Other editions of book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

A classic book of ghost stories from one of the world’s leading nineteenth-century writers, the author of In Ghostly Japan and Japanese Fairy Tales. Published just months before Lafcadio Hearn’s death in 1904, Kwaidan features several stories and a brief nonfiction study on insects: butterflies, mosquitoes, and ants. The tales included are reworkings of both written and oral Japanese traditions, including folk tales, legends, and superstitions. “At age thirty-nine, Hearn travelled on a magazine assignment to Japan, and never came back. At a moment when that country, under Emperor Meiji, was weathering the shock and upheaval of forced economic modernization, Hearn fell deeply in love with the nation’s past. He wrote fourteen books on all manner of Japanese subjects but was especially infatuated with the customs and culture preserved in Japanese folktales—particularly the ghost-story genre known as kaidan. . . . He died in 1904, and, by the time his ‘Japanese tales’ were translated into Japanese, in the nineteen-twenties, the country’s transformation was so complete that Hearn was hailed as a kind of guardian of tradition; his kaidan collections are still part of the curriculum in many Japanese schools.” —The New Yorker

Kwaidan, Stories and Studies of Strange Things, by Lafcadio Hearn, features several Japanese ghost stories and a brief study on insects. Hearn declares in his introduction, that most of these stories were translated from old Japanese texts (probably with the help of his wife, Setsu Koizumi). He also states that one of the stories - Yuki-onna - was told to him by a farmer in Musashi Province, and this was, to the best of his knowledge, the first record of it.

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, by Lafcadio Hearn, features several Japanese ghost stories and a brief study on insects. Hearn declares in his introduction, that most of these stories were translated from old Japanese texts (probably with the help of his wife, Setsu Koizumi). He also states that one of the stories - Yuki-onna - was told to him by a farmer in Musashi Province, and this was, to the best of his knowledge, the first record of it.

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was a uniquely international literary star: born in in the Greek isles to a British military surgeon, he grew up in Ireland, France, and Ohio—with stops along the way in Louisiana and the Caribbean—before finally settling in Japan. It is this last destination that brought him his most lasting acclaim.Kwaidan presents the complete text of Hearn’s classic 1903 book of Japanese ghost stories, collected during travels in his adopted homeland and presented in English for consumption by Western audiences. This edition pairs the original stories with twenty-eight photographs from celebrated photographer Hiroshi Watanabe, as well as an introduction from horror expert Paul Murray. Watanabe’s photographs provide illumination and illustration for these eerie tales. This new edition of a classic text is likely to appeal to worldwide fans of Japanese folklore, supernatural stories, and contemporary photography.

Upon his arrival in Japan in 1890, Lafcadio Hearn found himself enamored with the culture, people, and stories of the country, and would make Japan his home until his death in 1904. His collections of stories published during this time became the most popular of Hearn's writings, and earned him veneration worldwide as not only a great translator of Japanese mythology, but as a sensational teller of strange and wonderfully macabre tales. "Kwaidan" is most commonly translated as weird or horror tales, but to assign one word to the people, places, ghosts and gods in this work, one can only use the word strange. This collection of supernatural tales includes "The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi," "Ubazakura," and "Rokuro-Kubi," and other stories translated from old Japanese texts. Hearn was made a professor of English literature in the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1895, and is today revered by the Japanese for providing significant insights into their own national character.

In this new edition of "stories and studies of strange things" accompanied by illustrations by Lester Banzuelo, Lafcadio Hearn draws from his life in Japan and sketches a delicate, haunting world of snow maidens and faceless ghosts, corpse-eaters and trickster demons, soul mountains and enchanted sleep. With poetic imagination and cultural insight distilled by a lucid literary style, Hearn ushers us into the mysteries and marvels of an island country born of the sun and shrouded in mist from the sea.

A miscellany of ghost stories, odd tales, and curious observations by a master storyteller who penetrated Japan more deeply than any other Westerner. Lafcadio Hearn captures the folk spirit and quaint “exoticism” of a land thought at the time to be both mysterious and sinister. Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) gained Japanese citizenship and wrote many books about Japan for Western readers.