Week 3: Kwaiden, by Lafcadio Hearn (5)

 This reminded me a lot of the European Colored Fairy Books, or basically the Brothers Grimm fairy tale compendium. Which is fitting, since this is basically the same analogous process. Its really fascinating from an anthropological perspective how cultures from entirely opposite sides of the planet tell stories with similar moral tales, with supernatural forces that don't bother explaining themselves.

And the majority of these are moral tales - Yuki-Onna and O-Sanna's stories are basically about keeping your promises, though they give different reasons for needing to do so. Which makes sense, since people need to modify behavior for given context. Different stories providing a nuanced look into a part of the culture is really cool.

What's interesting is that these stories don't all necessarily inspire fear. They don't incite recipients into moral behavior through terror like modern ghost stories do, but they do all contain some kernel of a lesson. But then again, that is likely because the Japanese sensibilities for 'ghost' and 'demon' is different from our version of 'ghost' and 'demon.' It's less like ghost-stories and more like fairy-stories, though probably more accurate to say some shade in between. Like in a lot of fairy-stories, there is no clear cut distinction where 'reality' ends and the 'supernatural' begins in these tales. The difference between phenomena and noumena, as it were, which Hearn actually draws our attention to pretty early on. And that even stories like O-Sana's, which end with a peaceful resolution, do not reveal to us specific information, allows the stories to remain in that mysterious grey zone.

I think my favorite might be the story with the priest and the heads. He's just so unruffled to the point where the whole situation is hilarious to him, but the magistrate think he's mocking them because of his flippancy. That's such a grounding element to the tale that it really enhances the experience of it, short though the story is.

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