Episode Details

Three pieces closing one book and opening the next. Story of a Tengu, the last tale of In Ghostly Japan, tells of a priest of Hiyei-Zan who ransoms a snared kite from the boys who are beating it for its feathers — and is visited on the road by a monk who is no monk, who grants him his life's one wish: to behold the Buddha's great assembly on the Vulture Peak, recreated entire, on the single condition that he make no sign of reverence. (Hearn's own note, on the old story-book Jikkun-Shō and the Nō-play the legend furnished, is spoken where he set it.) The Reconciliation opens Shadowings: a young samurai who divorced his wife to marry into advancement returns to Kyoto by night and finds her still sewing by lamplight in the ruined house, young and forgiving as in his fondest memory; they talk of everything until dawn — and he wakes on the mouldering boards of the empty house, beside what the years had truly left of her. And in A Legend of Fugen-Bosatsu, the priest Shoku Shōnin, who has prayed for years to behold the Bodhisattva, is sent in a dream to a courtesan's house in Kanzaki, and sees the singing-girl's form change into Fugen-Bosatsu upon the white six-tusked elephant, and hears her song change into the Song of the Sea of Cessation. All seven of Hearn's own notes across the three pieces are spoken where he set them.

Chapters:

0:05 Story of a Tengu

9:09 The Reconciliation

17:45 A Legend of Fugen-Bosatsu

From In Ghostly Japan (1899) and Shadowings (1900) by Lafcadio Hearn, 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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