Kwaidan Lafcadio Hearn Summary
KAIDAN: Japanese Ghost Stories is a manga adaptation of the ghost stories of Lafcadio Hearn, a writer who settled in Japan during the Meiji era and took the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. Hearn retold old Japanese legends and tales from old books in English. You can read them in the manga one tale at a time. Most of the stories come from Kwaidan (1904). "In a Cup of Tea" comes from Kotto (1902).
Episode 1, "Hoichi the Earless," follows Hoichi, a blind biwa (lute) player who is summoned night after night by the ghosts of the Heike clan, who were destroyed at the sea battle of Dan-no-ura. To protect him, his whole body is covered in holy sutra text, but his ears are forgotten, and he loses both of them. In Episode 2, "Yuki-onna," Minokichi is a young woodcutter whose life is spared by the Snow Woman on a night of blizzard. Years later, he breaks the promise he made to her, who has become his wife, O-Yuki.
Episode 3, "Mujina," is a story of the noppera-bo, the faceless ghost: on the dark Kii-no-kuni slope, a man meets a faceless girl and then a faceless soba seller. In Episode 4, "Rokuro-kubi," Kwairyo, a samurai who became a priest, fights a family of monsters whose heads come off and fly. Episode 5, "In a Cup of Tea," is a strange story with no ending: a young retainer named Sekinai sees a stranger's face in his tea and drinks it down.
Episode 6, "The Story of Aoyagi," tells of the love and parting of the young samurai Tomotada and Aoyagi, the spirit of a willow tree. These classic Japanese ghost stories are not just scary. They are also sad, sometimes funny, and full of human kindness. Each one is told as a tale on a night of Hyakumonogatari, the old custom of telling a hundred ghost stories.
Story summary
Episode 1When the Dead Call His Name, Don't Answer — Hoichi the Earless
In the mangaKaidan, 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.
In the original mythThe story opens with history. More than seven hundred years before Hearn wrote, the Heike (Taira) clan lost their last battle against the Genji (Minamoto) at Dan-no-ura, in the Strait of Shimonoseki. The Heike women and children died in the sea with them, and so did the child emperor Antoku. For centuries afterward, people said the sea was haunted. Ghosts tried to pull swimmers under and sink boats, ghost-fires…
Episode 2Silent for Ten Years. Then He Told. — Yuki-onna (The Snow Woman)
In the mangaKAIDAN: 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.
In the original mythLafcadio Hearn opens the tale with a short note saying he heard it from a farmer of Chofu, a village in the Nishitama district of old Musashi Province, the area around present-day western Tokyo. In a village there live two woodcutters: Mosaku, an old man, and his eighteen-year-old apprentice, Minokichi. Every day they walk to the forest, crossing a wide river by ferry on the way.
Episode 3She Turned Around. She Had No Face. — Mujina (The Faceless Ghost)
In the mangaKAIDAN, 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...
In the original mythHearn opens with a place rather than a person. In the Akasaka district of Tokyo there is a slope called Kii-no-kuni-zaka. Hearn admits he doesn't know where the name comes from. On one side runs a wide, deep old moat below a high green bank. On the other side stretch the long, high walls of a palace. Before street lamps and rickshaws came to the city, this road was so lonely after dark that people walking late…
Episode 4He Didn't Run. He Hid the Body. — Rokuro-kubi
In the mangaKAIDAN: 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.
In the original mythHearn sets the tale about five hundred years before his own time. Isogai Heidazaemon Taketsura was a retainer of the Kikuchi clan in Kyushu, Japan's southern main island, and was known for his skill in arms. When his lord's house fell, he did not look for a new master. He shaved his head, became a Buddhist priest under the name Kwairyo, and wandered the country. He went wherever other travelers were afraid to go.
Episode 5He Drank the Face. Now It Comes Calling — In a Cup of Tea
In the mangaKAIDAN, 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.
In the original myth"In a Cup of Tea" appears in Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs (1902), a collection by Lafcadio Hearn (also known as Koizumi Yakumo), the Greek-Irish writer who settled in Japan and retold its old tales in English. Hearn begins with something unusual: a reflection on unfinished stories. He compares them to climbing a dark tower stair and discovering there are no more steps, only empty space. Some…
Episode 6"Tomorrow, I Won't Be Here," She Said — The Story of Aoyagi
In the mangaKAIDAN: 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."
In the original mythHearn sets the tale in the Bunmei era (1469–1487), a turbulent time in late medieval Japan. Tomotada is a young samurai serving Hatakeyama Yoshimune, the lord of Noto province. He was born in Echizen province and has served the Hatakeyama household since childhood. He is handsome, well-mannered, and well educated, skilled in Chinese learning and in writing Japanese poetry. His lord sends him on a mission to Kyoto,…
Episode 717 Years Later, a Stranger Brings Tea — The Story of O-Tei
In the mangaKAIDAN: 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.
In the original mythLong ago in the town of Niigata lived Nagao Chōsei, the son of a doctor, who was studying to become a doctor himself. Since childhood he had been engaged to O-Tei, the daughter of a friend of his father. The two families planned the wedding for the day Chōsei finished his studies. O-Tei, however, had always been frail. At fifteen she fell ill with consumption (tuberculosis), and she knew she would not recover.