A selection of Lafcadio Hearn's brilliantly entertaining and eerie ghost stories, regarded as major classics in Japan.
The improbable life story of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) included a
peculiarly gothic childhood in Ireland during which he was
successively abandoned by his mother, his father and his guardian;
two decades in the United States, where he worked as a journalist
and was sacked for marrying a former slave; and a long period in
Japan, where he married a Japanese woman and wrote about Japanese
society and aesthetics for a Western readership. His ghost stories,
which were drawn from Japanese folklore and influenced by Buddhist
beliefs, appeared in collections throughout the 1890s and 1900s. He
is a much celebrated figure in Japan.
Paul Murray is the author of biographies of Lafcadio Hearn and Bram
Stoker, and the editor of collections of Hearn's work. He is a
former Irish diplomat whose posting to Japan in the late 1970s
first ignited his interest in Hearn.
The particular value of Murray's collection is that it leads us in
chronological order through a much greater breadth of Hearn's
writings on the supernatural in Japan, with ghostly tales selected
from 11 of his books ... This book insightfully shows how Hearn
filtered Japanese ghostly originals through the prism of his own
expansive imagination and traumatized experience to create works
that were distinctly, and chillingly, his own
*Japan Times*
What makes these stories, preserved from ancient times, especially
readable today is the preternaturally postmodern form they are
given in Hearn's deeply idiosyncratic telling
*New Yorker*
The overarching mood is of wonder . . . the stories occupy the
reverie world our mind projects onto the backs of our eyelids,
where the ordinary mingles with the supernatural
*The Wall Street Journal*
An extraordinary author . . . Paul Murray, a former Irish diplomat,
has been hooked since a 1970s posting in Japan. His Penguin
compilation includes 34 selections, a chronology of Hearn's
peripatetic life, some intriguing background information about the
sources of the stories, and a number of evocative woodblock prints.
Murray's introduction is exceptionally useful to contextualize the
man and his oeuvre, tracing the powerful influence of Irish
folktales and ghost stories on Hearn's take on Japanese
counterparts
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
