Goryoujin: Whats The Deal With Father? (89-2 Edition) - Part 1

Goryoujin: what’s the deal with Father? (89-2 edition) - Part 1

(Part 1 - here) (Part 2)

Me for like a year now, halfway joking: father reminds of an onryo haha Adachitoka, crashing through the ceiling: guess what MOTHERFUCKER

As always, Father backstory is living in my mind rent free so in this post, I’ll be talking about goryou(jin), onryo, asserting some facts, asking some questions, talking a lot, but most importantly, I’ll be begging Adachitoka to get the foreplay over with already and give. us. a. FLASHBACK. (please)

Dated: 08/07/2020 Word count: 4426

Ramblings under the cut!

The Facts: What We Know (And What We Don’t)

A little bit wordy but I just wanted to sum up all the relevant information we have so far.

Father was, without a shadow of a doubt, human. 

According to Ebisu’s mask data, he lived 1100~ years ago. This would put the beginning of the timeline at around 900~ CE, which is right smack in the middle of the Heian period (794 - 1185). 

The Sakura flashbacks take place in and around the old capital of Heian (modern day Kyoto). The manga explicitly mentions the outer street of Kujo (Chapter 46 - official translation, page 14). The exact year is unknown but it’s likely to be after 947 (the year when the construction of Kitano Tenmangu, the shrine dedicated to Sugawara no Michizane we see in the flashbacks, was completed) but before 986 (when Sugawara no Michizane is officially deified as “Tenjin”).

He was very likely a Buddhist priest, judging by the simple motsuke koromo over a white kosode he wears in the flashbacks (the attire of your run-of-the-mill priest in the Heian period); the lingo + imagery associated with him (karma, Liberation, Chiki’s shakujou form) are strongly tied to Buddhist concepts.

He entered Yomi (in what way - by dying or by physically entering - is unclear), was given the first Koto-no-Ha by Izanami, then escaped via an unspecified “loophole” which allowed his soul to be called from Yomi by an unknown person. Real name used in the soul call is unknown. 

Izanami - who takes the appearance of the person closest to the viewer - appeared to him as a woman with a pockmarked face, which he lost to an unspecified natural disaster caused by a god(s). This is implied to have fueled his grudge against the Heavens: “Your ilk gets off scot-free for everything you do. But who do you think forgives the debt? People do. No matter how much you take from them, how much you walk all over them. I can’t forgive any of you. Not the gods… or any of the idiots who forgive them.”

After his death, it seems he became something akin to a goryoujin/onryo - either way, in his current state he’s neither god nor human but a “nonexistent creature abandoned by Heaven” whose escape from Yomi trapped him in an eternal cycle of reincarnation into other peoples’ bodies, which he doesn’t get to choose. 

He killed gods before realizing that it’s all pointless unless those who put their faith in the gods all died as well.

Although his exact motive for learning how to tame ayakashi is unclear, he states the following when Bishamon faces off with Heaven wielding Nana: “You have something you want to protect, even if it means being forsaken by the Heavens. You’ll do whatever it takes, even if it means following the path of disgrace and dishonor. You’re so predictable, Bishamon. You’re starting to remind me of me.” (Chapter 64 - official translation, page 25)

He named Mizuchi with the Koto-no-Ha.

As far as we know, Yato was born from Father’s one powerful wish, “the only wish [he] has ever been able to wish in [his] entire life”: to cull the herd. He gives him the name “Yaboku” - meaning “night diviner” - when he catches a star falling from Kanoto to Tori. This strongly suggests Father’s knowledge of the Chinese astrology system, as hinted at by the 28 Lunar Mansions illustrated on the cover of Volume 12 (Chinese astrology lore such as the 7 Big Dipper Stars, 9 Luminaries, 28 Lunar Mansions, and 36 Animals were all imported to Japan in the 6th century and later integrated into the esoteric Shingon and Tendai branches of Japanese Buddhism in the mid to late Heian period).

What is a “goryoujin”? (Infodump Part 2)

If you try to google “goryoujin”, “goryojin”, or any variation of this particular word in English, you won’t get any results (that are relevant, anyway). The word “goryoujin” seems to actually be a regional variant of the word goryō 御霊, literally meaning “honorable ghost” with the kanji for “god” 神 tacked on at the end. For the sake of cohesion, I’ll be using goryō from this point forth when talking about mythical goryō outside the context of Noragami.

