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A review by quoteradar
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn
4.0
This was a mixed bag.
The tales themselves range from startling (a blind musical priest who, unsuspecting, gives a week long command performance to a posse of appreciative but dangerous demons) to surreal (a man who falls asleep under a tree, has his soul kidnapped by a giant ant, and lives an entire life as adopted royalty before waking up five minutes later).
If you're used to modern jump-scare paranormal monster movies, these won't seem "scary" but there's definitely a glimpse of a world beyond our knowledge and control that seethes with strange beings and stranger happenings and skulls stuck to the hems of cloaks. There are ghosts and demons... but there is also magic, poetry, and wonder.
The translator-narrator has a way of spoiling the atmosphere of the tales he tells, however. Interrupting a story to explain a cultural point about magic may have seemed helpful when these were first translated for a Western audience very unfamiliar with Japanese folklore or tradition, but still other meaningful points are relegated to footnotes, and I couldn't discern a method here. I'd have preferred an introductory primer on key ideas in Japanese myths and then an uninterrupted narrative.
And! Beyond the odd encyclopaedic interjection, the stories were interspersed with editorial and essays, including a protracted musing on ants as a moral analogy to human civilization and what their sex-lives imply about the role of duty in human social evolution. I love a good essay, and if it's a slightly silly introspection that attempts to take an offbeat analogy to some kind of logical conclusion, so much the better. I guess when I read "Studies of Strange Things" in the title, this just wasn't what I was expecting.
The tales themselves range from startling (a blind musical priest who, unsuspecting, gives a week long command performance to a posse of appreciative but dangerous demons) to surreal (a man who falls asleep under a tree, has his soul kidnapped by a giant ant, and lives an entire life as adopted royalty before waking up five minutes later).
If you're used to modern jump-scare paranormal monster movies, these won't seem "scary" but there's definitely a glimpse of a world beyond our knowledge and control that seethes with strange beings and stranger happenings and skulls stuck to the hems of cloaks. There are ghosts and demons... but there is also magic, poetry, and wonder.
The translator-narrator has a way of spoiling the atmosphere of the tales he tells, however. Interrupting a story to explain a cultural point about magic may have seemed helpful when these were first translated for a Western audience very unfamiliar with Japanese folklore or tradition, but still other meaningful points are relegated to footnotes, and I couldn't discern a method here. I'd have preferred an introductory primer on key ideas in Japanese myths and then an uninterrupted narrative.
And! Beyond the odd encyclopaedic interjection, the stories were interspersed with editorial and essays, including a protracted musing on ants as a moral analogy to human civilization and what their sex-lives imply about the role of duty in human social evolution. I love a good essay, and if it's a slightly silly introspection that attempts to take an offbeat analogy to some kind of logical conclusion, so much the better. I guess when I read "Studies of Strange Things" in the title, this just wasn't what I was expecting.