A review by staticdisplay
Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari

4.0

I skipped the introductory bit, read the stories, and went back to the introduction. clearly a lot of care went into preserving the cultural and historical elements of the stories, but I'm not sure why you would go into a detailed analysis of the stories before presenting the stories. there are lots of citations and I did get a good sense of the context for each of the tales (I mean as much as I possibly can while being largely ignorant about almost everything). the tales themselves are quite interesting and compelling - I like spooky and "gothic" stories, and there is a bit of that in here. my favorites were The Carp of My Dreams and The Blue Hood. reading the introduction after reading the stories was satisfying, as there was a bit of examining and explaining which can also be interesting with spooky stories.