Japanese Ghost Stories Read online

  Hearn had always gloried in writing horrifying descriptive prose, from his earliest American journalism to his translations of the erotically charged and sadistically tinged French masters. His Japanese tales, too, often feature elements of the horrifying or grotesque – as when a man in ‘The Corpse-Rider’ (1900) has to spend the night riding on the back of a reanimated female corpse to exorcise her murderous spirit. However, his prose style, shorn of its previous striving after ornate effect, matured in his Japanese kwaidan into a hard-edged simplicity. The opening sentence of ‘The Corpse-Rider’ illustrates this new-found stylistic restraint: ‘The body was cold as ice; the heart had long ceased to beat: yet there were no other signs of death’ (p. 76).

  In dealing with real-life horror, Hearn was often laconic, knowing that he could achieve more by letting events speak for themselves rather than piling on literary effects. As a relatively young journalist, in August 1876, he witnessed a judicial execution in Dayton, Ohio. His account is all the more terrible for its restraint, eschewing the linguistic pyrotechnics that had marked his imaginative reconstruction of the ‘Tan-yard Murder’ less than two years previously.21 Now, in his Japanese story ‘In Cholera-Time’, published exactly twenty years after the Dayton execution, he treats the subject of infant mortality among the poor with similarly powerful restraint. One simple sentence encapsulates the horrifying but prosaic reality: ‘It costs only forty-four sen to burn a child’ (p. 24). In writing about horror – whether real or supernatural – Hearn had become a master of his craft.

  Afterlives

  Hearn’s extraordinary life and remarkably varied output make him a difficult subject to pin down. Although most famous for his writings on Japan, he was powerfully shaped by his Irish background. He was deeply influenced by the folkloric traditions of his homeland, a subject on which he corresponded with W. B. Yeats, who regarded him highly. His predilection for the Gothic connected him with other Irish writers of the period, most notably Bram Stoker. And in the horror stories dealing with his conflicted childhood, Hearn pioneered Irish Catholic autobiographical writing, later developed by James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh and John McGahern, among others. At the same time, his achievements far exceeded any parochial bounds. His sympathetic exploration of black culture (especially music) in the United States was remarkable by the standards of the time. He was also an excellent critic of mainstream English and American literature, as evidenced by his lectures at Tokyo University, which were published after his death.22

  Notwithstanding a bitter posthumous newspaper controversy over his character in America in 1906 – much of it driven by rage at the discovery of his interracial marriage – and the publication of Concerning Lafcadio Hearn (1908),23 a vituperative memoir by George Gould, a former friend, Hearn’s reputation remained high in the years following his death. His works became popular in his adopted homeland after their translation into Japanese in the late 1920s, where his role in collecting and preserving folklore was much appreciated.24 Hearn’s writings also played an important role in shaping the views on Japan of the American brigadier general Bonner Fellers, military secretary and head of psychological warfare to General Douglas MacArthur, commander of US forces in the Pacific from 1941. Described as ‘the most influential theorist and practitioner on MacArthur’s staff’, Fellers was a key player in the formation of American policy towards Japan during the Second World War.25 After the war, MacArthur accepted the arguments put forward by him that the emperor, Hirohito, should not be prosecuted for war crimes.26 As a devotee of Hearn’s writings, Fellers would have understood the importance of Shintō, the emperor’s place within it especially, and the likely catastrophic consequences of putting him on trial. Thus Hearn exercised a profound posthumous influence on post-war Japan through the medium of Fellers. The relationship between MacArthur and Fellers is examined in the 2012 movie Emperor, directed by Peter Webber.

  Hearn’s standing among academics declined after the Second World War and reached its nadir in the 1970s when, according to the leading Japanese authority on Hearn, Professor Sukehiro Hirakawa of Tokyo University, his writings were so discredited among American Japanologists that if a young student quoted Hearn sympathetically, he or she was almost certain to be criticized by academic advisers and considered unfit for serious scholarship.27 Happily, his reputation has now recovered and his output is the subject of a good deal of ongoing scholarship.

