Japanese Ghost Stories

In the 1890s, an American writer named Lafcadio Hearn left everything he knew to settle in Japan, take a Japanese wife, acquire a Japanese name, and spend the rest of his life attempting to understand and transmit a culture that fascinated him completely. What he found, in the ghost stories that saturate Japanese folk tradition, was something he felt Western rationalism had lost: a way of living alongside the dead, of acknowledging the presence of the past in the present, that seemed to him both more honest and more humanly complete than anything in his own tradition.

Hearn’s Japanese ghost stories — gathered in this Penguin Modern Classics edition — are the finest Western engagement with the Japanese supernatural tradition, written with the ethnographic precision of a trained journalist and the literary sensibility of a genuine artist.

Atmospheric, culturally illuminating, and genuinely unsettling — essential for anyone interested in Japanese literature, folklore, or the literature of the uncanny. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.