Terror of the Willow Ghost!? (柳精翁の恐怖！？, Ryuuseiou no Kyofu!??) is the 128th chapter of the Urusei Yatsura manga.
Summary[]
Onsen-Mark's attempt to scare Class 2-4 goes horribly right when the subject of his ghostly tale turns out to be real after all!
Plot Overview[]
When an English class in 2-4 finishes calmly and ahead of schedule for once, Onsen Mark attempts to tell a ghost story at the encouragement of his students. His first effort, a recital of the seven scary legends of Tomobiki High School, falls through, so he improvises and tells a tale of an old willow tree that is supposedly host to a vengeful spirit. After class lets out, Ataru takes Lum and Kosuke to the tree their teacher described; mocking it as an obviously fake story, Ataru doodles a mocking version of Shutaro Mendo's family crest, crying and shouting "It's dark! It's cramped! I'm scared!", on its trunk. As soon as the three teens leave, the tree's spirit pops out of it; enraged by Ataru's action, he seeks revenge. He catches the three in the streets of Tomobiki and gives them a phony treasure map which claims that the shadow of Tomobiki High's clock tower at midnight reveals a hidden treasure; when Mendo spots Ataru's graffiti emblazoned on the spirit's back, he picks a fight, and the spirit challenges Mendo to meet him beneath the Tomobiki High clock tower after midnight. He plans to ambush Mendo and to bury the trio in their treasure pit. But his plans go awry when the quartet run into Onsen Mark, who drags them all to the night shift room. He tries to scold them, but they instead break into his sake stash and all get drunk, causing the angry spirit to instead settle for doodling Ataru's graffiti all over the exterior and interior of the school, which sees the angry Mendo chasing Ataru around the next day.
Characters in Order of Appearance[]
Trivia[]
- Onsen-Mark's ghostly tales are based on a Japanese storytelling tradition called "Honjo Nanafushigi" - meaning "Seven Wonders" or "Seven Mysteries", where seven spooky stories are told, usually centered on a specific area. At some point, it became very widespread amongst Japanese schools for a school to have its own set of seven urban legends - once again, called "Honjo Nanafushigi". Given Tomobiki's apparent attraction to aliens and yokai, it's only natural that Tomobiki High has its Honjo Nanafushigi, which Onsen-Mark briefly refers to by name before inventing an eighth when Class 2-4 is unimpressed (especially as they've actually encountered several)... which immediately becomes true. Tomobiki High's Honjo Nanafushigi are called the "Seven Legends" in the Viz Media English translation of the manga.
- Legend #1: Tomobiki High was built on a cemetery.
- Legend #2: Inexplicable piano music can sometimes be heard coming from the empty music room.
- Legend #3: There is a particular locker that can (or must) never be unlocked. This legend was evoked in Chapter 117, when Ataru and several other boys of Class 2-4 attempted to stop Onsen-Mark from carrying out locker inspections.
- Legend #4: The anatomical skeleton in the science lab sometimes starts chattering.
- Legend #5: There is a specific class that is known as the "Terrible Failure Class", for its students are cursed to inexplicably fall asleep during the sakura (cherry blossom) season. This legend was the focus of Chapter 24, which established Class 2-4 as the cursed classroom and resulted in Ataru Moroboshi and Shūtarō Mendō discovering the reality behind the legend in that chapter.
- Legend #6: A mysterious red-cloaked phantom haunts the dark corners of Tomobiki High. In fact, Chapter 41 establishes that the Red Mantle is all too real... and is now an overweight has-been.
- Legend #7: The reflections in one of the bathroom mirrors may start laughing at the person casting them.
- Legend #8: The half-dead willow in the school yard is haunted by a guardian spirit, who once attacked a student who tried to carve into the tree's bark with a knife.
- In Onsen-Mark's tale of the haunted willow, the student boasts that his knife is a Zwilling; this means it was produced by the famous German knife-manufacturing company Zwilling J. A. Henckels AG, which is one of the largest and oldest knife-making companies in the world, having been founded on 13 June 1731 by the German knife-maker Peter Henckels.
- The practice of "night duty rooms" (宿直室), where a teacher would stay overnight as a security guard, saw each teacher rostered to take up a shift twice per month, and only male teachers were chosen for the role. The practice was abolished around 1974, although Japanese schools would continue to hire college students part-time to work as "night shift agents" until 1979, whereupon reports of incidents of these makeshift security guards drinking and partying caused the practice to be scrapped entirely.