  According to Professor Hirakawa, Hearn has always been regarded as pre-eminent among foreign observers of Japan by the Japanese themselves.28

  He remains enduringly popular in Japan, where his kwaidan, translated back into Japanese and included in the school curriculum, have become part of the cultural landscape.

  The 1965 film Kwaidan, made by the Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi and based on four of Hearn’s stories from 1900 to 1904 in this current collection (‘The Reconciliation’, ‘In a Cup of Tea’, ‘The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi’ and ‘Yuki-Onna’), is considered to be a cinematic masterpiece. ‘Yuki-Onna’ also inspired director Tokuzō Tanaka’s The Snow Woman (1968); the ‘Lover’s Vow’ segment of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990) and Kiki Sugino’s full-length film Yuki-Onna (Snow Woman, 2016).

  Hearn’s reputation is now growing internationally. There is a Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum in Matsue (the director of which is Bon Koizumi, Hearn’s great grandson), where Hearn spent his first year in Japan, as well as Hearn museums at Kumamoto and Yaizu, a seaside location where his spent summer holidays during his time in Tokyo. The Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens opened in 2015 in Tramore, a seaside town in south-eastern Ireland where Hearn spent childhood holidays with Mrs Brenane; the gardens are laid out to reflect the story of his life. It was on the beach at Tramore, visible from these gardens, where Hearn had a last meeting with his father. In England, where Hearn was educated in the 1860s, the Lafcadio Hearn Cultural Centre now forms part of the University of Durham. A Lafcadio Hearn Historical Centre was opened on Lefkada, Greece, in 2014.

  There are many important collections of Hearn material in the United States, including in the cities in which he lived: Cincinnati, at the Public Library of Cincinnati; and Hamilton County, and New Orleans, at the Lafcadio Hearn Collection of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.

  Hearn’s Japanese ghost stories provide a thrilling exploration of an Eastern culture by a peripatetic Western traveller whose life before the age of forty seems, in retrospect, like an unconscious preparation for the great work he accomplished in Meiji Japan. Crucial to his achievement was a respect for the validity of a Far Eastern culture, unusual among contemporaneous Western observers. There are few Victorian writers whose work chimes as comfortably with our own values in this era of globalization and cultural relativism.

  NOTES

  1. See p. 33 in this volume.

  2. Hearn claimed to have spoken both Romaic (modern Greek) and Italian (presumably Venetian) when he was a child. See Lafcadio Hearn, letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, 7 September 1893, in Elizabeth Bisland (ed.), The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), p. 160.

  3. John Davy, Notes and Observations on the Ionian Islands and Malta (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1842), vol. 2, p. 112.

  4. Eleni Charou-Koroneou, ‘Roza Antoniou Kasimati, Mother of Lafcadio Hearn’, Kithiraika (May 2006), p. 11. Published in Greek and a copy sent to me by Despoina Mavroudi; kindly translated into English by the then Cypriot ambassador to Ireland, Dr Michalis Stavrinos, in 2014.

  5. Lafcadio Hearn, ‘Draft MSS Autobiography’, Lafcadio Hearn Papers, 1849–1952, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia; quoted in Paul Murray, A Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (Folkestone: Japan Library, 1993; reprinted London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 248–9.

  6. Lafcadio Hearn, ‘MSS letter to W. B. Yeats’, 24 September 1901, Tokyo; photocopy kindly provided by Dr John K
elly, St John’s College, Oxford; quoted in Murray, Fantastic Journey, p. 35.

  7. Lafcadio Hearn, On Poetry, ed. Ryuji Tanabé, Teisaburo Ochiai and Ichirō Nishizaki, 3rd edn (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1941), p. 13.

  8. Elizabeth Bisland (ed.), The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, Riverside Press, 1906), vol. 1, p. 32; quoted in Murray, Fantastic Journey, p. 265.

