Mimi-nashi Hoichi

The Mimi-nashi Hoichi legend is a kaidan of a biwa minstrel attached to Amida-ji in Nagato (modern Yamaguchi). The young blind player Hoichi is renowned for his recitation of the Heike Monogatari, particularly the Dan-no-ura section. One night, in the absence of the head priest, a high-ranking warrior figure summons him to play for his lord; Hoichi performs the Dan-no-ura before what seems to be a Heike audience, and is led to the same place night after night. Suspicious, the priest has a servant follow, and finds Hoichi playing alone in the Heike graveyard behind Amida-ji. The listeners are the ghosts of the Heike. To protect him, the priest writes the Heart Sutra in ink across his entire body, but the ears are forgotten. When the ghost comes, only the ears are visible; they are torn off and taken away. Hoichi loses both ears but is spared, and from then is known as Mimi-nashi Hoichi, the No-Ear Hoichi. The structure has four parts: the fame of his biwa; the ghostly summons and the night recitations; the priest's use of the Heart Sutra; and the loss of the ears with a miraculous outcome. The cycle is a Heike vengeful-spirit narrative tied to the fall of the Heike at Dan-no-ura (1185), combining goryo belief and Buddhist subjugation. The biwa minstrel was, from the medieval period, both transmitter of the Heike Monogatari and a quieter of ghosts; Hoichi stands at the boundary, face to face with both the teller and the told. The loss of ears is read as the sacrifice of hearing to preserve the power to speak. The site is the Amida-ji of the legend, now Akama Jingu in Akama-cho, Shimonoseki (Yamaguchi); before the Meiji separation of Buddha and kami it was Amida-ji, and the precinct holds the imperial tomb of the boy emperor Antoku, who drowned at Dan-no-ura. In the precincts stands the Hoichi-do enshrining the image of Mimi-nashi Hoichi, with the seven-Heike-graves Shichimori-zuka beside it, enshrining Heike commanders Tomomori and Noritsune. The Dan-no-ura battlefield site in Mimosusogawa-cho, looking over the Kanmon Strait, is a National Historic Site. The standard modern transmission is in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904), under 'The Story of Mimi-nashi Hoichi.' The earlier layer is Issei San'nin's Gayu Kidan, volume two, 'Biwa Hikyoku Naku Yurei' (1770), which Hearn adapted. The Dan-no-ura account in the Heike Monogatari (Kamakura period) supplies the historical background. Akama Jingu shrine records, the Hoichi-do origin and Shincho Nihon Koten Shusei's 'Kaidan-Kidan' provide further documentation.