Two tales from Kwaidan. In Rokuro-Kubi, Kwairyō — once the samurai Isogai, now a traveling priest who fears neither man nor devil — accepts a woodcutter's shelter in the haunted mountains of Kai, and wakes in the night to find his five hosts' bodies lying headless beside the lantern. Following the counsel of the old book Sōshinki, he moves the master's body where its head can never rejoin it, outfaces the returning heads in the cedar grove, and at dawn walks into Suwa with a goblin's head dangling from his sleeve. In A Dead Secret, the gentle ghost of O-Sono returns night after night to gaze wistfully at her tansu, her chest of drawers, until the old priest Daigen Oshō keeps the night watch himself and finds the one small thing, hidden beneath a drawer's lining, that she could not leave behind.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
0:05 Rokuro-Kubi
21:47 A Dead Secret
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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