Japan has two major holidays every year: New Years and Obon. Of the two, I find Obon the most interesting because it’s a kind of religious halloween that takes place in late July and early August. The ancestors of each family are thought to come back and live with their kin for a few days and to dance with them at the annual round dances called Obon Odori. The Japanese also celebrate this time of year by telling ghost stories–thought to stave off the heat by inspiring chills along the spine. Yotsuya Kaiden–the story of the blameless housewife Oiwa poisoned and eventually murdered by her heartless husband–runs at the Kabuki Theater in Tokyo and can be seen in its various manifestations on late-night T.V. Variety shows feature ghost pictures sent in by viewers at home, and the whole country becomes interested in “annoyo”–the other world. I spent many years living in the countryside in Kyushu–where the nights are darker and the feeling of the past is ever-present. That’s where one feels the presence of annoyo and the significance of Obon the most! But, like most other things in Japan, the real secret of Obon is the people. Obon odori time is a great social occasion when all the pretty girls come out in their summer kimono and grandmothers teach their grandchildren the particular steps and hand-positions of their village dance style. There’s nothing too spooky about the celebration itself. Department stores, too, feature Bon lamps–blue-colored lava-lamp sorts of things, some with revolving blue lights–that are meant to show the way for returning spirits.

Here’s a “true” Obon story that I’d like to share.

I’ve lived in Japan now for over 14 years and I can tell you that Japan is full of interesting ghost stories, many of which I have collected over the years. Every summer, during Obon (Japan’s equivalent of Halloween), I make a point of asking my students to share their stories as part of my English classes. Just recently I gave the assignment to one of my English classes at Waseda University and received the following most interesting story: The mother of one of my students had a disturbing, recurring dream. She dreamed that her late father was standing next to her futon weeping uncontrollably. When she asked what was wrong he wouldn’t answer. The woman said that he was dressed in his white burial shroud, and looked exactly as he did in life, except that he had no legs–a traditional characteristic of Japanese ghosts. After a week of these dreams, the woman attempted to rise up and touch her father. “Don’t come here!” He told her. “I don’t want you here!” The woman found the harsh language that her father used odd indeed. In the final dream, the father reached down and touched his daughter on the breast and disappeared. When the woman woke up she felt that the dreams and her father’s touch had some special significance. Later that day she went to the hospital and had her breasts examined and the doctor found a tiny cancer. The doctor was astonished because the cancer was so small no one would have noticed it except for another specialist. The woman had an operation and is now perfectly healthy. She thinks, or so her son told the class, that her father did not want her to go to “Annoyo”–the other world, or the land of the dead–where he was. That’s why he told her not to come near him, and touched her breast. The incident happened about ten years ago, and is told by the family every year at Obon.

Wings of Madness; Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight.
Pul Hoffman.
Harper Perennial. 372 pages.

When I was an undergraduate I used to enjoy going through the back issues of the old Century Magazine. Century was a clearing house for the whole intellectual and cultural complex of Anglo-Saxon Victorian life. Most fascinating for me were the illustrations of the marvels of the world, including the wonders of developing technology. It is in the pages of Century Magazine that I first ran across the famous picture of Tesla calmly sitting among the crash and thunder of the artifical lightning he’d generated through one of his massive coils; and it was in Century that I first saw the diminuative Alberto Santos-Dumont, sitting beneath the huge envelope of airship no. 6 on his way to circle the Eiffel Tower.

Santoas-Dumont is a kind of dead-end in the history of modern flight. Though he was hailed as a great inventor and a pioneer of the air in his time, he was soon surpassed by the Wrights, the Curtises and the hundreds of others that followed. But for a time–between 1898 and 1906–Santos-Dumont was the subject of the adoration of the masses. Children played with toy Santos-Dumont airships, and Parisian women wore Santos-Dumont hats. He was photographed, lionized, feted by Kings, and secretly lusted after by many fair ladies, but he remained remote, self-contained, beyond it all. Indeed this brave man, who looked death squarely in the face and knew just what to do when the gas expanded too much in the warm upper reaches of the air and burst the silken envelope of his balloon, or when tumbling 100 feet to the earth trapped in the wreckage of his Demoiselle monoplane, was by all accounts Gay. Just as Tesla and other Gay men and women of the time, Santos-Dumont chose to maintain an ambiguous personal life.

However, his style of dress–he was the first civilian male to wear a wrist watch, for instance–his bravery, and the boldness of his designs attracted the admiration of thousands, including Thomas Edison, Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and James Pierpont Langley–the director of the Smithsonian and the inventor of a failed monoplane.

Who dared say that man had not yet tamed the air ways by 1903? Santos-Dumont, the diminuative, independently wealthy Brazilian, already had in his airship no. 9–the personal airship that he used to fly about Paris in, stopping at his favorite bars for a drink, or dining at Maxim’s with his friends, while the doorman held the mooring rope outside!

No doubt Santos-Dumont was a genius, but a genius prone to depression and inexplicable acts of self-abnegation. Though he was the first person to fly in Europe, he soon recognized that the Wrights had flown earlier and in a better designed version of a heavier-than-air craft. After that he began to live alone and sometimes to check himsef into mental hospitals where he refused to see family and friends. World War I convinced him that the world had perverted “his” invention–which he had intended only as a defensive weapon, if a weapon at all. Finally, in 1932, the former hero of the air hung himself.

Santos-Dumont loved turn-of-the-century Paris and there he flew above the heads of Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Alfred Jarry and Jack Johnson. That time is as distant to us as the Pre-Cambrian, and, like the Pre-Cambrian filled with fantastic forms of life that come down to us in old images and in the fossils of thoughts–the pages of books. Some continue to speak to us, while some remain as a foot-note at the very bottom of a crumbling page. Paul Hoffman rescues Santos Dumont for English readers, and gives him to us decked out in superb sentences and finely tailored paragraphs. In Brazil, however, the intrepid aeronaut has never been forgotten and to this day one may see his heart at the air-force academy in Campo dos Afonsos, on the outskirts of Rio.

I highly recommend this book.