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Kwaidan:  Stories and Studies of Strange Things

By Lafcadio Hearn

February, 1998  [Etext #1210]


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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. Diacritical marks in the original are absent from this
digitized version.




KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

By Lafcadio Hearn


TABLE OF CONTENTS

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


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. Hi 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 our. 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 aesthetic 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 Yaso-Kidan, Bukkyo-Hyakkwa-Zensho,
Kokon-Chomonshu, Tama-Sudare, and Hyaku-Monogatari. Some of the stories may
have had a Chinese origin: the very remarkable "Dream of Akinosuke," 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," was told me by a farmer of Chofu,
Nishitama-gori, in Musashi province, as a legend of his native village.
Whether it has ever been written in Japanese I do not know; but the
extraordinary belief which it records used certainly to exist in most parts
of Japan, and in many curious forms... The incident of "Riki-Baka" was a
personal experience; and I wrote it down almost exactly as it happened,
changing only a family-name mentioned by the Japanese narrator.

L.H.

Tokyo, Japan, January 20th, 1904.
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