Week 3: Kwaidan

Kwaidan is a collection of Japanese mythology and folklore assembled and retold by Lafcadio Hearn. Before reading, I had vague knowledge of many of the ghosts and creatures mentioned in this anthology. It was really interesting to actually read the original lore behind all of these characters. I had some misconceptions cleared up and also learned a lot of new stories that I had never heard of before. A common thread I noticed throughout a lot of the stories was a fascinating relationship between women and nature. In Oshidori, a duck appears in the form of a woman to the hunter who killed her mate, weeping over his death. In The Story of Aoyagi, a beautiful woman is revealed to actually be the soul of a tree. She perishes when her tree is cut down. When I began to read this story I had initially assumed that the woman’s unnatural beauty was an indication of some sort of evil trick, however the reveal of her true identity emphasized the Japanese acknowledgment of the unmatched beauty of nature itself. Finally, Yuki Onna, while not being the literal embodiment of an animal or plant, is a sort of representation of the cruelness of winter. Like many mysterious women in these stories, she is beautiful to behold. Descriptions of her white face and icy expression resemble how someone might describe a fresh snowscape. However, she uses her frozen breath to kill an old man while he sleeps in a shed during a snowstorm.  In this sense, she is a representation of winter; beautiful to behold, but ultimately deadly if you do not have protection from its coldness. 

Overall, the women in these tales are seldom what they initially seem to be. They are rarely the main character in a given story (with the exception of A Mirror and a Bell, and A Dead Secret). More often than not, these women are used to comment on man’s relationship with nature. In Japanese culture, nature is clearly something to be respected and preserved. The woman in Oshidori is used to humanize animals, and the intention of the story seems to be to make a hunter think twice before firing his bow at a living creature. Yuki Onna warns of the danger of the elements, and Aoyagi evokes a heavy grief over the cutting down of a tree. I am very glad I chose to read Kwaidan, because of what it reveals about Japanese fears and values regarding the natural world and our relationship with it.