My Plum Ghost
I participated in an art contest. Nothing serious, but it swallowed me whole. The theme was Yokai. Japanese spirits, monsters, the beautiful weirdness that lives between shadows and dreams. For this, I built a canvas with my bare hands in my Japanese Arts class. Cut the wood, stretched the cloth. I wanted it to feel like something real. Not digital. Not fake. Something that bleeds when touched. I used traditional materials. Glue, brushes, powdered pigments that smelled like the inside of a shrine. Nothing fancy. Just old magic. I spent days sitting in our classroom, hunched over it like a secret I couldn’t share. The canvas stared back at me. It whispered things. Or maybe I was just tired.
My yokai was mine. No one else’s. A hybrid born from salt and fear - a cross between umeboshi, that sour, shriveled plum that tastes like a punch in the mouth, and umibozu, the sea ghost with a black, formless body that capsizes ships when no one’s looking. I called it Umebozu. A pun. A joke only the sea would understand. It looks like a plum, but it drowns you. The painting was a colorful homage. An amateurish love letter. I shaped my small world to mirror Katsushika Hokusai’s wooden masterpiece The Great Wave off Kanagawa, but in a more cheerful way. The yokai stared from the center of the storm. Big eyes. Wrinkled skin. A hidden smile that made me happy.
People asked what it meant, and I explained. They smiled. They liked it. Sometimes I imagined the Umebozu slipping off the page, crawling into the real world, hiding in rain puddles or tea cups or behind vending machines late at night. I started seeing it everywhere. The curve of a wave in the river. The color of a bruise on my arm. It followed me home in the folds of my clothes, in the ink under my fingernails. I dreamed of salt and storms and laughing things that lived in the sea. And when I woke up, I missed it. I missed him. My little yokai. My plum ghost. Maybe he was never just a joke. Maybe he was the part of me that never fit, never spoke. But always smiled.