Readingground Blogazine

by Tomi Tsunoda

PART ONE: Tales 1-11

1.

In the feudal era of Japan — its medieval period, the age of the Samurai — there was a parlor game called Hyaku Monogatari Kaidankai (The Gathering of 100 Ghostly Tales). It was a kind of séance. One hundred candles were lit and placed in a circle. Each person in the room would tell a “ghostly tale” – any story having to do with the realm of spirits and the supernatural. Most stories were either first-hand experiences or tales from the teller’s village.

At the end of each story, the storyteller would extinguish one candle. It was believed that the telling of these tales would evoke spirits into the room. At each step of the game, the room would descend further into darkness, until the final candle was extinguished and the group was left sitting in the dark with whatever spirit had been evoked. Supposedly, Samurai used to practice this kind of séance to test each others’ courage.

I found out over this past Christmas holiday that my father was descended from many generations of Samurai warriors, dating back into this medieval era of Japan. Apparently, my father took this heritage quite seriously. My mother says he told her, in no uncertain terms, that “Samurai wives don’t cry out during childbirth.” I’d never heard this or other stories of my dad’s zealous sense of Bushido, the Samurai code of honor. I’d never heard about our Samurai heritage at all.

I stumbled upon Hyaku Monogatari Kaidankai in the furious researching of medieval Japanese culture and Samurai history that followed me home from the holidays.

During this time I settled on the idea of a new podcast – to hold my own digital gathering of 100 ghostly tales – or Kaidan. Though traditionally this word refers to ancient Japanese folklore having to do with spirits, for me it includes contemporary ghost stories, moments of a strange, instinctive “knowing”, and the surprising synchronicity of some events; the little clues left behind by a mysterious universe that seems like it’s trying to tell us something.

So I sat down to write, for the first time, all of my ghost stories. The first time I came up for air, I glanced at my computer screen and saw I’d already hit 10 pages.

Not long afterward, by sheer coincidence, I was put in touch with a stranger by a mutual friend of ours. As it turned out, the stranger’s name is Billy Fox, a composer who work crosses classical Japanese and modern American music traditions.

I checked out his ensemble’s website, and found that their biggest work is The Kaidan Suite, a musical interpretation of a ghostly tale as told during Hyaku Monogatari Kaidankai.

2.

My first experience with Japanese spirits was September 1988, when I’d just turned twelve years old. My mother had received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Tokyo University. She sold our house in New Jersey, flew me and the two cats to Japan, and checked the cats into a kennel and us into a hotel room, where we would live until she found a rental house close to my new school. I would enroll in the American School in Japan, my father’s alma mater, in the Chofu area of Tokyo.

After two weeks in the hotel, we piled into a cab with our two giant suitcases and my Aunt Noriko, and set off to our first Japanese home.

The house was on a tiny square cul-de-sac at the end of a residential road. After the turn off to our block, the buildings thinned out and the road continued out towards Chofu Airfield – an open expanse of green fields, little charter planes, strips of little-used concrete. Our block was on the edge of that airfield, and our house looked over at it on one side. I used to ride my bike down this road as far as I could before getting freaked out and feeling like I wasn’t welcome any further. Then I’d turn back.

I spent a lot of time playing at a nearby river as well, and often imagined there were people living on the hill across from me, watching me through the trees.

Mom, Aunt Noriko, and I arrived at the house for the first time in the late evening, and went on a tour of the house. The front door opened into a small, slate-covered genkan, a traditional entry way. From there, you would step up onto the hardwood floor of a tiny foyer at the base of the stairs.

The stairwell was narrow and steep, hardwood. It curved like a spiral halfway up, turning you 180 degrees. I remember always being afraid I’d slip and crack my head open when I walked up or down in socks. They were not the kind of stairs you could run down without risking major injury.

On the second floor landing was a small frosted glass window, dropping soft light into a tiny hardwood hallway. To the left of the stairs was a little room that my brother Ken would eventually move into. He had been living in Nagoya and was in the process of moving up to Tokyo to live with us.

At the very top of the stairs were two overlapping sliding doors (like on closets) – the entrance to what would be my bedroom. It ran the length of the house. It had its own balcony. It had two closets. It had one of the two heaters in the house. It was carpeted. It was the biggest room in the house, and it was mine.

