Part fifteen of nineteen. Four more of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost tales, in his own prose — Old Stories IV to VII of Kottō (1902). In Ikiryō, the shadow of a living woman — the hatred she never speaks aloud — leaves her body night after night to torment the clever young clerk she fears will ruin her son, until confession and distance cure them both. In Shiryō, the dead governor Nomoto Yajiyémon returns in the body of his maid-servant, reckons his own accounts in his own hand, and exposes the clerks who framed his widow and children. In The Story of O-Kamé, a wife who dies too young keeps her husband's promise for him — returning every night until a priest's service lets her rest. And in Story of a Fly, the thrifty maid Tama, who saved for her parents' memorial rites, comes back in the season of greatest cold as a great fly, and is given a funeral of her own. Hearn's own notes are spoken where he set them. The episode opens and closes with its theme, heard also briefly between the stories. Under the shelf's standard, one passage is carried without its depiction, per the exclusion register: in Ikiryō, the clerk's nightly torment is told without the strangling the book describes — the haunting, the confession, and the cure stand whole.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters
0:41 Ikiryō
9:18 Shiryō
14:37 The Story of O-Kamé
23:40 Story of a Fly
From Kottō (1902) 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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