Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn ed. by Andrei Codrescu (review)
2023; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mat.2023.a923694
ISSN1536-1802
ResumoReviewed by: Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn ed. by Andrei Codrescu Micheline M. Soong (bio) Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn. Edited and introduced by Andrei Codrescu. Foreword by Jack Zipes, Princeton University Press, 2019, 206 pp. The two key questions you probably have are: (1) Is this book worth my time and attention? And perhaps even more crucially, (2) Is this book a good candidate for teaching undergraduate folklore studies students, especially with a focus on Japan or East Asia? Fortunately, to both questions, the answer is a resounding, "Absolutely, YES!" Andrei Codrescu curates Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn for the Oddly Modern Fairy Tale series of Princeton University Press edited by Jack Zipes, who provides the foreword. It is a volume of twenty-eight Japanese folktales and kaidan stories retold by Lafcadio Hearn (a.k.a. Yakumo Koizumi) from four of his major published works: one story from Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (1897), six from Shadowings (1900), four from A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here and There (1901), and all seventeen stories from his Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). Codrescu's selection and ordering of the stories represents Hearn's chronological development of his relationship to Japanese culture from newly arriving and getting his bearings, to immersing himself, and capitalizing off his growing familiarity with the culture, to finally being able to see, appreciate, and preserve Japan's traditional culture using "thick description," Clifford Geertz's referencing of Gilbert Ryle's concept of an insider's knowledge of the context for social behavior. Codrescu provides a rather comprehensive and insightful twenty-eight-page biographic introduction of Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), who, as an infant is abandoned by his Greek mother and Irish father, and who survives neglect and deprivation in Dublin and London in the early stages of his life. Codrescu traces Hearn's trajectory from the United Kingdom to America, and beyond. Japan is where Hearn ultimately reinvents himself for the last time as his restlessness finally abates. Within fifteen months of arriving, he finds work as a teacher of English literature and is adopted by a samurai family as their son-in-law. In the succeeding years he [End Page 325] burnishes a reputation as an expert reteller of Japanese folktales and ghost stories for his fin de siècle English-reading audience (thanks in large part to his wife Setsu for finding these antiquated stories and then regaling him with them). Hearn, the perpetual outsider, finds a place to exist as himself within Japanese society, and is able to observe the passing away of traditional values and customs in the face of the onslaught of Western modernity at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the dawn of the Meiji era. Codrescu's introduction provides an emotional and psychological context for Hearn's endless fascination with stories of hauntings by alluring maternal figures and the terror of being powerless before a malevolent entity. Hearn tends to select stories that plumb the depths of the full range of human emotion: tingling curiosity and anticipation, corrosive envy and jealousy, insatiable desire, the white-hot sear of anger and revenge, and the anguished despair of abandonment and betrayal. Over half of the collected stories are kaidan stories. Noriko T. Reider's article "The Emergence of Kaidan-shū: The Collection of Tales of the Strange and Mysterious in the Edo Period" (2001) provides a working definition of this genre of kaidan 怪談, as well as traces the genre's historical evolution from Buddhist tales and Japanese folktales. Put simply, kaidan means "a narrative of the strange," but in its broadest sense refers to "frightening ghost stories … that frequently contain an element of horror as well as a motif of revenge" (Reider 80). With the exception of the first, last, and penultimate stories, "Dream of a Summer Day," "Hōrai," and "Hi-mawari," the stories from the first two books are more in the vein of folktales, while the stories from the last two books fall squarely into the category of kaidan 怪談. The six stories from Shadowings and the four stories from A Japanese Miscellany rely heavily on a...
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