The shelf's most famous tale, told whole and as Hearn wrote it. Hōichi, the blind biwa-player of the Amidaji temple, is famed above all for his recitation of the tale of the Heike, sung to the dead of Dan-no-ura. Night after night a stern samurai summons him to perform before a great lord and his court — in the graveyard, among the tombstones of the drowned Taira. To break the spell, the priest paints the holy text over the blind man's whole body, so that no ghost can see him. But one part of him is forgotten — and when the emissary of the dead comes again, all he can find of the biwa-player is his ears.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
0:05 The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi
From Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn (1904), 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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