Times of ghosts and it's not just about Halloween, ethe Kwaidan book which tells of Japanese ghosts. "Anyone who claims they don't believe in ghosts is lying to his heart," he says Lafcadio Hearn, undoubtedly the author to whom we owe the most famous and authoritative collections of stories on supernatural Japan. Su tutte Kwaidan (Scary stories from Japan of yōkai, ghosts and demons), a fundamental work that is now out in all Italian bookstores published by Libreria Pienogiorno and edited by Michael Dylan Foster, one of the leading Western experts on yōkai culture, land supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore and mythology. "A true marvel" for Sthepen King, a master who was also bewitched by the nightmares of the rising sun. Snow Woman reached down, almost touching him with her face, and he saw that she was very beautiful – but her eyes frightened him. For a while she continued to look at him; then she smiled and whispered, "You're so young and beautiful, Minokichi, and I'm not going to hurt you now. But if you tell anyone what you saw tonight, I'll be back..."
In an ancient game in Japan, people gathered at night by the light of a hundred candles to tell each other ghost stories, waidan in Japanese
It told of a blind musician summoned by a mysterious samurai to play for the dead, of a beautiful woman in white who spares the life of a young man during a blizzard, leaving him with a terrible warning, of a brave warrior grappling with vengeful ghosts… With each story a flame was extinguished, until complete darkness. And then he expected something mysterious and frightening to happen…
Long before manga, anime and video games from the Rising Sun conquered the world, when Japan and the Moon were almost the same distance for Westerners, Lafcadio Hearn opened wide the doors of the Japanese imagination and culture. It is also thanks to his work that ghosts, supernatural creatures and samurai chasing demons are familiar to us today. Hearn collected the stories of ghosts and yōkai of folklore and told them masterfully, knowing full well that their irreducible presences "are among us, always".
For him, in the darkness left by the last extinguished candle, the impossible surely becomes a reality. And each story reveals something that was previously hidden, something mysterious or forgotten, or ineffable. Like a ghost.
