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
