INTRODUCTION
The
publication of a new volume of Lafcadio Hearn's exquisite studies
of
Japan happens, by a delicate irony, to fall in the very month
when
the world is waiting with tense expectation for news of the
latest
exploits of Japanese battleships. Whatever the outcome of the
present
struggle between Russia and Japan, its significance lies in the
fact
that a nation of the East, equipped with Western weapons and
girding
itself with Western energy of will, is deliberately measuring
strength against one of the great powers of the Occident. No one
is
wise enough to forecast the results of such a conflict upon the
civilization of the world. The best one can do is to estimate, as
intelligently as possible, the national characteristics of the
peoples engaged, basing one's hopes and fears upon the psychology
of
the two races rather than upon purely political and statistical
studies of the complicated questions involved in the present war.
The
Russian people have had literary spokesmen who for more than a
generation have fascinated the European audience. The Japanese,
on
the other hand, have possessed no such national and universally
recognized figures as Turgenieff or Tolstoy. They need an
interpreter.
It
may be doubted whether any oriental race has ever had an
interpreter
gifted with more perfect insight and sympathy than Lafcadio Hearn
has
brought to the translation of Japan into our occidental speech.
His
long residence in that country, his flexibility of mind, poetic
imagination, and wonderfully pellucid style have fitted him for
the
most delicate of literary tasks. He has seen marvels, and he has
told
of them in a marvelous way. There is scarcely an aspect of
contemporary Japanese life, scarcely an element in the social,
political, and military questions involved in the present
conflict
with Russia which is not made clear in one or another of the
books
with which he has charmed American readers.
He
characterizes Kwaidan as "stories and studies of strange
things." A hundred thoughts suggested by the book might be
written down, but most of them would begin and end with this fact
of
strangeness. To read the very names in the table of contents is
like
listening to a Buddhist bell, struck somewhere far away. Some of
his
tales are of the long ago, and yet they seem to illumine the very
souls and minds of the little men who are at this hour crowding
the
decks of Japan's armored cruisers. But many of the stories are
about
women and children,—the lovely materials from which the best
fairy
tales of the world have been woven. They too are strange, these
Japanese maidens and wives and keen-eyed, dark-haired girls and
boys;
they are like us and yet not like us; and the sky and the hills
and
the flowers are all different from ours. Yet by a magic of which
Mr.
Hearn, almost alone among contemporary writers, is the master, in
these delicate, transparent, ghostly sketches of a world unreal
to
us, there is a haunting sense of spiritual reality.
In
a penetrating and beautiful essay contributed to the "Atlantic
Monthly" in February, 1903, by Paul Elmer More, the secret of
Mr. Hearn's magic is said to lie in the fact that in his art is
found
"the meeting of three ways." "To the religious
instinct of India—Buddhism in particular,—which history has
engrafted on the aesthetic sense of Japan, Mr. Hearn brings the
interpreting spirit of occidental science; and these three
traditions
are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich
and
novel compound,—a compound so rare as to have introduced into
literature a psychological sensation unknown before." Mr. More's
essay received the high praise of Mr. Hearn's recognition and
gratitude, and if it were possible to reprint it here, it would
provide a most suggestive introduction to these new stories of
old
Japan, whose substance is, as Mr. More has said, "so strangely
mingled together out of the austere dreams of India and the
subtle
beauty of Japan and the relentless science of Europe."
Most
of the following Kwaidan, or Weird Tales, have been taken from
old
Japanese books,—such as the Yaso-Kidan, Bukkyo-Hyakkwa-Zensho,
Kokon-Chomonshu, Tama-Sudare, and Hyaku-Monogatari. Some of the
stories may have had a Chinese origin: the very remarkable "Dream
of Akinosuke," for example, is certainly from a Chinese source.
But the story-teller, in every case, has so recolored and
reshaped
his borrowing as to naturalize it... One queer tale, "Yuki-Onna,"
was told me by a farmer of Chofu, Nishitama-gori, in Musashi
province, as a legend of his native village. Whether it has ever
been
written in Japanese I do not know; but the extraordinary belief
which
it records used certainly to exist in most parts of Japan, and in
many curious forms... The incident of "Riki-Baka" was a
personal experience; and I wrote it down almost exactly as it
happened, changing only a family-name mentioned by the Japanese
narrator.
L.H.