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Before holding forth on poetry and thought, remember that some things begin in wonder and awe.
“When I first looked him full in the face . . . to put it one way—it felt like telling a ghost story about a faceless yōkai and, when you reach ‘Was it a face like this?’, seeing not the yōkai’s face but your own . . .”
—Boogiepop and Others, chapter 1, “Romantic Warrior”1
When I first saw the theme “City · Space,” I was reading a report by Uchida Tadayoshi, “Yōkai and Urban Space in Edo.”2 Traditional literature of the supernatural seems not to have changed very much in urban life; compared with more specific investigations of yōkai, urban legends may be closer to the modern lives of city dwellers.
Perhaps some Frenchman living in seclusion in Italy let the whole world know that his comrade could stop time. And who is spreading the different versions of the rumors about a grim reaper in a black or gray hat?3 I imagine the all-knowing tavern keepers in Heroes of Might and Magic or The Elder Scrolls have no energy to spare for such matters. Legends circulate on the lips of people sharing a friend of a friend’s firsthand experience; in street-corner chatter about someone’s strange encounter on the way to or from work; in the minds of students trying, late at night in their dorm rooms, to work out how to tell a good horror story. People discussing overloaded elevators or the abduction and mutilation of living victims seldom think about the difference between horror stories and urban legends. Nor do tales of KFC’s six-legged fried chicken or the headless chicken that would not die require their tellers to distinguish rumor from urban legend. Sorting out rumor legend, urban legend (or urban myth), and contemporary legend, or tracing the etymologies and development of gossip, rumor, folklore, uwasabanashi (rumor and gossip), and esoragoto (fanciful invention), would do little to serve this essay’s purpose. I want only to offer the broadest possible overview of what we have in mind when we speak of “urban legends.”
If a scholar launches into stories of yōkai, ghosts, and apparitions in a paper on urban legends without explaining why, readers can hardly be blamed for frowning. Yet take a plot from Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan or the anthology Fantastic Tales compiled by Italo Calvino, adapt it a little, and it might circulate online as a splendid urban legend—as with Zhang Zhen’s “Duohun xiangji” (literally, “The Soul-Snatching Camera”) in relation to Poe’s famous “The Black Cat.” Can we therefore conclude that the distinction between traditional legends, as represented by Chinese tales of the strange and yōkai literature, and figures such as Slender Man, which gradually become famous through mass media, is merely a game of scholarly hair-splitting among folklorists, sociologists, and communications researchers? Should we distinguish such related concepts—and, if so, at what level?
Charles Hoy Fort’s collection of material on supernatural phenomena around the turn of the twentieth century laid solid foundations for later cryptid (UMA, “unidentified mysterious animal”) and UFO culture, as well as urban conspiracy theories. But it had little direct connection with folklore research on contemporary legends initiated by Richard Dorson and William Edgerton. This is certainly not to say that stories such as those of the disaster-bringing Mothman cannot be treated as urban-legend texts. It is simply that, to my mind, this blend of mysticism and natural history seems rather too traditional an approach. We agree with Brunvand’s observation that urban legends share many features with traditional folk legends, including variation. But to conclude from this that they are merely traditional motifs refurbished and familiar plots recombined is far too rash. Admittedly, the social psychology reflected in many classic urban-legend types readily finds counterparts in traditional legends. The well-known urban legend of a newborn revealing secret knowledge—an infant speaks and teaches people how to prevent an epidemic—and the Kansei-era story of a mouse repaying a kindness by bringing medicine are both, naturally, products of people’s imaginations during epidemics. We would certainly not refuse to acknowledge the plausibility of Alan Dundes’s explanation for the popularity of Bloody Mary simply because he works from a psychoanalytic or structuralist perspective: adolescent girls’ complicated feelings about sexual maturity. (Perhaps this is also how the legend of Boogiepop, who ends women’s lives at their most beautiful age, became popular?) Equally, though, trying to connect the hook with phallic imagery is not the direction or method pursued by most urban-legend researchers. (That said, in his essay on the Rabbit-Herd tale type in Minsu jiexi (Analyses of Folklore), he brings the familiar “nose as phallus” metaphor to bear on the episode about helping a man with a large nose, which is rather entertaining.)
