Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

INTRODUCTION

The publication of this new volume of Lafcadio Hearn’s exquisite studies of Japan happens, by a delicate irony, in the very month when the world is waiting with tense expectation for news of the latest exploits of Japanese battleships. Whatever the outcome of the current struggle between Russia and Japan The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) was a conflict sparked by rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea; it was the first time in the modern era that an Asian power defeated a European power., its significance lies in the fact that a nation of the East—equipped with Western weapons and fueling itself with Western resolve—is deliberately measuring its strength against one of the great powers of the West original: "Occident".

No one is wise enough to forecast the results of such a conflict upon the civilization of the world. The best one can do is to estimate, as intelligently as possible, the national characteristics of the peoples engaged, basing one’s hopes and fears upon the psychology of the two races rather than upon...