A collection of twenty-eight brilliant and strange stories, inspired by Japanese folk tales and written by renowned Western expatriate Lafcadio Hearn Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was one of the nineteenth century's best-known writers, his name celebrated alongside those of Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. Born in Greece and raised in Ireland "Fronted by an authoritative introduction by Andrei Codrescu, these Japanese tales revive, once again, a writer, traveler, and translator whose presence at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries enrich and engage still."---Alan Graubard, Leonardo