So far I have given none of the specific definitions of urban legend proposed by scholars since the 1960s. Objectively speaking, neither “traditional legends still active in the present,” nor “the product of classic motifs transformed and renewed in circulation,” nor other, more elaborate and detailed definitions can readily encompass “urban legends” across different conceptual frameworks. From this essay’s broad perspective, setting aside frightening legends—whether hearsay, gossip, or rumor—and humorous anti-legends that deliberately turn expectations on their head, even straightforward celebrity anecdotes and seemingly sober or wildly fanciful hearsay can be included as “urban legends.” (One example is the famous story of the exorbitantly priced baking recipe. On social media, “urban legend” can in fact refer just as readily to a romantic encounter, or to experiences that are neither frightening nor bizarre. We might even suggest, without being too rigorous about it, that milk’s transformation from an unwanted by-product of butter-making, hawked in the streets in the early nineteenth century, into a health drink credited with all-purpose benefits was likewise accompanied by stories woven by science, advertising, and factory owners and circulated much like urban legends.)
Brunvand and other scholars have had no easy time investigating whether urban legends are based on actual events. The wide circulation of variants, the considerable differences in their details, and the long spans of time they cover make it difficult for collectors to establish whether a real-life prototype exists. On the other hand, our field of vision is broader than that of Ōtsuka Eiji when he first ventured into these subjects in the late 1980s, or that of earlier specialists. (The International Society for Contemporary Legend Research was founded in 1988, when The Vanishing Hitchhiker had only just appeared in Japanese.) Urban-legend research does not exclude sekenbanashi—gossip—or hearsay, including rumor and gossip. Precisely because these urban legends are “unverified,” they occupy uncertain ground between what happened and what did not. Of course one can object that the human-faced dog was invented by Ishimaru Genshō, that there are no alligators in the sewers, or that eating a certain brand of snack from Taiwan Province will not make anyone more successful. But what is the point of establishing exactly when and where a frivolous young person woke up in a bathtub full of ice, or received a coffin-shaped “little gift”? Such inquiries into the “truth” of urban legends have gradually become a more workable analysis of their “credibility”: what makes an urban legend credible as it passes through telling and listening—or reading? Does its circulation depend on that credibility? (The question shifts from whether it originates in fact—truth—to an analysis of its credibility.)4
Urban legends, rumors, and gossip began to be discussed alongside one another chiefly from the 1970s onward. In 1969, when Edgar Morin published his investigation of the rumor that Jewish shopkeepers in Orléans were abducting women in changing rooms, he still called his subject a “modern myth.” In The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction, Brunvand identifies their common features as containing at least one incident, having a flexible form, and undergoing rationalization and localization. Gail de Vos’s Tales, Rumors, and Gossip: Exploring Contemporary Folk Literature in Grades 7–12 (1996), which takes adolescents as its starting point, examines the similarities and differences among the three in their characteristics, content, form, and modes of transmission. Yet, as she frankly acknowledges and as we have already noted, it is unrealistic to expect tellers consciously to distinguish the three genres, and people seldom make such distinctions as stories circulate. (Imagine Daisuke and his nephew Mikiya first deciding whether each piece of news counts as gossip or rumor before discussing what they have heard about Reien Girls’ Academy or a murderous maniac.)5 Research on how traditional legends, urban legends, and hearsay can turn into one another is also quite interesting. Once an urban legend’s bleak narrative tone dissipates and its sensational elements fade, it can, in a sense, become a traditional legend recognizable to folklorists—or something close to an ordinary folktale. And hearsay, embellished by different tellers as they pass it on by word of mouth, may become a classic urban legend that enjoys a spell of widespread popularity.
