Unmentioned in the introduction, another of the stories - "Hi-Mawari", written in the first person - appears almost certainly to be born from his own experience also, a recollection of a childhood experience in Wales (he'd spent time near Bangor when a child living with his Aunt). Hearn writes in his introduction, written only months before his death, that the majority of the stories were translated from old Japanese texts (some of which themselves were based on earlier Chinese tales), although one of the stories, "Riki-Baka", he declares to be of his own making, based on a personal experience. His Penguin compilation includes 34 selections, a chronology of Hearn's peripatetic life, some intriguing background information about the sources of the stories, and a number of evocative woodblock prints.Deriving its title from the word for "ghost story" in Japanese Kwaidan is a book by scholar and translator Lafcadio Hearn in which are compiled an array of ghost stories hailing from Japan. Paul Murray, a former Irish diplomat, has been hooked since a 1970s posting in Japan. the stories occupy the reverie world our mind projects onto the backs of our eyelids, where the ordinary mingles with the supernatural The Wall Street JournalĪn extraordinary author. What makes these stories, preserved from ancient times, especially readable today is the preternaturally postmodern form they are given in Hearn's deeply idiosyncratic telling New Yorker This book insightfully shows how Hearn filtered Japanese ghostly originals through the prism of his own expansive imagination and traumatized experience to create works that were distinctly, and chillingly, his own Japan Times The particular value of Murray's collection is that it leads us in chronological order through a much greater breadth of Hearn's writings on the supernatural in Japan, with ghostly tales selected from 11 of his books.
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