Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Lafcadio Hearn spent his last fourteen years in Japan, took the name Koizumi Yakumo, and built much of this 1904 collection from old texts and from tales his wife told him aloud. The ghost stories are short and cold: the blind musician Hoichi with sutras painted over his body, the snow woman Yuki-Onna, the wife who comes back after death. Hearn neither explains them nor softens them, which is why they still work. The book closes with three essays on insects, on butterflies and mosquitoes and ants, read through Buddhist ideas of the soul and rebirth. Kobayashi’s 1964 film drew from it, and Western readers have met Japanese ghost lore largely through it. Free PDF and EPUB edition available here.