His many footnotes explaining terms, historical points and religious inferences are admirably succinct. He was scrupulous in using the correct titles for people and in using or creating the right words for ritual objects and practices.
Hearn was clearly very bright and an accomplished, self-taught scholar. The stories in this volume are written with great care, staying close to the sparse and formal style of the original Japanese. He was born in 1850 to an Irish father and Greek mother in the Ionian island of Lefkada was abandoned by his parents and spent a largely miserable childhood in Ireland and England (the last section of this book is about this) became a journalist in the USA, where his illegal marriage to a black, ex-slave in 1874 lost him his job spent two years in the French West Indies translated French fiction wrote short novels arrived in Japan in 1890, where he married a Japanese woman had various teaching posts and published books on Japan, dying from heart disease in 1904. Lafcadio Hearn was as singular as the folk tales which he collected and published in Japan in the 1890s.
The fact that these stories were collected by Hearn direct from a presumably living oral tradition at the end of the nineteenth century is another indicator of how very different are the recent roots of Japan from those of Europe.
We enter a world in which fear-filled superstition is constantly reinforced by horrific acts of vengeance by spirits (often female), and where hierarchy is as rigidly observed between ghosts as amongst the living. The stories are thoroughly exotic by Western standards: spirit-women devour earthly lovers demons are tamed in fish-ponds and samurai monks clobber floating goblin heads. This remarkable set of generally very short tales has the feel and taste of authenticity.
0 kommentar(er)
