Two pieces from Shadowings, the third and fourth of its Stories from Strange Books. In The Screen-Maiden, the young Kyoto scholar Tokkei falls hopelessly in love with a girl painted on an old paper screen — a portrait by Hishigawa Kichibei, painted from life, in which her very spirit is said to live — and an aged scholar tells him how she may be won: give her a name, sit before the picture and call her gently by it every day, and be ready, when she answers, with a cup of wine that has been bought at one hundred different wine-shops. In The Corpse-Rider, a man who divorced his wife returns from a journey to learn that she has died of grief and anger, and that her body lies unburied, waiting for him; the inyoshi who undertakes to save him sets him astride the corpse at sunset, his hands twisted in her hair like a bridle, with one command — whatever may happen in the night, never let go. All six of Hearn's own notes across the two pieces are spoken where he set them.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
0:05 The Screen-Maiden
8:35 The Corpse-Rider
From Shadowings (1900) 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.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
