Some Japanese Ghosts

In the Shinto tradition, the dead do not simply leave — they linger, return, and demand the attention of the living. Lafcadio Hearn collected the ghost stories that embody this belief with the care and precision of someone who genuinely believed he was recording something true. These Penguin Little Black Classic stories — ‘Mujina’, ‘Yuki-Onna’, ‘The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi’ — are among the most perfectly constructed ghost stories in world literature.

Brief, precise, and atmospheric in a way that has influenced Japanese horror fiction, film, and folklore scholarship ever since Hearn published them, they represent the meeting point of two traditions: the Western short story and the Japanese kaidan — the ghost tale as moral instruction, as cultural memory, as evidence of the world that exists beyond the visible one.

Essential for anyone interested in Japanese literature, supernatural fiction, or the art of the ghost story at its most refined. A Penguin Little Black Classic. Published by Penguin.