In the capital there was an old woman who could see ghosts. She once told people: yesterday at a certain house I saw a ghost one could call the most foolish of all, and yet his state was pitiable, and it moved the heart.
The ghost was named So-and-so. He lived in such-and-such village, and his family was comfortably off. He was twenty-seven or twenty-eight when he died.
For the first hundred days after his death his wife asked me to keep her company, and I saw that he sat always in the courtyard under the lilac tree. Sometimes he heard his wife weeping, sometimes his child crying, sometimes his brother’s wife and his wife abusing each other. Though the living breath beat on him and he could not come near, he always laid his ear to the window, and his wretched look could be gathered up in both hands.
Later he saw a matchmaker come to his wife’s room, and started up in astonishment and looked about him. Later he heard the match had failed, and his face lightened a little. Then the matchmaker came again, going between his brother’s wife and his wife, and he ran after them in agitation, distraught as though he had lost something.
On the day the betrothal gifts were sent he sat under the tree, staring straight at his wife’s room, his tears falling thick as rain. From then on, whenever his wife went in or out he followed behind her, and his reluctance to leave her only deepened.
The day before the wedding, when his wife was sorting out her dowry, he wandered outside the eaves again, leaning on a pillar and weeping, or bowing his head as though thinking, and at the smallest sound of a cough from within he peered through the crack, restless the whole night through.
The old woman sighed: “Why must a foolish ghost be like this!” He did not seem to hear.
When the bridegroom’s people came in with torches going ahead, the ghost drew aside in the front corner, still craning to look at his wife. As I went out with her she looked back, and saw him following a long way off to the bridegroom’s house, where he was stopped by the door god, and knocked his head on the ground begging piteously, and was let in, and hid in a corner of the wall, watching his wife perform the ceremonies, standing stock still as though drunk.
When his wife went into the room he came nearer the window and watched, and until the candle was out and they went to bed he still did not leave, until the god of the ceiling drove him out and he went in disorder.
He still went to his wife’s house. His wife had left one child at home, and when he heard the child crying for its mother he hurried out and circled the child four times, rubbing his two hands together in a helpless gesture. Then his brother’s wife came out and slapped the child, and he stamped his feet and beat his breast, and from a distance ground his teeth.
The old woman could not bear to watch and went straight home.