I always had the sense that giving me the biggest room was somehow my mother’s compensation for the upheaval of the move. At night she would sleep in the living room on one of our little foam couches – unfolded with a futon laid across it. Though we never discussed it, I recognized the gesture and accepted it.

The room was haunted. I figured that out on the first night. Mom and Noriko left to pick our cats up from the kennel, and I was alone in the house.

I unpacked my pink plastic tape-player/radio and plugged it in. After making all kinds of pre-teen noise about the recent release of George Michael’s Faith, Ken had bought me a copy on cassette for my birthday, and I was eager to dig into it. I went down to the kitchen and made myself an instant Cup O’ Ramen, and carried it back upstairs for a camp-out in my new, giant, awesome, Japanese bedroom.

I was sitting cross-legged on the floor happily slurping up noodles and George Michael’s heartbreak, when I gradually got the sense that I wasn’t alone in the room – that I was being watched. I don’t mean: as though I was being watched through my window. I mean: as though someone was standing a few feet behind me.

I turned my head to look behind me, and of course, no one was there. But within seconds of turning around, I felt the same thing, again behind me, but closer. I whipped around to see who was there, and again, no one was.

This went on for several minutes, escalating until I was standing in the middle of the long room, turning around in quick desperate circles, crying hysterically, more afraid than I ever remembered being about anything before. No matter how quickly I spun around, I could not shake the feeling that someone was standing right behind me, leering at me over my shoulder. It had physical weight; I could literally feel its heat on my back and shoulder. I had the distinct, unpleasant feeling of being purposely and maliciously fucked with. One More Try was playing in the background.

In a panic, I worked my way over to the far end of the room, pushed myself back into the corner so that nothing could be behind me, and sank to the floor crying and chanting, “please go away please go away please go away please leave me alone please leave me alone please go away please go away please go away…”

That’s the last thing I remember, until the sound of the front door opening and my mother calling to me upstairs. I came to and found myself crouched in the same position I had been in when crying and chanting. The feeling I had experienced earlier was gone. The tape player had run to the end and stopped.

I should stop here to make something clear: I do not remember crying myself to sleep. I do not remember nodding off or even getting sleepy. I do not remember the music changing or ending. I do not remember anything except that at one moment, I was crying and begging this thing to leave me alone, and the next moment, I was coming to and hearing my mother’s voice. Anything that may have happened in between is a black hole in my memory.

I shook myself awake and made sure they couldn’t tell I’d been crying. My first instinct was to hide what had happened. I was sure they wouldn’t believe me, that my mother would worry I was somehow traumatized by the big move. In the years since, I’ve wondered if that could be true, if what I’d experienced was a manifestation of major life changes and a 12-year-old brain.

But the truth was, I could not have been happier to move. Leaving the house our family had grown up in was very sad, but it held some difficult memories (ghosts of its own kind…) and my life as an oafish and unpopular pre-teen with a bad perm in the New Jersey suburban public school system was a kind of nightmare I was only too relieved to escape. I was on an adventure. I was a youngest child of 5 who had my mother totally to myself for the first time in my life. I felt an immediate connection to Japan – my heart and soul felt at home there. I was on the other side of the earth. I felt special.

So maybe I just didn’t want to blow it by seeming unhappy or scared. I went downstairs to greet Mom and Noriko, and to say hello to the cats I’d missed so much. I said nothing to my mother about what had happened.

Later that night, when it was time for bed, I went upstairs and found a giant black cockroach in the casing of the fluorescent ceiling light. Well, found is the wrong way to put it. The thing was at least 4 inches long, and it’s shiny exoskeleton was clicking loudly and angrily against the plastic cover as it flopped desperately, in a panic, trying to find a way out. I was sure it hadn’t been there before – there was no way I would have missed it – yet there didn’t seem anyway it could have crawled into the light either. The casing of the fixture didn’t have any open spaces or gaps. Once we got it opened up, we saw there were no holes in the ceiling either. Rather than trying to figure out where it had come from or how it had gotten in there, my mother just got it out of the light and tossed it out the window.

There was never another cockroach or beetle of any kind in the room while we lived there.

3.

