Review: Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn

English; Lafcadio Hearn; Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, NY, USA, 1930.

Octavo; hardcover with orange-coloured stamped spine-titling and upper board decoration; 240pp., monochrome frontispiece, top edge dyed orange. Small stain to top edge; previous owner’s inscription on front free endpaper; price-clipped dustjacket sunned along the spine; chipping to the spine head and tail but with no loss of text or image; now protected by non-adhesive plastic.

Fans of horror fiction realise only far too well that there is horror and there is horror. What scares some people leaves other people cold. The same can be said of humour: what makes some people laugh, simply offends others. The reasons are multitudinous and varied: past experiences, different upbringings, all contribute to various degrees of susceptibility. One of those variables is culture.

Lafcadio Hearn was of Greek extraction, brought up in America, and rose to become one of the USA’s first ambassadorial representatives to Japan. What he found there forever changed him. He returned to pen many books, translating the literature – especially the folk- and ghost stories – of what was to become his spiritual home country. The best known of these are Kokoro and this collection of ghost stories and weird tales, Kwaidan.

Ghosts in Japanese mythology have a more distinct rationale from those found in the West. In most cases, the ghost appears to avenge a wrong done to them in their lifetime, or to expose the guilt of a criminal third party, whereas, in Europe say, a ghost may appear and scare onlookers without any definite cause or rationale, and the debate as to the reason of why they are unable to rest makes for some very pleasant ongoing fireside chats. These Japanese ‘yorei’, on the other hand, always seem to have a clear purpose in mind.

The book is in two sections – the first consists of spooky tales, while the second is entitled “Insect Studies” and recalls a number of fantastic writings about various arthropod creatures. The first tale is the story the blind musician Hoichi, who entertains, unknowingly, the spectres of the drowned clan of the Heike who slowly drain his energies as they force him to recount the epic songs of their demise on a nightly basis. Priests at the temple where Hoichi is staying try to protect him by painting his body with sutras that make him invisible to the ghosts, but they forget to paint his ears and the ghosts, while breaking their hold over the musician, cut off his ears as a punishment for his desire to be rid of them.

Thereafter, we have snow maidens, the hungry dead, reincarnated troubled wives and wandering priests in peril. Fans of Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy” will discover the source of one of his best strips in “Rokuro-kubi” the tale of a nest of goblins whose heads fly off at night to forage for meaty prey. Mignola claimed that there were elements of this tale that he couldn’t bring to the graphic re-telling, so loyal fans (like me!) should check this out.

As in most Japanese literature, there is not a lot of wrapping-up after the climax has been reached: the story told, the reader is left to ponder the unspoken elements of the narrative. This is a good thing and shows a high level of trust by the author in the audience. It also catches the terse, haiku-like force of the Japanese style and in this, Hearn’s sensitivity truly catches the native origins of the work.

As a sideline, the book was the inspiration to a 1960s movie by director Masaki Kobayashi. The film covers several of the stories that Hearn translates as well as some others, equally famous. Shot over more than twelve months in a giant converted aircraft hangar, it is well worth watching for its comments on Hearn’s stories as much as its exposition of Japanese cultural motifs in regard to their ghost tradition.

I’m not a fan of Cthulhu in Japan – there’s no basis for it in HPL and yet Chaosium has two sourcebooks in print about it – but, if you’re thinking of meeting the Mythos in that country, there’s no better place to start than with this collection of stories.

I give it four tentacled horrors.