Emerging in the early Heian period, the word goryō referred to the spirits of aristocrats who had died due to political causes (much like Tenjin, who is himself considered a goryō) and turned into wrathful spirits who carried out their vengeance against the public, causing things like epidemics, wars, and natural disasters. The ancient nobility would then honor these spirits as goryō (thus the name “honorable spirit”) to placate their wrath and turn them into benevolent guardians to bring peace to society (though some sources claim that not all goryō were vengeful spirits); this practice became known as goryō shinko 御霊信仰.

However, over time, the word goryō expanded its horizons - instead of just nobles being venerated due to fears about their wrath, any wrathful ghosts powerful enough could be honored as a goryō by people who feared that they might come back to take vengeance. This much-feared type of yokai 妖怪 is called an onryo 怨霊 (lit. “wrathful ghost”, “grudge ghost”) and any person who died an untimely, particularly grisly, or unnatural death or carried a powerful emotion to the grave (anger, hatred, grief, even intense love turned into jealousy) could become an onryo. Those who were thought to carry a risk of becoming such a spirit would have particular care and respect devoted to their burial and resting place to minimize the possibility of their spirit coming back into the world of the living. (However, it should be noted that most onryo are ghosts of women and very rarely men - and when the spirits of men manifest, it’s usually because of political disputes, grudges, or dying in wars. Adachitoka going for that trope reversal again?)

Onryo have one goal and one goal only in their cursed afterlife: to enact vengeance on those who had wronged them while alive. They are capable of causing harm to those in the world of the living, including physical injury, illness, misfortune, death, and even natural disasters.

Though the strength of an onryo’s curse varies on a case by case basis, they are regarded as incredibly powerful ghosts. Nothing illustrates this better than the Nihon san dai kaidan 日本三大怪談 or Japan’s Three Great Ghost Stories, telling three separate tales of yokai haunting the living: Banchō Sarayashiki 番町皿屋敷 (The Dish Manor at Banchou - Okiku), Botan Dōrō 牡丹燈籠 (Peony Lantern - Otsuyu), and Yotsuya Kaidan 四谷怪談 (The Ghost Story of Yotsuya - Oiwa). Two of the three stories here center around an onryo (Okiku and Oiwa respectively). I won’t go into details about the stories of Otsuyu and Oiwa here (they’re easily found online if you’re interested) but it should be noted that, even to this day, the crews involved in any production of Oiwa’s story (film, plays, you name it) first pay respects to her grave in Tokyo before beginning work since misfortune, physical harm, and even death is said to befall those who are involved in retellings of her story - that’s how feared the power of a truly vengeful onryo is.

*While the English side of the internet didn’t yield any results for “goryoujin”, I did search it in Japanese and from what I could read with my sucky reading skills and a dictionary, the concept was the same as what I’ve read about goryō in English.

Continued here.

Im gonna have to ask everyone to watch and reblog this, it’s a masterpiece and deserves all the love on the world, PLEASE WATCH, I GOT ACTUAL CHILLS.

So, what’s the deal with Nora?

Norasquad, how are we doing? Whew.

My thoughts are everywhere but I’m gonna try to make this as cohesive as possible. Thanks Nana at @hellanoragami​ for brainstorming with me! TW for discussions about miscarriage and stillbirth and all that it entails, disease, death, very brief mention of abortion, one potentially upsetting photo of starving children, all that not-so-good stuff. 

I believe that Nora is the spirit of a baby that was miscarried or stillborn. Some more thoughts and theories, as scattered as they may be, under the cut since it’s gonna be a little image-heavy.

Right off the bat, here are some things that make Nora’s state pretty clear:

Her words that she’s just a “fake little girl” (aka, she’s not actually, physically a child but a baby who died before she could really even live and be a “person” in the loosest sense of the words), her apparent jealousy that Hiyori was born “normal”, Nora expressing how she “wanted to be a girl” just like Hiyori (she uses onna no ko here, "little girl”, like in the previous sentences), her squished, bug-eyed, distinctly baby features...

Nora’s tail coming out of where her umbilical cord should have been...

...And her turning into a literal baby curled into fetal position before falling into a circular pond full of water, which just... wow, not even subtle there, just smacks of womb imagery. (And here we thought Nora was associated with water because she was drowned as a child, not because of its association with embryonic fluid!)

And, of course: the “memories” Yato saw when he first named her. Darkness (of the womb), a heartbeat (her mother’s), and muffled sounds (from outside the womb, as fetuses can hear sounds from around 18 weeks). Father likely didn’t tamper with her memories - she had no memories other than that in the first place.

