The best of these are collected in Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). He wrote extensively about Japanese culture around the turn of the century and translated and transcribed many folk tales and legends. Hearn moved to Japan from the US, married and became a Japanese citizen. Like a lot of westerners, my first experience of Japanese Gothic were the ghost stories of Lafcadio Hearn, received secondhand through Masaki Kobayashi’s 1965 movie Kwaidan.

I don’t know as much about Japanese and East Asian Gothic as I should. (You do it too, with the movement between different point of view characters in The Ash House.) The unreal challenges the real, leading to a morally and epistemologically transgressive moment: a dark epiphany when an ancient universe of superstition and barbarity rushes into the vacuum left by modern, civilized rationality, creating an atmosphere of brooding terror.

It’s also the reason for all those nested narratives and multiple points of view in novels like Melmoth, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, and Dracula. You see this a lot in ghost stories, when there’s always a suggestion that the haunted protagonist might be mentally ill, or simply intoxicated. I’d say it’s important that competing frames of explanation are offered to generate tension and unease, destabilizing any sense of narrative (and therefore, by extension, individual and societal) certainty. These are a bit like the Joseph Campbell’s ‘17 Stages of the Monomyth’ the different features don’t all have to be present in the narrative, but there must be some. OL13560014W Page_number_confidence 91.36 Pages 222 Partner Innodata Pdf_module_version 0.0.15 Ppi 360 Rcs_key 24143 Republisher_date 20211013152036 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 169 Scandate 20211009013648 Scanner Scanningcenter cebu Scribe3_search_catalog isbn Scribe3_search_id 9780824817893 Tts_version 4.There's also a recognizably ‘gothic’ mise-en-scène based around archetypal settings and characters, with familiar visual signifiers and narrative codes. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 10:15:27 Associated-names Inouye, Charles Shirō Boxid IA40257702 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Japanese Gothic Tales by Kyōka Izumi