Kwaidan

About this book

A blind musician sings before an audience that should have died centuries ago. A beautiful woman appears in falling snow, and a creature with an impossibly long neck transforms a night of travel into terror.

Lafcadio Hearn's best-known collection of Japanese ghost stories includes Hoichi the Earless, Yuki-onna and Rokuro-kubi, alongside shorter accounts of spirits and strange returns. A final group of studies turns to the behaviour and symbolism of insects. The prose is spare, patient and full of details that make the impossible feel briefly familiar.