Yuki-onna - A ghostly woman saves a man during a fierce snowstorm then gives him a deadly warning.The stories in this volume include among others: A new foreword by Michael Dylan Foster, the leading Western expert on Yokai literature, places the stories in context and explains the lasting importance of Hearn's pioneering look at Japan's bewitching spirit world. This new edition includes over 20 full-color woodblock prints that showcase the rich visual tradition of Japanese Yokai. They are fresh reminders of the dark and mysterious corners of the Japanese psyche, from popular representations in anime, manga and video games to Masaki Kobayashi's Oscar-nominated horror film Kwaidan. This unforgettable collection of 17 eerie tales and 3 original cultural studies by Hearn are based on traditional oral tales passed down for generations. Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan (which means ghost story in Japanese) is the first and most famous collection of Japanese yokai stories ever published. His Penguin compilation includes 34 selections, a chronology of Hearn's peripatetic life, some intriguing background information about the sources of the stories, and a number of evocative woodblock prints.Even as she screamed, her voice became thin, like a crying of wind then she melted into a bright white mist that spired to the roof beams. Paul Murray, a former Irish diplomat, has been hooked since a 1970s posting in Japan. the stories occupy the reverie world our mind projects onto the backs of our eyelids, where the ordinary mingles with the supernatural The Wall Street JournalĪn extraordinary author.
What makes these stories, preserved from ancient times, especially readable today is the preternaturally postmodern form they are given in Hearn's deeply idiosyncratic telling New Yorker This book insightfully shows how Hearn filtered Japanese ghostly originals through the prism of his own expansive imagination and traumatized experience to create works that were distinctly, and chillingly, his own Japan Times
The particular value of Murray's collection is that it leads us in chronological order through a much greater breadth of Hearn's writings on the supernatural in Japan, with ghostly tales selected from 11 of his books.
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