Japan is a very special country. If it’s even possible for an entire nation to be haunted, Japan is. It is very, very, very old. The culture evolved in virtual isolation on a set of active volcanoes, and around the worship of spirits – and not just gods, or the natural spirits (spirit of the river, spirit of the rock, spirit of the tree, spirit of the mountain), but Ancestral spirits. The spirits and ghosts of your family, for generations, who stay with you. According to the native Shinto religion, these spirits are the controlling forces of how the living world unfolds, and the living must appease them in order to maintain good fortune. Shinto families traditionally keep shrines in their homes and make regular offerings of food, water, and money to the spirits.

Ghost stories are common place, spirituality the meat and potatoes of the culture. The air itself feels thicker there.

I visited Japan for the first time in the summer of 1979, when I was almost 3 years old. My family went together and visited our ancestral burial ground in Kamakura. Here the eldest son of each eldest son (as my father was to my grandfather, and as my grandfather was to his father) was buried, for every generation, dating back to the 13th century. A small portion of the land was still owned by my uncle, but he’d had to sell off the rights on the rest of it to developers.

We arrived at the burial ground to find that almost all of the medieval tombstones had been bulldozed off into the woods. Although the ground itself wasn’t disturbed, the stones had been virtually demolished. I was too young to remember it now, but my father apparently went into the woods on his hands and knees, sobbing, gathering up the remains of the stones and trying to place them right again. My mother says it’s the only time in their 18 year marriage that she’d ever seen him cry.

Trying to find a way to comfort him, she asked if he’d like to take a piece of a stone home with them, so that we could set up a shrine of our own in the backyard. My father said he would like that very much.

My mother took a stone back to the hotel room, and – afraid it wouldn’t get through customs covered in moss – spent the whole of our last night in Tokyo scrubbing the thing furiously until it came clean.

The next day, my grandmother vehemently warned my mother against bringing it back to the U.S. She said the angry spirits of the Samurai would follow us home.

My mother left the grave stone in Japan.

4.

While living in Japan, I developed an interest in psychic ability and mind-reading games. I had a friend, Katherine, who was my practice partner. Riding the train to and from school, we’d take turns thinking of shapes and trying to read each others’ minds. As to be expected, it did not go so well at first – but we got better at it. A lot better. I would play this game with other friends as well occasionally, but mostly with Katherine – somehow I had the best track record with her.

Our first Christmas in Tokyo, my uncle and his family came over to visit, and we gave them a Pictionary. My cousins were a little young for it, so my Uncle took the colored pieces and played a guessing game with his daughter. He’d palm one piece behind his back, then present his fist and ask her to guess which color it was. I began to play as well to test myself, since I’d been practicing with Katherine. I got each guess right. I remember him looking surprised, and gradually he stopped playing with his daughter and focused all his attention on testing me. I remember being able to somehow see the color through the back of his hand.

After an unbroken streak of several correct guesses, he called out to my mother in Japanese. My mother looked into the room at me, smirked and shrugged, said something in Japanese. Then she disappeared back into the kitchen. I think that’s all that was ever said about it, and I didn’t understand what it was. I never asked. I took my mother for a skeptic.

5.

By the following Christmas, my interest in ghosts and pre-cognition must have become pretty well-known in the rest of the family, because my siblings all got me presents having to do with the paranormal: tarot cards, a Ouija board, and a book about developing your psychic abilities. I loved that book. I’ve since lost it and always kick myself for not remembering the title. I’ve looked for a proper equivalent since and have never been able to find one.

I had been reading the book, and left it down in the living room one night before bed. My mother picked it up out of curiosity, and read a chapter on clairvoyant dreaming. The chapter discussed how to ask your mind a question, then dream about the answer. My mother was having trouble locating a particular set of old books in the libraries of Tokyo University, and decided to use that problem as a test for this dream method.

As she was falling asleep, she focused on the books and the question of where they were. That night, she dreamed that she was walking through the stacks in the basement of the library, looking along the shelves for her books. She could see exactly where she was, and which shelves she was being led through. She walked right up to the books she needed, and pulled them off the shelf.

The next day, she went in to the University, to the place in the library she’d dreamed about. There on the shelf she’d seen in her dream, to her amazement, were the books she’d been looking for.

6.

The Ouija board became a popular slumber party pastime for my friends and I during this period of the 7th grade. There were three times in particular that I’ve carried with me ever since, twice in the same apartment.

