Episode Details

Hearn's telling of the Romance of the Peony-Lantern, entire. Hagiwara Shinzaburō, a young hatamoto's son, meets the beautiful O-Tsuyu at the Bon festival, and she comes to him night after night through the summer dark, her maid O-Yoné going before her with a lantern painted with peonies, the sound of their geta — kara-kon, kara-kon — crossing the garden before them. When his servant Tomozō, watching through a crack in the shōji, sees what his master cannot, the house turns to the old doctor Yusai and to Ryōseki, chief priest of Shin-Banzui-In, for a protective mamori and sacred o-fuda pasted over every door — and the visits change their nature. All seventeen of Hearn's own notes are spoken where he set them, and the tale closes inside its storyteller's frame, where the listeners argue about what O-Tsuyu did, and why. Under the shelf's standard one passage is carried as report rather than display: what the dawn discovers behind the mosquito-net is left undescribed, per the exclusion register — the death itself stands, as the book reports it, and no completeness is claimed beyond what is told.

Chapters: 0:05 A Passional Karma

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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