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Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

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Title: Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Author: Lafcadio Hearn

 
Release date: February 1, 1998 [eBook #1210]
 Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1210

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KWAIDAN: STORIES AND STUDIES OF STRANGE THINGS ***

KWAIDAN:
Stories and Studies of Strange Things

By Lafcadio Hearn

A Note from the Digitizer

On Japanese Pronunciation

Although simplified, the following general rules will help the reader
unfamiliar with Japanese to come close enough to Japanese
pronunciation.

There are five vowels: a (as in fAther), i (as in machIne), u (as in
fOOl), e (as in fEllow), and o (as in mOle). Although certain vowels
become nearly "silent" in some environments, this phenomenon can be
safely ignored for the purpose at hand.

Consonants roughly approximate their corresponding sounds in English,
except for r, which is actually somewhere between r and l (this is why
the Japanese have trouble distinguishing between English r and l), and
f, which is much closer to h.

The spelling "KWAIDAN" is based on premodern Japanese pronunciation;
when Hearn came to Japan, the orthography reflecting this pronunciation
was still in use. In modern Japanese the word is pronounced KAIDAN.

There are many ellipses in the text. Hearn often used them in this
book; they do not represent omissions by the digitizer.

Author's original notes are in brackets, those by the digitizer are in
parentheses.

Contents

 INTRODUCTION

 KWAIDAN
 THE STORY OF MIMI-NASHI-HŌÏCHI
 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 AKINOSUKÉ
 RIKI-BAKA
 HI-MAWARI
 HŌRAI

 INSECT STUDIES
 BUTTERFLIES
 MOSQUITOES
 ANTS

 Notes

Illustrations

 BLOWING HER BREATH UPON HIM
 BUTTERFLY DANCE

INTRODUCTION

The publication of a new volume of Lafcadio Hearn's exquisite studies
of Japan happens, by a delicate irony, to fall 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 present
struggle between Russia and Japan, its significance lies in the fact
that a nation of the East, equipped with Western weapons and girding
itself with Western energy of will, is deliberately measuring strength
against one of the great powers of the 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 purely political and statistical studies of the complicated
questions involved in the present war. The Russian people have had
literary spokesmen who for more than a generation have fascinated the
European audience. The Japanese, on the other hand, have possessed no
such national and universally recognized figures as Turgenieff or
Tolstoy. They need an interpreter.

It may be doubted whether any oriental race has ever had an interpreter
gifted with more perfect insight and sympathy than Lafcadio Hearn has
brought to the translation of Japan into our occidental speech. His
long residence in that country, his flexibility of mind, poetic
imagination, and wonderfully pellucid style have fitted him for the
most delicate of literary tasks. He has seen marvels, and he has told
of them in a marvelous way. There is scarcely an aspect of contemporary
Japanese life, scarcely an element in the social, political, and
military questions involved in the present conflict with Russia which
is not made clear in one or another of the books with which he has
charmed American readers.

He characterizes Kwaidan 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 of the long ago,
and yet they seem to illumine the very souls and minds of the little
men who are at this hour crowding the decks of Japan's armored
cruisers. 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 maidens and wives and
keen-eyed, dark-haired girls and boys; they are like us and yet not
like us; and the sky and 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, in these delicate, transparent,
ghostly sketches of a world unreal to us, there is a haunting sense of
spiritual reality.

In a penetrating and beautiful essay contributed to the "Atlantic
Monthly" in February, 1903, by Paul Elmer More, the secret of Mr.
Hearn's magic is said to lie in the fact that in his art is found "the
meeting of three ways." "To the religious instinct of India-Buddhism in
particular,-which history has engrafted on the aæsthetic sense of
Japan, Mr. Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of occidental science;
and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his
mind into one rich and novel compound,-a compound so rare as to have
introduced into literature a psychological sensation unknown before."
Mr. More's essay received the high praise of Mr. Hearn's recognition
and gratitude, and if it were possible to reprint it here, it would
provide a most suggestive introduction to these new stories of old
Japan, whose substance is, as Mr. More has said, "so strangely mingled
together out of the austere dreams of India and the subtle beauty of
Japan and the relentless science of Europe."

_March_, 1904.

Most of the following _Kwaidan_, or Weird Tales, have been taken from
old Japanese books,-such as the _Yasō-Kidan_, _Bukkyō-Hyakkwa-Zenshō_,
_Kokon-Chomonshū_, _Tama-Sudaré_, and _Hyaku-Monogatari_. Some of the
stories may have had a Chinese origin: the very remarkable "Dream of
Akinosuké," for example, is certainly from a Chinese source. But the
story-teller, in every case, has so recolored and reshaped his
borrowing as to naturalize it... One queer tale, "Yuki-Onna,"

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