My friend Brandy’s father was a wealthy international business man, and their family lived in the penthouse apartment of a luxury apartment tower in Roppongi. Their tower was one of a series of towers, labeled Tower A, Tower B, Tower C, and so on. I remember that Brandy’s was maybe G or H. She told me there were rumors that the series of towers were haunted. The stories began about Tower A, and not long afterward, Towers B and C were also rumored to be haunted, then stories were circulating about Towers D and E, and so on. It was believed by most of the residents of the Tower Complex that the haunting was working its way through the towers.

Their penthouse apartment spanned one half of the entire tower. The elevator opened into their private foyer. There was only one other tenant on the floor – the other penthouse apartment on the other side of the building. The homes were separated by two elevator shafts and layers of walls and pipes and other architectural buffer. The other three sides of the apartment were the outside walls of the building. They were an isolated pocket, and no sound traveled between apartments.

One night when I slept over, I brought my Ouija board. Brandy and I set it up on her bed once everyone else had gone to sleep. The little Ouija indicator started moving around very early on, and it moved very effortlessly.

I should talk about Brandy. Brandy was not a mischief maker. If anyone was the bad influence in that friendship, it was surely me. Brandy’s family all watched television together and ate dinner together and laughed together and were very happy. She loved her little brother. She wore thick glasses, braces, and had a tight, dirty-blond afro. She was a loyal friend and a good kid. We were nerds together.

She wasn’t fucking with the Ouija.

What we gleaned through questioning was that we were speaking to a little boy who’d been poisoned by an adult in his family. When we expressed sadness for him, the indicator began to spell out the same word over and over again:

H – U – G (pause) H – U – G (pause) H – U – G (pause) H – U – G (pause) H – U – G

We finally asked, “Do you want us to give you a hug?”

The indicator pointed to YES.

We both made a show of hugging the air.

The indicator pointed to NO. Then it began spelling:

U (pause) H – U – G (pause)
U (pause) H – U – G (pause)
U (pause) H – U – G (pause)
U (pause) H – U – G (pause)

We said, “We’re trying! How do we hug you?” We tried everything, hugging the stuffed animals, hugging each other, hugging the air, hugging the board.

It kept pointing to NO, and spelling U (pause) H – U – G (pause). Then it started spelling, in the same rhythm:

T (pause) H – U – G (pause)
T (pause) H – U – G (pause)
T (pause) H – U – G (pause)
T (pause) H – U – G (pause)

Brandy and I both froze. I asked, “Does this mean you want me to hug you?”

The indicator pointed to YES.

Again, I went through a ridiculous show of trying to satisfy it by hugging everything in the room. The indicator wouldn’t stop moving between NO and T (pause) H – U – G (pause).

We both got real freaked out and finally pushed the indicator to GOODBYE at the end of the board. I would not learn until later that this is supposedly a big Ouija no-no. It is believed to trap the spirit in the limbo where you’re speaking to it, and it will then haunt the house.

A couple of weeks later, Brandy pulled me aside at school to tell me about some strange things that had been going on in her apartment. One night, while her little brother was asleep, she and her parents were watching TV, and all three heard the voice of a young boy singing. Her mother got up to check on her little brother, but when she got to his room, found him fast asleep. They all looked around the house but could not find where it was coming from.

Some days later, her mother was alone in the apartment taking a shower, and heard the voice again – a young boy singing. She looked all over the house, but could not find where it was coming from. Every time she thought she was moving toward it, it suddenly sounded like it was coming from somewhere else.

7.

And so, stupidly, the group of us decided to pull out the Ouija board for our first slumber party at Brandy’s house. Brandy, Katherine, our friend Lisa and I laid out with the board on her parents bed. It occurs to me as I write this that I don’t know where her parents were. I remember them not being home.

The lights had been dimmed almost all the way down.

Before too long, the board began moving, and through our questions and its responses we gathered that we were speaking to an older woman. Her responses were cagey and seemed false. Of course, this made us wonder about the legitimacy of the answers, but we took turns with different combinations of us touching it at a time, always with the same sorts of results. I was lying on my stomach, and could see the gaps of space appear and disappear between our fingers and the indicator.

The way it went down is a little blurry for me until the end. I remember we all had a bad feeling about this Woman Ghost, and felt cold spots moving around the bed. We kept stopping and touching the air, feeling pockets of cold move from one place to another.

