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Valice Press
Valice Press

Free companion

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Free material for Hearn's seventeen ghost stories and three insect essays: the old provinces against the prefectures they became, the creatures named by what folklore calls them, the register of what Hearn took and what he was told, and a sheet for reading the book aloud by candlelight.

The Valice edition is built, validated and priced, and its payment product exists — what is left is that the edition's own pages have not been deployed yet, so the storefront row is deliberately still held back. Everything on this page is free and works today regardless.

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  • The Provinces

    PDF · US Letter · 1 page

    The ten old provinces Hearn names — Musashi, Iyo, Mutsu, Tamba, Noto and the rest — against the modern prefectures they became, with the tale each belongs to. It also carries the correction: the text places Niigata in Echizen, and Niigata is in Echigo. That slip has been reprinted for a century and the edition leaves Hearn's sentence alone and tells you instead.

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  • The Yōkai Cards

    PDF · US Letter · 1 page

    Fifteen cards, one for each creature and apparition in the book, named by what folklore calls it rather than by Hearn's title — which matters most for “Mujina”, where the thing on the road is a noppera-bō and the animal in the title never appears.

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  • The Register of Provenance

    PDF · US Letter · 1 page

    What Hearn's own note establishes about where these tales came from, and what it leaves open. THREE pieces have an origin he states — one Chinese, one told to him by a farmer of Chōfu in Musashi, one that happened to him. A fourth is not stated by him at all and is marked as evident rather than stated: it is plainly autobiography. The remaining sixteen are shown as open rather than assigned to one of his five named books on a guess.

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  • The Hundred Candles

    PDF · US Letter · 2 pages

    Hyakumonogatari kaidankai is the Edo game the genre is named after: a hundred lamps, a tale each, one lamp out after every one, and the thing the tales have been summoning arrives when the last goes dark. Companies stopped at ninety-nine. This sheet plays it with the seventeen tales of this book, in an order that works, and tells you to stop at sixteen.

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About this material

Lafcadio Hearn died on 26 September 1904 and Kwaidan was published in Boston on 2 April 1904, so the text is in the public domain on two independent grounds. The two plates are by Takeuchi Keishū, born 13 November 1861 and dead on 3 January of 1942 or 1943 (Wikidata Q11545824); on either date the term expired more than a decade ago, and the edition reproduces both. The unsigned introduction of March 1904 that stands in the first edition is not by Hearn, names no author anywhere, and is not printed.

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