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,” was told

me by a farmer of Chōfu, Nishitama-gōri, 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. TŌKYŌ, JAPAN, January 20th, 1904.

KWAIDAN