Lafcadio Hearn, Emre Doğan

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

The Complete 1904 Text, Annotated — 17 Stories and 3 Insect Studies, with a Register of What Hearn Took, Was Told and Lived, a Yōkai Index and a Glossary

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 and both of Takeuchi Keishū's 1904 plates. 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 all 45 Japanese words he italicises and leaves unexplained; 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 gazetteer of the ten 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. 138 pages.

Pages

138

Language

en