Episode Details

Three pieces from In Ghostly Japan, opening Hearn's 1899 collection. Fragment is a vision entire: a pilgrim follows his Bodhisattva guide up a mountain through the night, climbing over endlessly breaking fragments, until dawn reveals what the mountain is made of — and whose lives its skulls once were. In Furisodé, a merchant's daughter, hopelessly in love with a beautiful samurai she glimpsed once at a temple-festival, has a long-sleeved robe made in his colours and pines away; sold on by the temple, the robe passes from girl to girl, and every wearer sickens with the vision of the same beautiful shadow and dies — until the priests burn it, and the characters of the invocation leap from the silk in flame and set Yedo ablaze in the Great Fire of the Long-sleeved Robe, 1655. (Hearn's own note, on the poet Komachi, is spoken where he set it.) And A Story of Divination remembers the gentle old fortune-teller of Izumo who told Hearn's fortune four times and was always right, and tells within it the Chinese tale of Shōko Setsu, the broken tile that had his fate written inside it, and the jar of gold — before the teller's own unforeseeable end, found standing frozen at the foot of a pine: "the fortune-teller knows not his own fate."

Chapters:

0:05 Fragment

5:33 Furisodé

11:48 A Story of Divination

From In Ghostly Japan by Lafcadio Hearn (1899), 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.

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