Kwaidan

A hybrid beast that devours dreams; a flesh-eating spectre from the graveyards of hell; a shape-shifting phantom with no face; a demonic decapitator of babies; a huge goblin-spider that drinks human blood: all these plus many more strange and sinister creatures feature in the kwaidan ("ghost stories") collated and translated by the author Lafcadio Hearn (1860-1904) during his 14-year stay in Japan.This new edition of KWAIDAN collects twenty-nine weird tales from four volumes written by Hearn, presenting the very best of his work in a true expression of Japanese lore at its bizarre and phantastic extremes. Many of these stories are not currently in print.The stories are further enhanced by eighteen illustrations of the supernatural by master ukiyo-e artist Yoshitoshi Tsukioka, from his series 36 Ghosts (1889-92).The cover illustration is by ukiyo-e master Hokusai.Kwaidan was filmed in 1964 by Masaki Kobayashi, and is now regarded as a classic of Japanese cinema; it was recently released on DVD by Criterion.