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Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
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Free material for Hearn's seventeen ghost stories and three insect essays: the thirteen old provinces against the prefectures they became, the creatures named by what folklore calls them, where each of them would sit in Codex Bestiarium, the register of what Hearn took and what he was told, and a sheet for reading the book aloud by candlelight.
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The Provinces
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The thirteen old provinces Hearn names — Musashi, Iyo, Mutsu, Tamba, Noto, Kai, Shinano, Kii 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.
Open PDF60 KBThe Yōkai Cards
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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. Each card carries the class the creature would take in Codex Bestiarium.
Open PDF47 KBThe Codex Concordance
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Where the fifteen would sit in the six classes of Codex Bestiarium — and why not one of them is already in it. The Codex gives Japan three creatures with bodies: the tengu, the kappa and Yamata-no-Orochi. Its smallest class, the restless dead, runs to eight entries from eight traditions and none of them is Japanese. Five of these fifteen would go straight into it. The sheet prints all six classes so a reader holding one book can place the other.
Open PDF63 KBThe Register of Provenance
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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.
Open PDF60 KBThe Hundred Candles
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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. Two neighbouring layers are not printed, on the same reasoning. The unsigned introduction of March 1904 is not by Hearn and names no author anywhere. And thirty-six of the eighty-five notes in the electronic text were written by its transcribers rather than by Hearn — they carry no anchor and no back-link, because no sentence of his calls them — so the edition prints his forty-nine and none of theirs.