  9. Hearn, On Poetry, pp. 14–15.

  10. [Lafcadio Hearn], ‘Violent Cremation’, Cincinnati Enquirer, 9 November 1874; see also ‘Killed and Cremated’, Cincinnati Enquirer, 10 November 1874. The stories were not published under Hearn’s byline.

  11. [Lafcadio Hearn], ‘Golgotha: A Pilgrimage to Potter’s Field’, Cincinnati Enquirer, 29 November 1874; quoted in Murray, Fantastic Journey, p. 30.

  12. See, for example, the appendix, ‘Some Creole Melodies’, to Lafcadio Hearn, Two Years in the French West Indies (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1890), pp. 424–31.

  13. Setsu Koizumi, ‘Reminiscences’, in Yoji Hasegawa (ed.), A Walk in Kumamoto: The Life and Times of Setsu Koizumi, Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Wife (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 1997), pp. 19–21.

  14. Lafcadio Hearn, ‘The Dream of a Summer Day’, in his ‘Out of the East’: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895), p. 12. Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) was one of a trio of great British Japanologists, the others being William George Aston (1841–1911) and Ernest Satow (1843–1929) of the Meiji era. As professor of Japanese at Tokyo Imperial University, he was a friend and benefactor of Hearn’s, although they later fell out.

  15. Koizumi, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 3.

  16. Lafcadio Hearn, letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, 14 December 1893, in Bisland (ed.), Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, p. 214.

  17. Kenneth Roxroth (ed.), Introduction to The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (London: Wildwood House, 1981), n.p.

  18. Ibid.

  19. James A. Michener, The Hokusai Sketch-Books: Selections from the Manga (Vermont and Tokyo: Tuttle, 1958), p. 197.

  20. Ibid., p. 196.

  21. ‘Gibbeted’, Cincinnati Commercial, 26 August 1876. The text is reproduced in Malcolm Cowley (ed.), The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Citadel Press, 1949), pp. 203–15.

  22. John Erskine (ed.), Appreciations of Poetry by Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1916), Life and Literature by Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1917) and Books and Habits: From the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922); Ryuji Tanabé, Teisaburo Ochiai and Ichirō Nishizaki (eds), On Poets (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1934) and On Poetry (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1934).

  23. George M. Gould, Concerning Lafcadio Hearn (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Company, 1908).

  24. Rie Kido Askew, ‘The Politics of Nostalgia: Museum Representations of Lafcadio Hearn in Japan’, Museum and Society, vol. 5, no. 3 (November 2007), p. 132.

  25. See Paul Murray, ‘Lafcadio Hearn’s Interpretation of Japan’, The Japan Society Proceedings, Autumn 1994, p. 62; see also Patrick Porter, ‘Paper Bullets: American Psywar in the Pacific, 1944–45’, War in History, vol. 17, no. 4 (2010), pp. 479–511.

  26. Paul Murray, ‘Lafcadio Hearn’s Interpretation of Japan’, in Sukehiro Hirakawa (ed.), Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 1997), p. 257.

  27. Professor Sukehiro Hirakawa, ‘Supplementary Comment on the Lafcadio Hearn Paper’, paper given at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 19 July 1978; published in Louis Allen and Jean Wilson (eds), Lafcadio Hearn: Japan’s Great Interpreter: A New Anthology of His Writings, 1894–1904 (Folkestone: Japan Library, 1992), pp. 302–8.

  28. Hirakawa (ed.), Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn, p. 1.

  Of Ghosts and Goblins1

  ‘A long time ago, in the days when Fox-women and goblins haunted this land, there came to the capital with her parents a samurai girl, so beautiful that all men who saw her fell enamored of her. And hundreds of young samurai desired and hoped to marry her, and made their desire known to her parents. For it has ever been the custom in Japan that marriages should be arranged by parents. But there are exceptions to all customs, and the case of this maiden was such an exception. Her parents declared that they intended to allow their daughter to choose her own husband, and that all who wished to win her would be free to woo her.

