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Part fourteen of nineteen. Three more of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost tales, in his own prose — The Story of Kogi the Priest closes A Japanese Miscellany's Strange Stories on this shelf, and In a Cup of Tea and Common Sense open Kottō (1902). In The Story of Kogi the Priest, the Miidera artist-priest who would paint fish only from life, and set them free, falls ill, seems to die, and wakes to tell how his soul swam Lake Biwa in the attire of the Golden Carp — and what he saw from inside the fisherman's basket. In a Cup of Tea, the attendant Sekinai swallows a stranger's face reflected in his tea, and is visited that night by its owner — a fragment Hearn leaves, as the old story-book left it, unfinished. In Common Sense, a learned priest is sure that Fugen Bosatsu rides nightly to his mountain temple — and the ignorant hunter who feeds him is just as sure that what all three of them can see cannot be the Buddha. All five of Hearn's own notes across the three pieces are spoken where he set them. Under the shelf's standard, one passage is carried without its depiction, per the exclusion register: the hunter's discovery in Common Sense is told without the blood-trail and the pierced body — the badger's death itself stands, as the book reports it. One further tale of Kottō's Old Stories stands held in the register, awaiting its ruling, and is not read here.

Chapters

0:05 The Story of Kogi the Priest

13:03 In a Cup of Tea

19:47 Common Sense

From A Japanese Miscellany (1901) and Kottō (1902) 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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