Episode Details

Two pieces from Shadowings, the fifth and sixth — and last — of its Stories from Strange Books. In The Sympathy of Benten, the young Kyoto poet Hanagaki Baishu finds a poem-slip blown to his feet at the goddess Benten's temple, written in a girl's exquisite hand, and loves the unknown writer; after a seven days' service to the goddess, with a vow to pass the seventh night in ceaseless worship, Benten sends the Old-Man-under-the-Moon to bind him with a crimson cord and bring the girl's very soul to his side — and in the winter her father, warned in dreams of the same goddess, calls Baishu in from the street to wed the girl herself. In The Gratitude of the Samébito, Tawaraya Totaro shelters a shark-man banished from the Dragon-Palace in his garden pond, and falls into a love-sickness his doctor declares incurable; learning that his benefactor is dying for want of the ten thousand jewels demanded as a betrothal-gift, the Samébito weeps great tears of blood that harden into rubies — and, to make up the full number, makes himself homesick for the Dragon-Palace on the Long Bridge of Seta. All thirteen of Hearn's own notes across the two pieces are spoken where he set them.

Chapters:

0:05 The Sympathy of Benten

16:40 The Gratitude of the Samébito

From 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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