Kwaidan

Lafcadio Hearn spent years gathering ghost stories from old Japanese legend, and in the late 1800s he retold them for a wider audience. Kwaidan is the result: a collection of eerie tales in which spirits, goblins and the living share the same world, often with unsettling consequences.

A blind poet is summoned to perform for an audience that turns out to belong to a dead royal family. An old man trades his own life to bring blossoms back to a withering cherry tree. A man stops to comfort a woman weeping in the dark and recoils when he sees her face. A mandarin duck haunts the hunter who killed her mate.

These stories have lasted because they are quiet and strange as well as frightening. This edition carries an introduction by Ruskin Bond.