Cultural Notes
Hoichi the Earless
Mythology & Folklore
The story of Hoichi the Earless is primarily known in the west thanks to Lafcadio Hearn's transcription of Japanese folktales in his book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Hearn's original source is likely a text by Isseki Sanjin from 1782.
The story follows Hoichi, a blind musician who is brought by a samurai to perform for a lord who is allegedly traveling incognito. Hoichi is told not to tell anyone of this requested musical performance and once more he is invited out to perform. Hoichi's friend, a priest, discovers that the samurai and lord luring Hoichi out at night were ghosts who lured him to a graveyard. In order to protect his Hoichi from these ghostly visitations the priest inscribes Hoichi's body with the text of the Buddhist "heart sutra". When the ghostly samurai comes to retrieve Hoichi he can only see his ears (which were the only part of his body that had no writing on them). The samurai seized Hoichi's ears and ripped them off to bring back to his master.
Relevance to MAO
Rather than the text of Hoichi being recreated it is instead the imagery that has become imporant. Yurako's body is inscribed with tattoos much like those written onto Hoichi's body. The image of Hoichi's inked flesh has been famously recreated in Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film Kwaidan. From this iconic film the image of inked flesh has shown up in Suehiro Maruo's illustrations of Kwaidan and the professional wrestler Jinsei Shinsaki (Hakushi in the WWE) and his opponent the Great Muta who inscribed kanji on his own body when he battled the white-clad wrestler.