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Japanese Ghost Stories

Japanese Stories of the Supernatural by Lafcadio Hearn

The stories featured here are from Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) (1850-1904) an author, best known for his for his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories.

Hearn declares in his introduction to the first edition of the book, which he wrote on January 20, 1904, shortly before his death, that most of the these stories were translated from old Japanese texts (probably with the help of his wife, Setsu Koizumi). He also states that one of the stories - Yuki-Onna - was told to him by a farmer in Musashi Province, and his was, to the best of his knowledge, the first record of it. Riki-Baka is based on a personal experience of Hearn's.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
THE STORY OF MIMI-NASHI-HOICHI
OSHIDORI
THE STORY OF O-TEI
UBAZAKURA
DIPLOMACY
OF A MIRROR AND A BELL
JIKININKI
MUJINA
ROKURO-KUBI
A DEAD SECRET
YUKI-ONNA
THE STORY OF AOYAGI
JIU-ROKU-ZAKURA
THE DREAM OF AKINOSUKE
RIKI-BAKA
HI-MAWARI
HORAI
Insect Studies
BUTTERFLIES
MOSQUITOES
ANTS
Notes

About Lafcadio Hearn

Lafcadio Hearn was born in Lefkada (the origin of his middle name), one of the Greek Ionian Islands, the son of an Irish father and Greek mother, moving to Dublin, Ireland at the age of 6.

At 19, Hearn was sent to live in the United States of America where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. For a time, he lived in utter poverty, which may have contributed to his later paranoia and distrust of those around him.

He found work as newspaper journalist, later moving to New Orleans, Louisiana, and spending two years in the West Indies.

In 1890 Lafcadio Hearn went to Japan with a commission as a newspaper correspondent, which was quickly broken off. It was in Japan, however, that Hearn found his home and his greatest inspiration. Through the goodwill of Basil Hall Chamberlain, Hearn gained a teaching position in the summer of 1890 at the Shimane Prefectural Common Middle School and Normal School in Matsue, a town in western Japan on the coast of the Sea of Japan. Most Japanese identify Hearn with Matsue, as it was here that his image of Japan was molded. Today, The Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum and Lafcadio Hearn's Old Residence are still two of Matsue's most popular tourist attractions. During his fifteen-month stay, Hearn married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a local samurai family, and became a naturalized Japanese, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo.

In late 1891, Hearn took another teaching position in Kumamoto, Kyushu, at the Fifth Higher Middle School, where he spent the next three years and completed his book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). In October of 1894 he secured a journalism position with the English-language Kobe Chronicle, and in 1896, with some assistance from Chamberlain, he began teaching English literature at Tokyo (Imperial) University, a post he held until 1903. On September 26, 1904, he died of heart failure at the age of 54.

In the late 19th century Japan was still largely unknown and exotic to the Western world. With the introduction of Japanese aesthetics, however, particularly at the Paris World's Fair in 1900, the West had an insatiable appetite for exotic Japan, and Hearn became known to the world through the depth, originality, sincerity, and charm of his writings. As the man who offered the West some of its first glimpses into pre-industrial and Meiji Era Japan, his work still offers valuable insight today.

The Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi adapted four Hearn tales into his 1965 film, Kwaidan.

More Japanese Horror at CULTJAPAN

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia articles "Lafcadio Hearn" and "Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things".