At some point, Katherine went… funny. She became very invested in the Woman Ghost, and started talking as though she could translate for us. I remember that she described it, though I don’t remember now what the description was. I was too heebie-jeebied to pay attention to the details, I think.

Katherine got up and began moving around the room, continuing to say things like, “She’s right here, she’s in here with us,” or “She doesn’t want you to say that anymore,” things of that nature. It was spooky.

Brandy and Lisa and I sat there kind of freaked out, but none of us wanted to push the indicator to GOODBYE again. I said, “Someone go turn the lights on.”

Katherine immediately jumped down my throat, and yelled, “NO! Don’t turn on the lights! She’ll go away!!! She’ll go away!!! She doesn’t like the lights!!! She’ll go away!! Don’t!!” It was here that I starting getting scared in a real way. Katherine was so clearly not in control, and at 12 years old, that really fucking freaked me out.

I was about to push myself up to go turn the lights on, when suddenly I felt an enormous weight on my lower back – exactly the feeling of someone sitting on me, the full weight of an adult human being. No one was there or touching me in anyway. There was nothing on my back. Still, I could not get up to turn off the lights – the weight physically prevented me from getting up.

I yelled to Lisa, who was closest to the light switches, “LISA. IT’S SITTING ON ME AND HOLDING ME DOWN. GO. TURN ON. THE LIGHTS.” It was hard for me to breathe. The weight kept pushing harder into my back. I had to shout because by now, Katherine was yelling at the top of her lungs, on the verge of tears, desperately begging Lisa not to turn the lights on. Lisa sat there frozen, freaked out by both of us and not sure what to do. Finally her paralysis broke – she ran over to the light switches and flicked them on.

Immediately, the pressure on my back disappeared. Katherine stopped yelling and just looked kind of blankly at us. All the tension in the room disappeared. We put the Ouija board away, and I decided not to bring it to sleepovers anymore.

8.

Later that year, I went on a school trip to a tiny island off the southern coast of Honshu. The island was populated only by a small village, many shrines on the mountains and in the woods, and natural hot-spring baths. Half of us stayed in an Inn in the village, the other half with an American man and his wife, who helped sponsor the trip.

One night, the man we stayed with gathered us up in the back room of his house, and told us a ghost story about the village. The details are lost for me now, but it involved a crazy old lady ghost who haunted the nearby shrine, and stories of people found shredded by her fingernails. Earlier in the evening, he’d gone out to the shrine and placed a wooden spoon halfway up the steps to the temple, which was 70-something steps high. We were each challenged to take a different wooden spoon out into the darkness alone, count our way up to the correct step, and switch out our spoon for the one lying there. We were to then return to the house with the spoon we’d picked up as proof of having been there. The spoon we left behind would be there for the next student. This experience was legendary at the school. For weeks leading up to the trip, older students had been telling us “go for the spoon!” but wouldn’t explain what it meant.

I had an embarrassingly bad run – after talking a really big game to the other students, explaining how teachers would never ask us to do anything that was actually dangerous, so it must not be true, I got so scared on the road in the blackness that I didn’t even make it to the temple. I came back to the house with my spoon, my good sense having failed me, and cried hysterically in the back room out of shame.

Later that week, while I was staying in the Inn down the road, the group of girls sleeping in the back room of the house decided to have a séance. Aside from the creepy old lady story, they had found out that a woman had died in this back room, and they decided they wanted to talk to her.

One of the girls drew out a Japanese Ouija board on a piece of paper, and used a 5-yen coin as the indicator. They spent the evening talking with the Ouija board, then went to bed.

Throughout the night, the girls kept waking up one at a time and finding themselves… messed with. One girl woke up with one of her sleeves pulled off her arm and turned inside out. Other girls woke up at different times with their clothes oddly pulled off or rearranged. Another girl woke up to find herself moved to the other side of the room. Two girls at separate times woke up and found their places on the floor had been switched.

When they talked about it the next day, it was with giddy excitement and a little bit of fear, but not much surprise.

9.

In the spring of 1990, my mother’s grant ran out and she needed to move back to the United States. My brother was staying in Tokyo, so they gave me the choice to stay there with him and finish out my school year. I took it.

Not long before we moved out of the house, Katherine came over to hang out. She’d never been there before. We’d not hung out quite as much through the 8th grade, but she knew we were moving soon, and finally came over to the house to play for the first time.

