Episode Details

The shelf leaves Kwaidan for Hearn's earlier Gleanings in Buddha-Fields — and for a piece Hearn himself insists is not a story at all: the translation of a series of signed and sealed Japanese documents of 1823, telling of Katsugorō, a nine-year-old farmer's son of Nakano-mura who remembered, in exact and checkable detail, his former life as Tōzō, son of Kyūbei of Hodokubo, dead of smallpox at six — the burial in a jar upon the hill, the old man who led his spirit through a light like perpetual sunset, and the three days he waited in the garden before consenting to be reborn. The documents stand entire: the estate intendant's official report, the letters that carried the case to the Sengakuji temple, the names and ages of both families, and the daimyō Matsudaira Kwanzan's relation in popular style, taken down from the boy's own grandmother — with Hearn's notes spoken where he set them, and his closing question of what it is that remembers.

Chapters:

0:05 The Rebirth of Katsugorō

From Gleanings in Buddha-Fields by Lafcadio Hearn (1897), public domain — the ghost tales of Hearn's Japanese collections, told in his own order within each book, in Hearn's own prose, lightly modernized.

KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.