京霊 (Kyorei) Kyoto Ghost Story

In 2004, I worked as an adjunct professor in a small university near Kyoto, Japan.

A short, reticent Japanese professor of psychology started to sit with the foreign professors during lunch break; the other Japanese professors seemed to avoid him. He frequently spoke of ghosts.

The other foreign professors spoke in broken Japanese, but since I had studied the language extensively in college, we spoke freely to one another. He had much to say - we spoke frequently of death, the supernatural, and its relation to Kyoto.

When I told him I was going back to America, he was crestfallen - it seemed he had found someone who believed him, and that had inspired him to start recording many of the stories he had collected from friends, acquaintances, strangers.

On my final day at work, there was a slab of paper clamped together with an alligator clip in my mailbox at the university. He had given me stories, and I have betrayed him by not translating them until a decade later. Forgive me, Tanabe-sensei.