『百物語』에 나타난 괴이의 유형 및 양상

Abstract

Ghost story culture, which flourished until the Edo period, was confronted with a crisis that its vein would be stopped because of the rationalism which had been introduced since the Meiji Restoration. However, under such conditions, ghost stories continued to be on everybody’s lips through the story telling of literary people at that time. 『Hyaku-monogatari(百物語)』, a collection of ghost stories which was published in the 27th year of the Meiji period(1894), held a key position in the ghost story history of Japan, in that it inherited the tradition of Ghost Story Society of modern times. This study speculated on the types and aspects of mysteries shown in a total of 34 ghost stories as an advanced post to identify characteristics of 『Hyaku- monogatari』. A total of 39 mysterious stories were categorized according to properties: 6 on humans, 6 on natural things, 4 on sound and strange phenomena and 1 on mysterious things. Humans appeared 25 times, of which ghosts appeared 19 times. The reason why such aspects appeared is that ghost stories were made based on human oriented ideas which were found in conflicts between humans and humans, or humans and society. Except stories 20, 30, 31, 33 and 34, as the mysteries in each of these was derived from internal conflicts in human society such as death from an illness, sensitivity, murder, conflicts between wife and husband, jealousy, suicide, death in battle, tricks, death from an accident and hatred. The internal conflicts in society which occurred in the flow of rapid changes due to forced enlightenment were expressed through a form of ghost story, in which mysteries triggered by humans appeared the most. That is, 『Hyaku-monogatari』 is characterized by urban ghost stories which expressed the darkness in our minds.