Hanging out in my long bedroom upstairs, the conversation came, as it often did, upon ghosts. I told the story of my first night in the house. Katherine eagerly suggested we play with the Ouija board. After the experiences at Brandy’s apartment and my experience that first night in the room, I was very reluctant to screw around. But as Katherine pointed out, we were about to move out anyway. So I caved.

It was mid-afternoon and sunny. A beautiful spring day. The Ouija board began to move easily and quickly. I don’t remember what it said. I didn’t pay much attention. It was Katherine who wanted to play, and I was humoring her despite my better judgement, so I kept out of most of it. I remember after playing awhile, my mother called us down to dinner. Katherine and I both struggled with what to do, since the board had not said GOODBYE yet. We just boxed it up and put it back in the closet. I closed my bedroom door on our way downstairs.

From that point on, the feeling I’d felt that first night – the feeling of having someone standing right next to me, or in front of me, or behind me, that I couldn’t see – began to return. Thankfully, it never crept back into my room, but lingered aggressively on the landing outside my door. I would wake up in the morning and steal myself before opening the bedroom door. I’d slam the door shut behind me as quickly as possible, and dive down the stairs, moving so quickly and with so much fear that once I slipped and toppled all the way to the bottom. When coming up stairs, I’d repeat the routine in reverse, running up and getting the door open as quickly as possible, squeezing through, and slamming the door shut behind me.

The “presence” on the landing intensified daily through our last weeks in the house. It was as though the air there was a thick pool of wet mud with electrical currents running through it, all powered by some sort of boogeyman who was waiting for me to step through.

I’ve never spoken about this with either my mother or my brother. I have no idea if they ever experienced the same thing. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to talk about it, especially after the paranormal Christmas gifts and my mother’s dream about finding those books in the library. For some reason I just remained convinced that no one would believe me. I had no way to prove it, and didn’t relish the idea of having to try.

10.

My Japanese grandfather married a woman named Marianne Tonkin – a tough English broad – and they gave birth to my Aunt Edith. Shortly after Edith was born, they traveled back to Japan to visit my great-grandparents. Toward the end of the visit, Marianne took a walk in the garden with her father-in-law. He told her that he was going to die soon, but not to worry, because shortly aftwards she would give birth to a boy. Marianne tried to comfort and correct him, thinking he was confused. He was healthy, though old, and she had just given birth to a girl, rather than being pregnant with a boy.

They returned to the United States, and about two months later, got word from Japan that he had died. Not long after that, Marianne discovered she was pregnant again – with my father.

11.

One afternoon, after we’d moved out of the house in Chofu and into the apartment in Ikebukuro, my friend Elly came over after school. I told her about some of the exercises I was reading about, including Psychometry: the reading of objects and photographs. I never got far with photos, but I discovered on this day that I was quite good with jewelry.

Elly encouraged me to try it on her, and handed me a ring she wore everyday. I held it in my hand, tried to clear my mind, and – as the book said – “allow images to float into it.” I could feel the physical energy of the ring vibrating in my hand and traveling up my arm into my head.

I know how that sounds. It’s a little embarrassing. I can’t think of a better way to describe it.

I got a picture stuck in my mind, of the living room in Elly’s house, with a giant Christmas tree in the corner, and her mother and another friend of ours sitting on the couch. The book I’d been studying said that you should speak the images out loud to someone as you see them, so they can be recorded and verified. I told Elly what I saw, and opened my eyes. She was staring at me silently from the couch, and slowly told me that the friend and her mother had given her the ring for Christmas before I’d ever even moved to Tokyo.

When I moved back to the U.S. a few months later, things died down. I broke out the Ouija board once at a party that first year, but threw the board away afterward. Bringing the séance home to the U.S. felt off somehow. Like talking to a stuffed animal and knowing it can’t hear you.

After a time, ghosts and mid-reading games became less of a priority than the new social survival game of high school. As my life in Japan faded into the background, so did my interest in spirits and powers of the mind, and I basically forgot about them until many years later.

*****
To Be Continued. Check back in two weeks for PART TWO: Tales 12-22, and look for Tomi’s podcast — The Gathering of 100 Ghostly Tales — premiering Monday, March 31 on Podia: breedingground’s portable entertainment network.