is there an exorcist samurai in the house?

Whenever I get a new Business English student I spend the first lesson getting them to draw a diagram of the structure of their company and their role in it. I assure them this is a valuable vocabulary-building exercise. It also happens to be far easier for me than reading the corporate website for an hour trying to work out who the hell they are. Giulio works for a major fashion house. In my first lesson with him I sat patiently while he explained all the subsidiary companies and the departments and stuff, and then I asked him to point to the little box which represented him.

Me: ….Oh.
Giulio: Yes.
Me: It must be very… bracing. Having that kind of responsibility.
Giulio: (rolls eyes heavenward with messianic stoicism)
Me: So, um, Sir. What do you do exactly?
Giulio: Blah blah terrifying high finance jargon blah blah…
Me: Mm-hm. Interesting. Is that your Rolls in the carpark?

For the first few weeks he was a pain in the arse. He had me googling bizarre share market terminology and labouring through the finer points of the third conditional passive even though he would still answer the question what are you doing tonight? with I am tired so I think I just come in my bedroom.

Now he just tells me stories like this.

His company has dealings with a Japanese corporation that require frequent business trips. He carries around a treasured business card for the best ribs restaurant in Roppongi, which he insisted on photocopying for “the next time you go in Tokyo.” Yatta! Anyway, in 2004 several of his colleagues were over there giving a presentation. One of them was addressing a crowded conference room in Italian. Well, to be specific, one minute he was speaking in Italian, the next he was speaking in old Japanese. The entire building was evacuated, and they called in the General Manager of the company, a Mr Nakayama, who spent the next seven hours exorcising a spirit from the unfortunate Italian fashionista. The possessed man had no recollection of it, but his colleagues who were present remember it perfectly.

Nakayama, who is a friend of Giulio’s, later explained that his company’s headquarters were built on top of an old Shinto cemetery. Objects frequently move from room to room, sometimes observed in motion and sometimes not, and occasionally somebody gets possessed. If the ghost is a good sort of ghost, work goes on as usual. But if it’s a nasty one, they clear the premises and bring in the General Manager. Luckily, this man is one of about 150 people in Japan with the power of exorcising such spirits. He only retains this power by, as Giulio put it, “living in a particular way.”

“How do you mean? He’s a vegetarian? He doesn’t drink?”

“No, he must to follow the… come si dice? Le regole dei Samurai.”

“He lives by the code of the samurai.”

“Appunto.”

“Like with the sword and the haiku and…”

“He practice the aikido all the week and he lives the code in every particolar. And so he can esorcise the fantasme.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“Cosa?”

“Non posso crederlo.”

“Anchio, I cannot believe this but I must to believe this.”

Cool.