The second of the two tales this shelf carries exactly as Hearn wrote it. Musō Kokushi, a priest of the Zen sect, loses his way at nightfall in the mountains of Mino and is refused shelter at a hilltop hermitage — but taken in kindly by a village headman's household, a house in mourning. By the village's custom, everyone must leave on the night of a death, and the dead must be left alone; Musō, who fears neither demons nor evil spirits, performs the service and keeps the vigil himself. In the deepest hush of the night a Shape, vague and vast, enters and devours the corpse and the offerings before his eyes. At dawn he climbs back to the hermitage — and hears the hermit's confession: the Shape was the priest of the hill himself, a jikininki, an eater of human flesh, paying for a selfish life with a horrible hunger, begging only for the prayers that might set him free.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
0:05 Jikininki
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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