Halloween’s looming shadow will soon darken our doorstep, and with it comes an opportunity for the introverts among us to find refuge in creepy compendiums of critters that go bump in the night while hot-breathed trick-or-treaters pass their houses. If you prefer flipping through books to going outside, Folio Society, the folks behind that dragon-skin, leather-bound Game of Thrones book, has a collection of Japanese horror stories that will vex you.
Japanese Ghost Stories is a 200-page book featuring twenty classic yokai tales originally translated by 19th-century traveler and journalist Lafcadio Hearn (Kwaidan). Key among its fables are the long-necked Rokurokubi featured on the book’s cover, the snow ghost Yuki-onna, and the love story of Aoyagi, in which a samurai falls in love with a woman who isn’t what she seems. Classic. Folio Society’s hardcover edition of the yokai compendium is translated by Royall Tyler and illustrated by award-winning artist Yuko Shimizu. Check out io9’s exclusive preview of Japanese Ghost Stories below and see what delightful horrors await.
“Coming up with a good concept, or, at least a concept I am excited to materialize, is the most important and crucial part of the process,” Shimizu said in a press release. “After looking at a lot of old Japanese books and its formats, I wanted to make the illustrations look like a traditional Edo period EHON. These picture books are like an ancestor of manga. They are magazine format story books for adults that are heavily illustrated. But of course, this book is coming out in the 21st century, so it’s a traditional Edo Ehon look with a modern twist.”
Japanese Ghost Stories is bound in screen-printed cloth, with four-color text throughout. It also includes printed endpapers, a ribbon marker, and a die-cut and blocked slipcase cover. As with everything Folio Society, its price tag isn’t for the faint of heart. It clocks in at $110. For the baller-on-a-budget folk well-versed in yokai fables who are curious about which stories will be featured in Japanese Ghost Stories before forking over their hard-earned dollars for Folio Society’s newly fangled collection (no one likes owning repeats!), here’s the list of stories bound in its book:
Oshidori
The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi
The Story of O-Tei
Ubazakura
Diplomacy
Rokuro-Kubi
Of a Mirror and a Bell
Jikininki
Mujina
Yuki-Onna
A Dead Secret
Jiu-Roku-Zakura
The Dream of Akinosuké
Riki-Baka
The Story of Aoyagi
Hi-Mawari
Hōrai
The Story of Kwashin Koji
The Story of Itō Norisuké
The Story of O-Kamé
The book also features an introduction written by one of io9’s favorite sci-fi authors, Yoko Ogawa (The Memory Police). In it, Ogawa opines about how Hearn perfectly captures the spirit of Japanese horror stories she grew up hearing.
“I remember the summer vacations of my childhood, when my cousins and I would gather at our grandmother’s house. At night, beneath the mosquito netting over our futons, we would listen to ghost stories told by an older cousin. He would skillfully alter the tone and rhythm of his voice and use elaborate sound effects to heighten the drama of the stories. It was frightening but delightful—indeed, delightful precisely because it was frightening—and I’m sure that these precious memories are based on stories that had been retranslated back into Japanese from the English-language ones Hearn recorded in Kwaidan,” Ogawa writes. “Thanks to Hearn, these stories, first told in Japanese, were transformed into English and were thus able to take flight in the wider world. Still today, Lafcadio Hearn continues to show us the potential for Japanese literature to freely expand, unconstrained by borders or boundaries.”
If you want to recreate Ogawa’s anecdote with your loved ones this Halloween, Japanese Ghost Stories is available on Folio Society’s website and releases on October 20th.
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