Part sixteen of nineteen. Three more of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost tales, in his own prose — the last of Kottō (1902). In Story of a Pheasant, a dead father-in-law comes back as a one-eyed bird and begs his daughter-in-law's protection from the hunt — and her husband, guessing the truth, kills it anyway, and is banished for the deed. In The Story of Chūgorō, a handsome young retainer steals out night after night to a beautiful woman who waits by the river, and wastes away toward death before her true shape is known. And in A Matter of Custom, a sceptical young Zen novice spends a night in a mountain temple and hears the dead parishioner at his prayers — a thing the old nun accepts as mere custom. Hearn's own notes are spoken where he set them. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Lightning Crash, heard also briefly between the stories. Under the shelf's standard, two passages are carried without their depiction, per the exclusion register: in Story of a Pheasant, the killing of the bird is told without the act itself; in The Story of Chūgorō, the young man's wasting and death stand whole, without the draining detail the book describes.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters
0:41 Story of a Pheasant
6:01 The Story of Chūgorō
18:39 A Matter of Custom
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. Narrated by Madame de Pamplemousse. Theme: Lightning Crash.
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