Jesse Glass


from Reduced, a Series of Painted Photographs

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Oho Ghosts

"When I lived & taught in Kyushu, the college where I taught was in the countryside, close to Kumamoto on the Nishitetsu line. I usually got off at Oho Station and walked about 20 minues across the fields to my job at a woman’s college. The battle of Oho happened in the 14th century—during the warring clans period in Japan. One August day Warlords from Kagoshima and Osaka met and left 500 dead (and unburied) on those fields. The woman’s college bought the land rather cheaply during the ‘bubble’ of the 1980s, the owners expecting to build dormitories, a shopping complex, and other things out there with the cranes and the tree frogs and rice fields. As it turned out the economy went south. When construction started on the college the contractors dug up human bones and bits of old armor. A Kanushi (Shinto priest) was brought in to exorcise the property, but it didn’t work. The security guards, students, and teachers of the school, as well as the soldiers of the Japanese Self-Defense force at their camp nearby began to report encounters with three wraiths dressed in old armor, walking (without legs and feet) in single file and asking for Misu, O-misu Kudasai (Water, water please). Tales of these apparitions reached the television news in Tokyo and lots of people descended upon this rural community. Ogori, the nearest town, has got in on the act and gives a grand ceremony/exorcism for the souls of the Oho warriors every year, but even that hasn't done much good. The ghosts are still repeating their sad request to anyone who will listen. I never saw the ghosts though my students said they did and the farmers nearby also said they heard and saw strange things."

Jesse Glass has recent work in Golden Handcuffs Review and Journal of Poetics Research. Glass’ translations from Heraclitus, including one translation carved on the verso of a fossil, will be published and sold as a limited edition set by Zimzalla later this year.
 
 
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