Kwaidan
Lafcadio Hearn, 1904
Ghost stories and insect essays from a Greek-born Irishman who became Japanese: a stranger's report on a country of hungry ghosts and cherry trees.
Lafcadio Hearn
1850–1904
Lafcadio Hearn writes as a stranger who never quite stopped being one, and that distance gives his Japanese ghost stories and insect essays their odd, exact tenderness: he notices what a country takes for granted. Start with Kwaidan, where hungry ghosts and cherry trees share the page with the chirps of insects, or with Shadowings, which gathers ghost stories, insect songs and notes on fear in the same quietly curious voice. Both are best read as reports from a country he loved without ever fully belonging to.
Feels like wonder, death and memory.
Start with Kwaidan.
Hearn lost the sight of his left eye in a schoolyard accident, arrived in Japan in 1890, and took the name Koizumi Yakumo on becoming a Japanese citizen.
The loneliness of being praised by a room you cannot see.
Then Hōïchi lifted up his voice, and chanted the chant of the fight on the bitter sea,—wonderfully making his biwa to sound like the straining of oars and the rushing of ships, the whirr and the hissing of arrows, the shouting and trampling of men, the crashing of steel upon helmets, the plunging of slain in the flood. And to left and right of him, in the pauses of his playing, he could hear voices murmuring praise: “How marvelous an artist!”—“Never in our own province was playing heard like this!”—“Not in all the empire is there another singer like Hōïchi!” Then fresh courage came to him, and he played and sang yet better than before; and a hush of wonder deepened about him. Books by Lafcadio Hearn
Shadowings
Lafcadio Hearn, 1900
A globe-trotting newspaperman in Meiji Japan collects ghost stories, insect songs, and notes on fear—curious, exact, and quietly strange.
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