I - Inky & Ikiryo - Fictional Phantoms #AtoZChallenge 2016

Hello (again) and welcome to my blog this lovely Monday, I hope you all had a great weekend. Today I have two fictional phantoms who are both Japanese, only one is animated and the other is all about people.

Inky (Pac-Man)

Inky is the cyan ghost from Pac-man and he's been around since the original arcade game. He's also the tricky one. He has no pattern in how he reacts to Pac-man so it is impossible to predict what he will do.

Blinky (red) chases Pac-man all the time like a one ghost army; Inky might as well, if he is in the mood.

Pinky (pink - bet you didn't guess that one :)) can jump ahead of Pac-man when you least expect it; so can Inky when he feels like it.

Clyde (orange) chases, but then wanders back to his corner when he get's too close and on occasion, Inky might do this too.

It all depends, making Inky a unpredictable ghost who can really put a spanner in the works.

Ikiryo (The Tale of Genji)

Written text from the earliest
illustrated handscroll (12th century)

An Ikiryo is a ghost of a living person and is a popular belief in Japan where the spirit leaves the body to haunt people or places. It has often been used in fiction and these spirits can be vengeful and dangerous.

The story I am interested in first is the classic The Tale of Genji which was written in the early years of the 11th century and Aoi no Ue, the Noh play of the same story,

In it Genji has a lover, the Lady Rokujo who's Ikiryo leaves her body and torments Genji's pregnant wife Aoi no Ue, which causes her to die after childbirth.

There is another Ikiryo in the medieval anthology Konjaku Monogatarishu in the tale "How the Ikiryo Spirit of Omi Province Came and Killed a Man of the Capital", which kind of gives away the plot! In the story a commoner encounters a noble woman who he guides to the house of a noble man, where she disappears at the gates. What he couldn't have realised was that the woman was in fact the Ikiryo of the man's former wife, who proceeds to cause the man an illness that kills him.

The wrath of a woman scorned in Japanese literature can truly be terrible it seems.

I think I'd rather be up again Inky than an Ikiryo, what do you think?

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My Other Blogs

I am sharing blogging duties with my sister, Sophie, on two other blogs for the AtoZ as well :

Wittegen Press | Fantasy Boys XXX (AC)

And Sophie also has her own blog in the AtoZ too:

Sophie's Thoughts and Fumbles

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Other People's Blogs

Don't forget to check out the other participant in this years AtoZChallenge. Click on the image to visit the main site and see the full list.