Audiobook · read by volunteers
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904)
Read by Vilayvanh, Nadine Eckert-Boulet, Availle, Scott Carpenter, Martin Geeson · 21 chapters · 3 h 51
About the book
A blind musician who sings of a great sea battle so movingly that the dead come to listen. A woman made of snow who spares a young man on one condition. A traveller on a dark road who meets a weeping woman with no face. Kwaidan collects the weird tales that Lafcadio Hearn gathered from old Japanese books and from the people he met, and retold in an English both delicate and haunting. These are ghost stories, but quiet ones, full of sorrow, duty and a strange tenderness. Three short studies of insects follow the tales. Twenty-one short chapters and a little under four hours, read by five volunteers, make this an ideal collection for a dark evening. It is a small masterpiece of the supernatural, written by an author who loved the country he describes.
Introduction
Lafcadio Hearn, who lived from 1850 to 1904, was born in Greece, grew up partly in Ireland and spent his later years in Japan, where he took Japanese nationality and a Japanese name. He wrote many books to introduce the country to Western readers. Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, published in 1904, is perhaps the best known. The word kwaidan means weird tales or ghost stories.
In his introduction, Hearn explains that most of the stories were taken from old Japanese books, and that some may have a Chinese origin. He also stresses that each storyteller reshaped his material so that it felt natural in its new setting. One of the best known tales, Yuki-Onna, he says, was told to him by a farmer as a legend of his village, and he does not know whether it was ever written down. The book also includes The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi and Oshidori among others.
Kwaidan has been very influential in the world of horror and fantasy, and it inspired a celebrated Japanese film of 1964. It matters as a work of literary retelling and as a window on a body of folklore that was not widely known in English at the time.
The LibriVox recording consists of twenty-one chapters, starting with the introduction, and lasts almost four hours. It is read by several volunteers, among them Vilayvanh, Nadine Eckert-Boulet and Availle. The mood is hushed and atmospheric, and the stories reward listening in a dim room. Fans of horror, fantasy and Japanese culture will find the tales short, eerie and memorable, and the mixture of sorrow and wonder explains why they have been reprinted and adapted for more than a century.
Public domain
Lafcadio Hearn died in 1904: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text