字義的な冥婚

Rose Troup Buchanan “Chinese authorities arrest 11 people over exhuming woman’s body to sell as corpse bride” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/chinese-authorities-arrest-11-people-over-exhuming-womans-body-to-sell-as-corpse-bride-9830879.html


中国山東省で、女性の死体を墓場から掘り起こして「冥婚(Ghost Wedding)」*1における花嫁用に仲介業者へ売ったとして、11名の男が逮捕された。その女性は死んで3か月後に墓場から掘り起こされ、最終的には「死んだ独身男の家族」に38,000元で売られた。主犯格の王某によると、屍体は新鮮であればあるほど高く売れるという。


The practise of ‘Ghost weddings’ has largely disappeared from urban China, however, some remote villages still believe it is vital for an unmarried individual to marry. The ceremony will ensure the prosperity of the surviving family and spare the dead from an afterlife without a spouse.

A number of cases have been reported in recent years. In 2009 a father paid a team of grave robbers 33,000 yuan to find a bride for his son, who had died in a car crash. The grave robbers were later discovered exhuming the remains of a teenage girl who had committed suicide after failing her college entrance exam.

A darker incidence occurred in 2011, when a Shaanxi man was impatient to wait for a natural death. He murdered a pregnant woman in order to sell her body to a family for 22,000 yuan. He was later convicted and sentenced to death.

「「冥婚」という慣行は中国の都市部からは殆ど消滅している」というが、そもそも「冥婚」の前提たる土葬が都市部では禁止されている*2
中国での報道だと、例えば、


山東菏沢:盗尸団伙倒売女尸配陰婚 称新死的値銭」http://news.xinhuanet.com/yzyd/legal/20141030/c_127158389.htm


中国の「冥婚」がlitreral(字義的)だとすると、日本(東北地方)のそれはfigurative(比喩的)だといえるかも知れない。
See also
2009@「あの世で夫婦に…今なお残る“冥婚”という風習」http://matome.naver.jp/odai/2136253122947238601