  ‘Many men of high rank and of great wealth were admitted to the house as suitors; and each one courted her as he best knew how – with gifts, and with fair words, and with poems written in her honor, and with promises of eternal love. And to each one she spoke sweetly and hopefully; but she made strange conditions. For every suitor she obliged to bind himself by his word of honor as a samurai to submit to a test of his love for her, and never to divulge to living person what that test might be. And to this all agreed.

  ‘But even the most confident suitors suddenly ceased their importunities after having been put to the test; and all of them appeared to have been greatly terrified by something. Indeed, not a few even fled away from the city, and could not be persuaded by their friends to return. But no one ever so much as hinted why. Therefore it was whispered by those who knew nothing of the mystery, that the beautiful girl must be either a Fox-woman or a goblin.

  ‘Now, when all the wooers of high rank had abandoned their suit, there came a samurai who had no wealth but his sword. He was a good man and true, and of pleasing presence; and the girl seemed to like him. But she made him take the same pledge which the others had taken; and after he had taken it, she told him to return upon a certain evening.

  ‘When that evening came, he was received at the house by none but the girl herself. With her own hands she set before him the repast of hospitality, and waited upon him, after which she told him that she wished him to go out with her at a late hour. To this he consented gladly, and inquired to what place she desired to go. But she replied nothing to his question, and all at once became very silent, and strange in her manner. And after a while she retired from the apartment, leaving him alone.

  ‘Only long after midnight she returned, robed all in white – like a Soul – and, without uttering a word, signed to him to follow her. Out of the house they hastened while all the city slept. It was what is called an oborozuki-yo – “moon-clouded night”. Always upon such a night, ’tis said, do ghosts wander. She swiftly led the way; and the dogs howled as she flitted by; and she passed beyond the confines of the city to a place of knolls shadowed by enormous trees, where an ancient cemetery was. Into it she glided – a white shadow into blackness. He followed, wondering, his hand upon his sword. Then his eyes became accustomed to the gloom; and he saw.

  ‘By a new-made grave she paused and signed to him to wait. The tools of the grave-maker were still lying there. Seizing one, she began to dig furiously, with strange haste and strength. At last her spade smote a coffin-lid and made it boom: another moment and the fresh white wood of the kwan2 was bare. She tore off the lid, revealing a corpse within – the corpse of a child. With goblin gestures she wrung an arm from the body, wrenched it in twain, and, squatting down, began to devour the upper half. Then, flinging to her lover the other half, she cried to him, “Eat, if thou lovest me! this is what I eat!”

  ‘Not even for a single instant did he hesitate. He squatted down upon the other side of the grave, and ate the half of the arm, and said, “Kekkō degozarimasu! mo sukoshi chōdai.”fn1 For that arm was made of the best kwashifn2 that Saikyō could produce.

  ‘Then the girl sprang to her feet with a burst of laughter, and cried: “You only, of all my brave suitors, did not run away! And I wanted a husband who could not fear. I will marry you; I can love you: you are a man!”’3

  ‘O Kinjurō,’ I said, as we took our way home, ‘I have heard and I have read many Japanese stories of the returning of the dead. Likewise you yourself have told
me it is still believed the dead return, and why. But according both to that which I have read and that which you have told me, the coming back of the dead is never a thing to be desired. They return because of hate, or because of envy, or because they cannot rest for sorrow. But of any who return for that which is not evil – where is it written? Surely the common history of them is like that which we have this night seen: much that is horrible and much that is wicked and nothing of that which is beautiful or true.’

  Now this I said that I might tempt him. And he made even the answer I desired, by uttering the story which is hereafter set down:

  ‘Long ago, in the days of a daimyō4 whose name has been forgotten, there lived in this old city a young man and a maid who loved each other very much. Their names are not remembered, but their story remains. From infancy they had been betrothed; and as children they played together, for their parents were neighbors. And as they grew up, they became always fonder of each other.