Two tales from Kwaidan. In The Dream of Akinosuke, the gōshi Miyata Akinosuké, napping beneath the great cedar in his garden, dreams an entire life: summoned in a lacquered palace-carriage to the court of the King of Tokoyo, wed to the August Princess, and set to govern the island of Raishū for twenty-three years of happiness and one great sorrow — then wakes, minutes later, to find his friends still drinking beside him, and takes up a spade to search the ants' nest under the cedar for the kingdom he ruled. In Riki-Baka, a simple lad — born into perpetual childhood, gentle, harmless, and beloved of the street's small children — dies suddenly in his sixteenth year; and three months later a boy is born into a great house with the name his mother wrote upon his dead palm, "Riki-Baka," written plain upon the newborn's hand.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
0:05 The Dream of Akinosuke
13:17 Riki-Baka
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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