Hearn, Lafcadio

About the Author:

Lafcadio Hearn (1850 - 1904) grew up in Ireland but was successively abandoned by his mother, his father and his guardian.  He moved to the United States and worked as a journalist but was fired for marrying a former slave.  Lafcadio later moved to Japan where he married the daughter of a samurai and became a naturalised citizen.

AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:

2 out of 5

(1 book)

Japanese Ghost Stories

A collection of Japanese folk tales which detail sinister encounters with the supernatural, dating from the 19th Century and before.

It is not necessarily this book's fault that it wasn't what I'd hoped for, but that inevitably colours my enjoyment of it.  What I wanted was a retelling of some Japanese ghost stories in the style and tone of other 19th Century collections of ghost stories but what this is instead, is a number of short translations of older stories with the odd editorial note by Hearn himself.  It means that tonally and textually these aren't stories to be enjoyed as crafted pieces of literature but are instead more akin to transcriptions of folk tales told around the fire, with all the vagueness and leaps in logic you could expect from that.

This isn't to say that there isn't a great deal to enjoy here, but the nature of the origins of these stories and how they've been gathered means that there is a great deal of repetition of ideas, with most of the stories involving some young samurai or priest seeing a beautiful woman who turns out to be a malignant spirit of some kind.  It, unfortunately, becomes a bit predictable after not too long.  There are some outlier stories which break the trend and which have a more coherent authorship to them, but they're exceptions.

For me, there were two things that did elevate the book overall.  The first is simply how, as a fan of folklore and mythology, you can get a sense of how different ghosts and spirits were/are viewed by the Japanese than by Europeans.  The other thing was the Appendix, in which the author chillingly relates his own terror of ghosts throughout his childhood and how the refusal of the adults around him to acknowledge the problem only deepened his fear.

2 out of 5

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