Oboroguruma

A hazy night on the great road at Kamo.

You hear it first — the creak of a carriage. Ox-cart wheels, the sound every Heian aristocrat's evening was full of.

And then you see it, and it's wrong. A semi-transparent ox-cart — and the whole front panel is one enormous face.

It doesn't stop. It creaks past.

To understand it you need to know about parking

This is real, and it is one of my favourite facts about the Heian court.

The nobility travelled in ox-drawn carriages, and at the great festivals — Kamo especially — everyone came out to watch the procession from inside their carts.

Which meant the best viewing spots along the route were fought over. Not metaphorically.

They had a term for it: kuruma arasoi, the "carriage quarrel." Retainers physically shoving rival ox-carts out of the prime positions, so that their mistress's vehicle got the view and the other one got a wall.

Status warfare, conducted in a car park, by the most refined court in the world.

And it produced the greatest scene in Japanese literature

In the Tale of Genji, there is a carriage quarrel at the Kamo festival.

On one side: Aoi, Genji's wife — young, of the highest birth, with a full retinue.

On the other: Rokujō Miyasudokoro — older, formerly Genji's lover, of immense refinement and precarious position, who has come quietly to catch a glimpse of him.

Aoi's people shove Rokujō's carriage out of the way. They break it. They force it to the back, where she can see nothing, in front of everybody, and everybody knows whose carriage it is.

She goes home humiliated.

And then her resentment does something she does not choose and cannot stop.

It leaves her body.

It goes to Aoi — while Rokujō sleeps, unaware, waking with the smell of ritual incense in her hair that she cannot explain — and Aoi sickens, and Aoi dies.

That's the ikiryō: the living ghost. A grudge so strong it detaches from a person who is still alive and still, in her waking hours, mortified by what she suspects herself of doing.

Sekien put the face on the cart

Now here's why the oboroguruma is a better piece of work than it first appears.

Sekien could have drawn a woman's face in the carriage window. Obvious. Correct. A ghost riding in a vehicle.

He put the face on the front panel. The cart is the face.

And that is the sharpest reading of the Rokujō material I've encountered anywhere.

Because in a carriage quarrel, your vehicle is your face. That's the entire mechanism of the insult. Nobody saw Rokujō — she was inside, behind blinds, as a lady of her rank had to be. What was shoved, and broken, and shamed in public was the cart.

So the humiliation lives in the vehicle. Permanently. That's where it happened, and that's where it stays.

Sekien invented this creature in 1781, seven hundred years after the Genji was written, and got closer to the point than most commentary does.

The aristocrat of the wheel-monsters

There's a small family of wheel-yokai, and the class difference between them is stark.

The katawaguruma is a burning wheel with a woman's tortured face in it, rolling through the streets. It's commoner material — street justice, screaming, a child seized and returned, grief in public.

The oboroguruma doesn't even stop.

It creaks past, translucent, on a foggy road, wearing the face of somebody who lost an argument about precedence eight centuries ago.

One version of the grudge burns. The other version has impeccable manners and has simply never let it go.

If you were drawing it, I'd say give the face courtly makeup — the shaved brows, the whitened skin, the small painted mouth.

The defeat should look expensive.