I love ghost stories. I’ve loved them ever since I was a little girl and would make my father tell me plots of horror movies as bedtime stories. I also like stories about stories, so when I heard about Ayakashi, I assumed I would fall in love with it. Unfortunately my final verdict was that I was very disappointed in it. Well, most of it, I should say. It wasn’t a total loss, as I’ll explain in a moment.

Ayakashi is a retelling of three traditional Japanese ghost stories. Each one is done with a different director and a different animation style. The first two stories are really ho-hum. Maybe because they are retellings of famous Kabuki plays. I love Kabuki. I really do and I am not saying it to sound pretentious, but they really are things you have to see in person to enjoy. If you watch the stories told in any other medium, you can’t help but notice the blatant misogyny most often in them and that they tend to…drag. The first two stories not only suffer from this, but also have pretty, but lackluster, animation and voice acting. The impromptu live action kabuki documentary after the first story also didn’t endear me any.

Then there is the last story. It’s a whole other kettle of fish. “Fantastic” doesn’t quite do it justice.  The animation is wonderfully unique and chaotic and does a marvelous job of adding to the atmosphere of the story. The story itself is about a man with no name and known only as “the Medicine Seller” (voiced by Takahiro Sakurai: cue my fan-girlish swooning now) who wanders into the compound of an aristocratic family on their daughter’s wedding day. Only the daughter’s impending marriage triggers a curse that seems set on wiping out the whole family. Maybe it’s a good thing that the Medicine Seller is more than he seems?

The story is a retelling of the common “cursed cat” myths that abound in Japan, but the story takes the old legends and twists it into wonderful things. They use the avant-garde art to give us something original and genuinely creepy without getting gory. Like the old adage says, sometimes it’s what is not seen that is more frightening than what you can see. In my opinion it’s the only story of the three that is honestly scary and makes you feel for the (true) victims. The denouement actually made me cry a bit, I felt so sorry for them.  

The last three episodes (the third DVD) is really the only ones worth watching from the series. The last three episodes were so successful and were given so much praise that they made a spin off series starring our Medicine Seller called Mononoke. Mononoke is as great as the three episodes that started it all and it leaves us wanting more even more (and I hope one day they give it to us). Mononoke is also episodic retellings of famous Japanese ghost stories, but all well done. Sadly, Mononoke is not in the states yet, but when it does get picked up, I really recommend it!