Hyaku-mongatari : Japanese game of telling 100 ghost stories, extinguishing one of 100 lit candles after each. After 100 tales, the audience is sitting total darkness.

The Japanese Love or rather adore ghost stories and thier folk tails are filled with tales of the ghosts and the supernatural.

So here we begin so I can blow out a candle, one of a hundred.......

One night Hoichi, who worked at a temple, was summoned by a nobleman to play the sorrowful song of the battle of Dan-no-ura for his court. Hoichi was a little uneasy about playing for this particular court because he had never heard of it before. But the court implored and implored and finally he obliged. "Then," , "Hoichi lifted up his voice and chanted the chant of the fight on the bitter sea, wonderfully making his biwa to sound like straining of oars, and the rushing of ships, the hissing of arrows, the crushing steel upon helmets, the plunging of the slain." In the pauses of his playing, Hoichi could hear voices murmuring praise, and this pleased him enormously. "But when at last it came to tell the fate of the fair and helpless [the women and children caught in the middle of this battle] all the listeners uttered together one long shuddering cry of anguish; and so wildly that [Hoichi] was frightened by the violence of the grief that he had made." Hoichi stopped playing, and the sobbing and wailing went on for some time until a great stillness settled on the court. Hoichi was then asked to return the following night to perform that song for the court again. He promised that he would and left.

Unbeknownst to blind Hoichi, this was not a living court but a dead court, and his performance did not take place in a great hall but a graveyard. Blind Hoichi started to visit the graveyard regularly and performed for the ghosts who, again and again, wildly wailed at the peak of the sorrowful song.

Meanwhile, the head priest of the temple became curious about Hoichi's late-night absences and investigated the matter. The priest soon realized what was going on, and informed blind Hoichi that he was playing for the dead. At first, Hoichi did not mind this, so the priest warned him that the dead were going to "tear him to pieces" very soon. Recognizing the danger he was in, Hoichi stopped playing for the dead court.

Remember the Battle of Dan-no-ura for we will learn much of this epic in the History of Ancient Nipon.

Miyako Shizuko No Sakura Mutemwiya rises to the soft song of swishing silks and snufs out a candel's flame.

*bows*

*bows*

*and Bows yet , again to the honor of the assembled Guests*