Urban Legends: The Purple Mirror

A young girl was always sick because of her immunity impairment and her body was so weak she spent most of her teens in the hospital. One year for her birthday she received a cute hand mirror from her parents. She would treasure the mirror and would look into it every single day. 

The girl's favorite color was purple and she decided to paint the mirror purple. After it was painted purple and she could look into it she became strange. She was shocked and tried to desperately peel the purple paint off of it. It would not peel though and it was stuck. It was permanently purple and she could no longer look into it. 

Her illness would take for the worse maybe because she was distraught about her precious mirror. Her parents hoped that she would get better and bought another mirror, but she was not interested in it. 19 days before her 20th birthday she lay in her bed holding the purple mirror. She would look into it muttering "Purple mirror" repeatedly until her last breath.  

It's said that the grudge for the mirror lives in the words "purple mirror (murasaki kagam)" and children who remember it by their 20th birthday will meet with misfortune or death.

In another variation of the story as told in the Kansai area the girl was not sick. One day a girl was approaching her 20th birthday. She was excited about her coming-of-age ceremony and was looking forward to wearing her best clothes for it. This would never happen though as she had died in a traffic accident. 

Her family wanted to bury her with her treasured purple mirror. She carried it around with her everywhere, but when she died it wasn't on her person. When her parents looked in her room it was gone. So the funeral proceeded without it.

A short while after a terrible rumor about the dead girl began to spread. It was said that she was dating a boy with a bad reputation and this soured when she wanted to break up. This was why she had died and the missing mirror was a treasured gift from the boy. This however was not true. 

It had turned out that a close friend of hers started the rumor. When it came to that girl's coming-of-age ceremony arrived she disappeared. Inside her room was the missing purple mirror. It's said that her parents died from anxiety. 

In other variations of the story, it's until the person meets another age like 18 or 15, or sometimes when they graduate. Some say that she had an eating disorder and finally saw how she looked after painting the mirror.  All in all because of the unfortunate fate of a young woman and her mirror a curse began. 

SOURCES:

Kowabana

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