So, Nora’s a baby. What now? How can she even be a shinki?

Well, my friends, in Buddhist mythology (yes, it always comes back to Buddhism when it comes to Trash “I was a Buddhist priest probably” Dad), everyone has a soul - and by that, I mean everyone. That includes the souls of aborted, miscarried, and stillborn babies, who are sentenced to stack stones on the shores of the mythical Sanzu River as penance since they have not acquired enough good deeds to cross to the other side and pass over.

(On the far right.)

Since the Sanzu River doesn’t seem to be a thing (unless Adachitoka is giving us a double-meaning here, with Nora having to be close to water metaphorically representing the Sanzu River that the souls of departed children must stack stones by) in Noragami, I’m guessing that the souls of all these children stay on the Near Shore and take the form of older children once named, if not already corrupted (but that’s not a problem for Father). Since even the souls of those who have passed on before they could really “live” have enough agency and innate identity to stack stones in the first place, they would easily have enough identity - a requirement for something to be named correctly - to be named and used as shinki.

Side note: Nora’s chest in her ayakashi form looks a lot like that of a child who has been starving.

Which brings me to my next point!

Why the Fuck Did Father Name A Random Stillborn Baby Spirit

It’s one thing to see a baby god born out of your wish and be like “Oh yeah, I’ll tell this little kid to slaughter a bunch of people when he grows a little older” but it’s another thing entirely to see the corrupted spirit of some random stillborn baby and think “Oh yeah, this will make a great shinki.” It’s insanity, even for Father.

.... Unless Nora wasn’t just a “random stillborn baby spirit.”

Let’s backpedal a little bit to Chapter 60.

As @invertedgoogle​ pointed out in a mutual Discord server we’re in, the scenery looks dead, dry, as if in the middle of a drought. Of course, droughts mean less food for an already usually-hungry populace of commoners, which means malnutrition, which means disease... conditions terrible for carrying a baby and both mother and child making it out alive.

And even if there was no drought, commoners had hard lives in the Heian period - they depended on good harvests for food (fun fact: malnutrition can cause stillbirths and miscarriages) and entire communities were devastated by diseases such as smallpox.

Smallpox, which can leave pockmarks, even on the face. I know a lot of people read the translation that mentioned her as a “freckled woman” but it is in fact specifically “girl with a pockmarked face.” Father’s “precious person”, who Izanami took the form of when he entered the Underworld.

I’m suspecting that Nora was, indeed, not some random corrupted baby wandering around but his own stillborn daughter with Pockmarks who might’ve died in childbirth as well since childbirth was pretty dangerous to even a healthy, fed woman before modern medicine but idk it’s a theory, who died in the womb before she could be born and named. Disease, malnutrition, and severe deformities/defects are all legit reasons for a stillbirth.

Why Father even calls himself “Father” (it seems like his ayakashi innately know to call him that), why he might’ve gotten the Brush, what pushed him to hate Heaven so much, why he bothers to have this patchwork “family” and“play house” in the first place with Nora and Yato, why he’s so emotionally unavailable towards Nora - all things that start to make a lot more sense once I started thinking about this theory.

I’ll just leave you guys with an excerpt from @echodrops​‘s Chapter 78 analysis:

The concept of “playing house” in Noragami is very interesting. It only comes up in the context of gods and humans; we’ve seen it three now in the context of (what is likely) a god playing house with a human: Kofuku hurt Daikoku by trying to “play house” and raise a child; Bishamon hurt her shinki (and was hurt by her shinki) for trying to foster a motherly relationship with them; and Father pretended at kindness and care for his “children” while they were all aware of the real truth.

You could argue that one of these things is not like the other–both Kofuku and Bishamon did what they did out of love, while Father is evil–but I wonder if the third case is really that much different than the first two. Why did Father raise Mizuchi and Yato like his children? Was this a one-sided endeavor in which he bought their loyalty with occasional moments of kindness? Is that all there is to it? Or is there something else going on here?

How much of Father’s “playing house” was pure cruelty… and how much of it might stem for a desire for the very thing Heaven denied him?

Anyway, I’m #1 Clown, signing out and dying on this probably-crack hill.

Edit: I’m stupid and forgot to mention how Pockmarks’ death could be tied to Heaven. Remember, when there is chaos in the Far Shore and between gods, upheaval on the Near Shore follows... chaos, failed harvests, disease, and the chain continues... I’ll leave it at that.

Can we skip the angst and have them forgive each other, thanks

takekiun

become my servant