Who Is Shomontei Fukurai?
The storyteller who hosts the night of a hundred tales
Shomontei Fukurai is the storyteller (hanashika) who narrates every episode of KAIDAN: Japanese Ghost Stories on Manga Portal. He does not appear in Lafcadio Hearn's original works. He is an original character created for the manga.
At the start of each episode, he steps onto a dimly lit stage, sets up a candle, and opens with words like, "Well now, tonight, one tale from the Hundred Stories," introducing the ghost story to come. When the story ends, he blows out the candle in the lingering silence to close the night's tale. The same storyteller also appears in the site's rakugo comic-story collection.
Hyakumonogatari, the "Hundred Stories," was a game that was popular in the Edo period: people gathered at night to tell ghost stories one by one, putting out one light after each tale. Fukurai is the guide who lets readers feel the mood of that game through manga.
Episodes featuring this character7
NEWEpisode 1
When the Dead Call His Name, Don't AnswerHoichi the Earless
Kaidan, Tale One. Hoichi, a blind master of the biwa lute, is summoned night after night to perform for "a person of high rank." But the guests who weep at his tale are the dead of a clan that sank beneath the sea. On the night his whole body is covered in sacred writing, he must not answer, no matter who calls his name.
19 pages
NEWEpisode 2
Silent for Ten Years. Then He Told.Yuki-onna (The Snow Woman)
KAIDAN: Japanese Ghost Stories, Episode 2. On a night of howling snow, a young woodcutter is spared by a woman in white—on one condition: he must never tell anyone what he saw. Years later, blessed with a gentle wife and ten children, he finally breaks his silence... to the one person he should never have told.
19 pages
NEWEpisode 3
She Turned Around. She Had No Face.Mujina (The Faceless Ghost)
KAIDAN, Episode 3. Late at night on a dark slope, an old merchant can't bring himself to walk past a girl weeping at the edge of the moat. He flees from the faceless girl and finally reaches the glow of a noodle stall. But when he pours out the whole story to the stall keeper, whose back is turned to him...
19 pages
NEWEpisode 4
He Didn't Run. He Hid the Body.Rokuro-kubi
KAIDAN: Japanese Ghost Stories, Episode 4. Kwairyo, a wandering priest who used to be a fierce samurai, spends the night with a kind family deep in the mountains. At midnight he finds their sleeping bodies with no heads. He doesn't run. He quietly hides one of the bodies instead.
20 pages
NEWEpisode 5
He Drank the Face. Now It Comes CallingIn a Cup of Tea
KAIDAN, Episode 5. At a teahouse on New Year's, a stranger's face appears in Sekinai's cup of tea. The hot-tempered young samurai snaps, "Stay out of other people's tea!" and drinks the face down in one gulp. That night, oddly polite visitors begin to call, each promising to repay him. And this story has no ending.
19 pages
NEWEpisode 6
"Tomorrow, I Won't Be Here," She SaidThe Story of Aoyagi
KAIDAN: Japanese Ghost Stories, Episode 6. Lost in a mountain blizzard, the young samurai Tomotada finds shelter in a hut, where a girl answers his poem with a poem of her own. He breaks the rules and makes her his wife. When a great lord's household takes her away, a single poem wins her back, and they share five happy years. Then one morning she tells him, "I can't be here tomorrow."
20 pages
NEWEpisode 7
17 Years Later, a Stranger Brings TeaThe Story of O-Tei
KAIDAN: Japanese Ghost Stories, Episode 7. Dying at fifteen, O-Tei makes a promise to the man she was meant to marry: "I'll be born again, and I'll come back to you." Seventeen years later, Nagao Chosei sets off on a journey alone. At an inn in the mountain hot-spring town of Ikao, a girl he has never met brings him a cup of tea.
19 pages