out and weeps at his performance, she tells him to come back every night and to tell no one about it.
The "lord" and the many people Hoichi plays for are thought to be the Heike clan, who sank into the sea at Dan-no-ura with the child Emperor Antoku. Her words are what send Hoichi to the graveyard night after night, setting the whole story in motion.
Episodes featuring this character3
NEWEpisode 1
When the Dead Call His Name, Don't AnswerHoichi the Earless
Kaidan, Tale One. Hoichi, a blind master of the biwa lute, is summoned night after night to perform for "a person of high rank." But the guests who weep at his tale are the dead of a clan that sank beneath the sea. On the night his whole body is covered in sacred writing, he must not answer, no matter who calls his name.
19 pages
NEWEpisode 4
He Didn't Run. He Hid the Body.Rokuro-kubi
KAIDAN: Japanese Ghost Stories, Episode 4. Kwairyo, a wandering priest who used to be a fierce samurai, spends the night with a kind family deep in the mountains. At midnight he finds their sleeping bodies with no heads. He doesn't run. He quietly hides one of the bodies instead.
20 pages
NEWEpisode 6
"Tomorrow, I Won't Be Here," She SaidThe Story of Aoyagi
KAIDAN: Japanese Ghost Stories, Episode 6. Lost in a mountain blizzard, the young samurai Tomotada finds shelter in a hut, where a girl answers his poem with a poem of her own. He breaks the rules and makes her his wife. When a great lord's household takes her away, a single poem wins her back, and they share five happy years. Then one morning she tells him, "I can't be here tomorrow."
20 pages