ovely materials from which the best fairy tales of the world have been
woven. They too are strange, these Japanese maidens and wives and
keen-eyed, dark-haired girls and boys; they are like us and yet not
like us; and the sky and the hills and the flowers are all different
from ours. Yet by a magic of which Mr. Hearn, almost alone among
contemporary writers, is the master, in these delicate, transparent,
ghostly sketches of a world unreal to us, there is a haunting sense of
spiritual reality.

In a penetrating and beautiful essay contributed to the "Atlantic
Monthly" in February, 1903, by Paul Elmer More, the secret of Mr.
Hearn's magic is said to lie in the fact that in his art is found "the
meeting of three ways." "To the religious instinct of India--Buddhism
in particular,--which history has engrafted on the aesthetic sense of
Japan, Mr. Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of occidental science;
and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his
mind into one rich and novel compound,--a compound so rare as to have
introduced into literature a psychological sensation unknown before."
Mr. More's essay received the high praise of Mr. Hearn's recognition
and gratitude, and if it were possible to reprint it here, it would
provide a most suggestive introduction to these new stories of old
Japan, whose substance is, as Mr. More has said, "so strangely mingled
together out of the austere dreams of India and the subtle beauty of
Japan and the relentless science of Europe."

March, 1904.

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Most of the following Kwaidan, or Weird Tales, have been taken from old
Japanese books,--such as the Yaso-Kidan, Bukkyo-Hyakkwa-Zensho,
Kokon-Chomonshu, Tama-Sudare, and Hyaku-Monogatari. Some of the stories
may have had a Chinese origin: the very remarkable "Dream of
Akinosuke," for example, is certainly from a Chinese source. But the
story-teller, in every case, has so recolored and reshaped his
borrowing as to naturalize it... One queer tale, "Yuki-Onna," was told
me by a farmer of Chofu, Nishitama-gori, in Musashi province, as a
legend of his native village. Whether it has ever been written in
Japanese I do not know; but the extraordinary belief which it records
used certainly to exist in most parts of Japan, and in many curious
forms... The incident of "Riki-Baka" was a personal experience; and I
wrote it down almost exactly as it happened, changing only a
family-name