About the book
In January 1904 Lafcadio Hearn finished a book of ghost stories in Tokyo and signed the note in front of it with his initials. He had eight months to live. Seventeen tales came out of it — the blind lute-player who plays for the drowned Heiké, the woman who is a willow and dies when it is felled, the face on the Akasaka road with nothing on it — and then, without changing his tone, three essays on butterflies, mosquitoes and ants. Readers have been complaining about the ants since 1904 and they are wrong: the insect studies ask the same question as the tales, on a subject that cannot be dismissed as superstition. This edition prints all twenty pieces, both of Takeuchi Keishū's 1904 plates, and Hearn's own forty-nine footnotes — and not the thirty-six further notes that later hands added to the electronic text and that other editions reprint as his. Around them: an introduction of nearly three thousand words; a head-note before every piece; a REGISTER OF PROVENANCE that does what no other edition does — it separates the three pieces whose origin Hearn actually states (one Chinese, one told him by a farmer in Musashi, one that happened to him) from the sixteen he leaves open, and marks a fourth as evident autobiography he never claims, instead of assigning each tale to one of his five named books on a guess; a glossary of fifty-one Japanese terms in which every entry says whether Hearn explains it himself — on the page, in a note at the back, or never, which is the answer for eleven of them; a Yōkai Register naming the creatures by what folklore calls them rather than by his titles, which matters most for “Mujina”, where the thing on the road is a noppera-bō and the animal in the title never appears; a CODEX CONCORDANCE placing all fifteen in the six classes of Codex Bestiarium, in which not one of them appears — its smallest class, the restless dead, runs to eight entries from eight traditions and none of them is Japanese, and this is the book where Japan's answer is; a gazetteer of the thirteen old provinces against the prefectures they became, which catches an error the text has carried for a century (Niigata is in Echigo, not Echizen); a chronology; and a plain account of which of Hearn's claims have not survived — the Spencerian ant sociology, the racial explanations — and the one that was right, which is the mosquito. Readers arriving from Kobayashi's 1964 film are told, in the book, that only two of its four episodes are in it. 142 pages.
