Kwaidan: Ghost Stories and Strange Tales of Old Japan

· Courier Corporation
4.0
2 reviews
Ebook
192
Pages

About this ebook

A blind musician with amazing talent is called upon to perform for the dead. Faceless creatures haunt an unwary traveler. A beautiful woman — the personification of winter at its cruelest — ruthlessly kills unsuspecting mortals. These and seventeen other chilling supernatural tales — based on legends, myths, and beliefs of ancient Japan — represent the very best of Lafcadio Hearn's literary style. They are also a culmination of his lifelong interest in the endlessly fascinating customs and tales of the country where he spent the last fourteen years of his life, translating into English the atmospheric stories he so avidly collected.
Teeming with undead samurais, man-eating goblins, and other terrifying demons, these twenty classic ghost stories inspired the Oscar®-nominated 1964 film of the same name.

Ratings and reviews

4.0
2 reviews
Martin Florén
February 6, 2014
Google books does not display some characters, e.g. ō, properly in any of the fonts available. Other than that it is a fascinating collection of wonderfully strange and sometimes macabre Japanese folklore, and truly one of the classic works one should not miss.
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About the author

Oscar Lewis, an American anthropologist, was renowned for his studies of poverty in Mexico and Puerto Rico and for his controversial concept of "the culture of poverty." After graduating from Columbia University, where he studied under Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead, his first major book, Life in a Mexican Village (1951), was a restudy of Robert Redfield's village of Tepoztlan, which reached a number of conclusions opposed to those reached by Redfield. Much of the controversy over the culture of poverty disappeared when Lewis labeled it a subculture; ironically, reactionaries have used the concept to blame the poor for their poverty, whereas Lewis believed the poor to be victims. Many of his books are based on tape recordings of family members, a technique in which Lewis was a pioneer.

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