Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

He characterizes Kwaidan original: "Kwaidan"; a collection of Japanese ghost stories and folk tales published by Lafcadio Hearn in 1904. The word literally means "ghost stories." as "stories and studies of strange things." A hundred thoughts suggested by the book might be written down, but most of them would begin and end with this fact of strangeness. To read the very names in the table of contents is like listening to a Buddhist bell, struck somewhere far away. Some of his tales are from long ago, and yet they seem to illuminate the very souls and minds of the men who are at this hour crowding the decks of Japan's armored cruisers This refers to the Japanese sailors fighting in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), which was occurring at the time of this writing..

But many of the stories are about women and children—the lovely materials from which the best fairy tales of the world have been woven. They too are strange, these Japanese young women, wives, and keen-eyed, dark-haired girls and boys; they are like us and yet not like us, and the sky, the hills, and the flowers are all different from ours. Yet by a magic of which Mr. Hearn, almost alone among contemporary writers, is the master, there is a haunting sense of spiritual reality in these delicate, transparent, and ghostly sketches of a world that seems unreal to us.

In a penetrating and beautiful essay