The Vengeful Spirit of Emperor Sutoku (崇徳院の怨霊)

In the waning years of the Heian period, Akihito — enthroned as the seventy-fifth Emperor while still a child — had the path to cloistered rule sealed against him forever by a single phrase his father, Retired Emperor Toba, had inscribed in the abdication decree: "imperial younger brother." Those characters, later generations would whisper, were not an invitation to the throne but to the grave.

In the first year of Hōgen (1156), Retired Emperor Sutoku was defeated in the Hōgen Rebellion, that clash of blood between courtiers and warriors, and banished to the distant province of Sanuki. He would never again breathe the air of the capital, never again look upon his wife's face.

In the land of his exile, it is said the retired emperor copied out the five volumes of the Mahāyāna sutras by hand and petitioned the court to accept them as an offering. The imperial decree refused him. The sutras were sent back. What depths of despair and fury seized him in that moment — one can only imagine. From that day forward, they say, he let his nails and hair grow wild and wore the countenance of a demon. He bit through his own tongue, and with that blood wrote a curse in the colophon of the scriptures, swearing to become the great demon-power of Japan, to cast down emperors into the ranks of the common people and raise the common people up to emperors.

In the second year of Chōkan (1164), the retired emperor died in Sanuki. In the capital that followed, calamities multiplied — strange signs in the heavens, disasters upon the earth — and those closest to Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa met their ends one after another in violent and unnatural ways. The people trembled: the resentment of Sutoku-in had at last begun to move. His name is spoken to this day with dread, counted among the Three Great Vengeful Spirits of Japan alongside Sugawara no Michizane and Taira no Masakado.

The spirit enshrined at Shirahige on Sanuki was in time invited to Kyoto as well, where it came to be worshipped at Shiramine Shrine. The sanctuary was built to appease a wrathful ghost — and in that very act, the court confessed how deep the grudge of Sutoku-in truly ran. Even now, those who walk the mountain roads of Sanuki after dark speak of a white-robed shadow glimpsed in the late hours of the night. It never turns to look back. It only recedes into the distance, and as it goes, faintly — just barely — the sound of a sutra being read drifts through the air.