Japanese Ghost Stories

“The pleasures of [Hearn’s] work are to be found in his delightfully bizarre hybrid renditions of Japanese folklore—particularly of a genre called kaidan, or tales of the uncanny—old stories that he blended with elements of horror and French Romanticism, the best of which are collected in Japanese Ghost Stories. . . . The result is something that sits at the nexus of Borges, Baudelaire, and Bram Stoker, and that prompted Malcolm Cowley to call Hearn ‘the writer in our language who can best be compared with Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.’ . . . His retellings of these strange tales are a delight to read.” —The New York Review of Books

“Attractive . . . The framing commentary . . . adds to the charm of the whole. . . . How curious, and how touching, that it fell to a peripatetic Westerner to vouchsafe these enchanting homegrown stories the immortality they deserve.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The stories in this new Penguin anthology are why Hearn continues to have a lasting legacy in both America and in his adopted homeland, Japan. . . . . It is a testament to the power of Hearn’s writings that this foreign-born writer has earned a place in the canon of Japanese literature—his work is still celebrated in Japan to this day.” —Colin Dickey, Longreads