Week Three - Kwaidan : Stories and Studies of Strange Things




Kwaidan : Stories and Studies of Strange Things - Lafcadio Hearn

September 11, 2017


           Kwaidan : Stories and Studies of Strange things consists of many, short Japanese ghost stories. Although some were more enjoyable than others, I enjoyed reading them all. The few that stood out for me were probably "Yuki-Onna", "Mujina", and "Rokuro-Kubi". Yuki-Onna was probably my favorite. I was happy to see that the story happened to be the film we watched during class, and it was almost exactly like the story. It's about this very pale woman in white, who basically sucks the life out of this man. This other man, Minokichi, is there to witness it. Since he was young and attractive, the woman let him live. The only thing he had to promise, was to never speak of what he saw or she would kill him. Long story short, he winds up telling the story years later to his wife.. who IS THE WOMAN IN WHITE. What a plot twist. She doesn't kill him because they have kids together. It's interesting to see a ghost like woman, who kills men, have emotions toward someone. It wasn't a scary ghost story, but it was different than what I'm used to. I liked the idea of her having emotions in some way.
     Mujina is a whole other story. It was rather short compared to the other stories, but it works well that way. In the story, there's a man who notices a woman weeping by a moat. Since he's afraid she's trying to kill herself, he goes up to her. He's trying to tell her not to cry and that he can help her and he realizes this woman doesn't have a face. She had no eyes, no nose, nothing. Reading that actually creeped me out a bit. Have you heard of Slenderman?
     Last but not least there's Rokuro-Kubi. Altough I left this one last, it was still really interesting to read through. It involves a priest going into a friendly woodcutters home so he doesn't have to be out in the woods at night. The priest gets up to get water in the middle of the night and sees that everyone in the house no longer had heads. The creepy thing about the situation is that, it's normal for them. If they are away from their bodies for too long, they will die. Definitely an interesting story to read. Not the scariest story, but I know I wouldn't want to see headless people.

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