Lafcadio Hearn's KWAIDAN

[Extollager]

Traditional folktales from places as far apart as Japan and Iceland may contain elements of horror.

Here is a story from Japan as told by Lafcadio Hearn.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1210/1210-h/1210-h.htm#mujina

If you have read E. F. Benson's "The Step," you may wonder if Benson hadn't read this Hearn piece.

People interested in folktales (scary or otherwise) are invited to start a discussion here:

Folktales: Grimm, Asbjørnsen and Moe, Jacobs, Afanasyev, & more

 

[Extollager]

I should have mentioned that Hearn's Kwaidan is "stories and studies of strange things."

 

[j d worthington]

I've only read selections from Kwaidan up to this point (though I have the whole of it set aside for reading as part of my reading of books mentioned in HPL's "Supernatural Horror in Literature"... I hope before the end of the year). Otherwise I'd love to discuss the man's work. Hearn had an uncanny way with adapting other works to English forms, as he did with Flaubert for instance, or Gautier. Certainly he did some of the most memorable translations and renditions of such works I have encountered.

By the way... have you ever read his Fantastics? That is another I hope to get to around the same time period....

 

[Extollager]

No, J. D., I haven't read Fantastics. In fact, I haven't read all of the pieces in my Dover edition of Kwaidan yet, although I bought my copy 40 years ago. I own 30+ folktale books,* and I tend to read around in them without reading any one of them straight through ... although I did read Jacqueline Simpson's Scandinavian volume for Penguin (and maybe Lindow's Swedish collection) from beginning to end. I group Kwaidan with these books, along with the University of Chicago edition of Folktales of Japan.

*More, if I were to count books whose primary intended audience is children. Such books can be very good, e.g. Isaac Bashevis Singer's versions of Yiddish tales.

 

[Randy M.]

Hi, gents.

Extollager, I have yet to read Hearn other than Kwaidan and Some Chinese Ghosts. The latter isn't quite as fluid as the former, and Kwaidan, I believe, gains from being read beginning to end. Hearn's prose is beautiful, as spare as anything written by Crane or Hemingway, and at moments poetic.

Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

.....Kwaidan, I believe, gains from being read beginning to end.

Thanks -- I guess I should pick it up and read it thus rather than as a collection of folk tales to be dipped into whenever.

 

[Randy M.]

I don't know enough about Japanese history or mythology to place it in context, but it's a book I first heard about when it was described as fantasy and as such I found reading it rewarding and Hearn's prose almost mesmerizing over the course of the book.

Randy M.

 

[BAYLOR]

Hoichi The Earless . Which has bee adapted to film.

 

[lynnfredricks]

There are a number of film adaptions, the older the better. He lead an interesting life and really embraced Japan and Japanese culture.