Three pieces from A Japanese Miscellany — the first, third and fifth of its Strange Stories — open Hearn's 1901 collection on this shelf. In Of a Promise Kept, the Izumo samurai Akana Soyemon, detained in the usurper Tsunehisa's castle by his own cousin's treachery, keeps his pledged word to return to Harima on the ninth day of the ninth month — in the only way left to a man who may not go. In Before the Supreme Court, the dying Kinume dreams that the Pest-God offers her the life of her namesake in Utarigori; the stricken girl dies, and before the tribunal of Emma-Dai-O, King and Judge of Souls, the error is unravelled and set right in the strangest adoption in the book. In The Story of Umetsu Chubei, a young samurai on night-watch at the castle gates is begged by a strange woman to hold her baby "for one little moment" — and the child grows heavier, and heavier, in his arms. All nine of Hearn's own notes across the three pieces are spoken where he set them. Under the shelf's standard, two passages are carried without their acts, per the exclusion register: Hasebe's revenge at Tonda Castle is left undescribed, and the Pest-God's stroke is not depicted — the deaths themselves stand, as the book reports them, and no completeness is claimed beyond what is told. Two further Strange Stories of this book stand held in the register, awaiting their ruling, and are not read here.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
0:05 Of a Promise Kept
8:38 Before the Supreme Court
15:52 The Story of Umetsu Chubei
From A Japanese Miscellany (1901) 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.
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