We have just mentioned that, of these three forms, urban legends have a relatively bleak “narrative tone.” One Chinese scholar even states bluntly that “urban legends are the sewer through which the frustrations of city life are discharged.” Most people, too, would intuitively feel that the term “urban legend” already promises something sensational. On the one hand, their interchange with rumor means that urban legends do express anxiety, fear, or moral admonition in a relatively negative and extreme voice. On the other, they have adapted and absorbed many classic plots from traditional supernatural and fantastic tales. Finally, experience has shown countless times that a suitable measure of the bizarre greatly helps a story become popular, whether it travels by word of mouth or through more modern media. (As for the absorption of supernatural tales into urban legends, take the Boogiepop passage I quoted at the beginning. An encounter with a faceless being—a familiar episode in Chinese ghost stories—can be found in Hearn’s “Mujina.” Watch a recording of Tsukino Mito’s hundred-tales stream: countless plots in the stories sent in by viewers have counterparts elsewhere.)6
Methods of classifying urban legends generally stay within folklore studies’ own classifications by motif and tale type. For the localization of variants of a single legend, we can turn to the concept of the “oicotype”—a locally adapted form—introduced into folklore studies by von Sydow. Perhaps the best-known example is the changing-room abduction legend investigated by Morin and mentioned above: a Japanese version adds the severing of limbs, while the version we read on online forums becomes the tragic experience of a Chinese newlywed couple traveling in Southeast Asia. (Likewise, the very different ways the victim dies in European and American variants of the well-known urban legend “The Boyfriend’s Death” do have something to do with regional cultures or traditional beliefs. But what social psychology is reflected in the Fukushima, Yamagata, and Iwate variants of Hanako, the toilet ghost—the white hand in the toilet, for instance, or the three-headed Hanako?)
Folk activities associated with urban legends are broadly divided into ostension, pseudo-ostension, and legend trips. Ostension is something like a route by which an urban legend becomes reality: people carry out the activities described in it, reinforcing its credibility. Pseudo-ostension places greater emphasis on imitating the legend’s plot in those activities. Legend trips should be the most familiar to us. Bixian and diexian—spirit-invocation games using a pen or a saucer—and the exploration of haunted houses or homes where people have met violent deaths can all be included here. (Comparable cultural traditions have long existed: Japanese kimodameshi, or tests of courage, and hyakumonogatari, hundred-tales gatherings, for example, as well as the popularity of Chinese tales of the strange before the Tang dynasty and during the Ming and Qing.)
Urban legends are no longer confined, like traditional folktales, to oral transmission or records on paper. Mass media and the internet have given the genre unprecedented influence. The combination of rumor and advertising, and media coverage that turns actual events into sensational, larger-than-life stories, leave us increasingly unable to hold on to a sense of reality: the ever less distinct image of the dark web; Dear David or “Daixi zhi ying” (literally, “Daisy’s Baby”); Slender Man, from photographs to pseudo-documentaries, from games to films; SCP, where no one can tell what the overall mood of the next thousand files will be . . .
From the burnings at Orléans recorded by Paul of the Abbey of Saint-Père in Chartres to the conviction, during the soul-stealing scare, that an itinerant stonemason or monk must be practicing some form of sorcery; from stories of people with AIDS piercing condoms with needles to the unwavering belief that Southeast Asians still practice malign jiangtou sorcery: the movement of people through cities has made it easier for legends to circulate. Fixed places of residence allow inhabitants gradually to develop their own views and cultural prejudices—and, with them, a fear of other cultures and a rejection of strangers. When telling a story to others in one’s social circle, presenting it as the firsthand experience of a “friend of a friend” makes it more credible. Barriers of time, place, and culture will eventually dissolve through countless variations, as eager city dwellers continue weaving our legends and myths from new motifs.
Afterword
We ought to agree on this much. If someone has read The Hero with a Thousand Faces or a more specialized study and acquired a rudimentary understanding of certain patterns and structures in myths and heroic epics, we can hardly help questioning how persuasive their grand talk about the charms of myth really is. Similarly, even if someone has read from Enlil’s flood to the London underground imagined by New Weird novelists, but has never attempted to think systematically or read the research in the relevant fields, we can hardly help suspecting that, at best, it gives them something to talk about once everyone has eaten and drunk their fill. A degree of familiarity with particular supernatural tales and legends, and wide reading in scholarly work, are of course fundamental. Yet the distinctive ways urban legends arise and circulate also seem to require those who discuss them to have some personal experience of what they discuss, rather than stopping at collecting texts and compiling theories. Rather than invoke the seventeen rhetorical expressions for fear found in Roman writings, we would do better to get down to an honest archaeology of knowledge. But instead of tracing origins through a dictionary of devils published in medieval Florence or an undated illustrated catalogue of yōkai, we would do better still to read the work of urban-legend researchers since the last century.
Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us.
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night,
That, if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.—Marcellus, Hamlet, Act 1, scene 1
Comments
An O That Isn’t 0 (一只非0的O): “Urban legends” have always been one of the subjects I have wanted to discuss. It is easy to classify the city’s “dark side” as a supplement or an opposite to its daylight order. Yet a logic like that of Metropolis (1927) also shows us that the dark “underground city” is where the truth of the city lies. It is worth noting that this “dark side” is, on the one hand, increasingly hunted down and suppressed by sleepless, unceasing 24/7 electronic surveillance and electric lights that burn all night, while, on the other, it returns through the internet—the “dark web,” for example. How we might return, in today’s context, to the city’s production of its legends, and how urban legends in turn affect the city: I think this is undoubtedly a subject worth examining in depth.
Nanquan Slays the Cat (南泉斩猫): Through an essayistic archaeology of knowledge, this article sublates the continuity of the concept “urban legend.” Using induction, analogy, and supplementary examples, the author brings various kinds of narrative ordinarily kept separate into a serious analysis, setting them side by side and increasing the distance between “legend” and the citizen (Bürger). At this distance, “legend” is elevated into something that gives concrete form to the separation between modern people’s transcendent spirit and their thought . . . that is, what the author’s afterword calls “a personal experience of what is spoken of.” Humanity can thus grasp, through “legend,” a “meaning in life” that is difficult to attain in banal existence and cannot be put into words. It is precisely in this dimension that “legend” acquires a certain sublime value: to examine “legend” is to understand the spirit of the age.
Jack Cade: Generally speaking, cities are the principal setting of modern life, and the culture they generate is, in a sense, also a manifestation of strategies for legitimating positions of power. From the standpoint of social criticism, then, discordant urban supernatural tales seem to constitute an oppositional culture, adopting concealment and disguise in an effort to resist and undermine the dominant “value system.” Before emphasizing their antagonism, however, we need to recognize that their structure is actually dialogical. This dialogue, which resembles a struggle, is precisely a dialogue between two discourses that share a universal, unified code. To a certain extent, the Slit-Mouthed Woman’s savage bloodshed is actually at odds with savagery: even as a vengeful spirit, she remains deeply intoxicated by the spectacle of “beauty.” This reveals, from another angle, her unsurpassed loyalty to it.
I therefore regard the author’s simple genealogical inquiry into urban legends as something to his credit. The illusion that urban legends possess autonomy as mere texts must be systematically destroyed. For supernatural tales appear as sinister, cryptic speech precisely because the vast majority of voices that have been stifled, reduced to silence, and marginalized usually cannot find an appropriate relational position directly within the dialogical system. They can only sink to the status of a nauseating overflow from the gleaming city, or to its dark shadow, thereby completing the structuring of the actual city within the symbolic order. (It is hardly surprising, then, that consumerism so quickly remakes these tales.) The slogan on the merchandise sold in every great metropolis—a T-shirt reading “I ♥ Shanghai,” for instance—expresses precisely our sincere “courtly love” for the city.
But it must also be said that such a sweeping accumulation of material alone cannot restore these urban legends to their proper place within the dialogical system of social classes. Instead, it can all too easily lapse into an unoriginal reaffirmation of existing marginalized discourses or oppositional cultures. After all, folklore studies is already a prominent field; we cannot do better than its researchers by following the same line of thought. My suggestion is that the author narrow the discussion to a single supernatural tale, or a closely connected series, and question, in historical terms, the moral axis of good and evil presupposed for it within popular culture, using this inquiry to discuss in detail the ideological factors connecting it to social and historical contradictions. Only in this way can the analysis more effectively subvert the circulation of urban supernatural tales as coded information and better realize this essay’s original intention, rather than leave the essay looking thin.