Not all of the stories are particularly spooky, though – some are just, as the title suggests, ‘studies of strange things’. If you want to know what happens to his ears, you’ll have to read the story! There’s also a great story recounting the legend of Hoichi the Earless, a blind musician who is tricked into playing his biwa (lute) for an audience of ghosts in a cemetery every night. These are interspersed with more traditional ghost stories, involving spirits returning after death to look for a loved one or to search for a lost possession. The creepier stories in the book are the ones that explore the different kinds of ghosts and monsters that appear in Japanese myth, such as the ‘faceless ghosts’ or noppera-bō, the human-like goblins called rokurokubi with detachable floating heads and the corpse-eating spirits known as the jikininki or ‘hungry ghosts’. Although the Yuki-onna character dates back centuries, Hearn’s account is based on this verbal version and not translated from any other source. For example, in his introduction, Hearn states that the story of Yuki-onna, in which a beautiful young woman in white appears to two woodcutters during a snowstorm, was told to him by a farmer in Musashi Province. The other seventeen pieces are a mixture of ghost stories, fairy tales and strange anecdotes, some of which Hearn translated from old Japanese texts and others which he heard on his travels through Japan and attempted to put into words himself. These mainly focus on the role of the insects in Japanese and Chinese mythology, art, drama and poetry and are full of intriguing little snippets of information. Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things contains seventeen of these tales, as well as three essays on insects – one on butterflies, one on mosquitoes and one on ants. The writer and translator Lafcadio Hearn was born in Greece and raised in Ireland, before later settling in Japan where he began to collect Japanese legends and folktales which he translated into English.

XVII event is a fascinating and unusual collection of Japanese short stories, first published in 1904. The next book I’ve read for this year’s R.I.P.

Japanese ghost stories lafcadio hearn