In The Corpse-Rider a man has to ride on the back of a female corpse come back to life for an entire night to effect an exorcism. Some of the supernatural manifestations found in Hearn’s ghost stories are grotesque in the extreme.

Other elements of the western horror tradition that features in these stories include shape-shifting and the interchangeability of human and animal forms. In Jikininki vampirism meets cannibalism in the form of a priest who consumes human flesh. Her body when exhumed shows no sign of death, like the vampires in Bram Stoker’s contemporaneous Dracula. In The Story of O-Kamé a vampiric dead wife drains the life blood out of her husband. Women as well as men can be the perpetrators of violence and vengeance: the unfortunate second wife of a faithless samurai in Of a Promise Broken also has her head torn from her body and a trail of blood leads to the garden where it is found in the hands of the now ghoulish form of the dead wife: “But the fleshless right hand, though parted from the wrist, still writhed – and its fingers still gripped at the bleeding head, – and tore, and mangled, – as the claws of the yellow crab cling fast to a fallen fruit. Some of the supernatural manifestations found in Hearn's ghost stories are grotesque in the extreme

So too will the sadism and subtlety with which gods or mortals will wreak their vengeance on those who have crossed them: the Shinto god whose collection box has been looted by the brazen O-Katsu in The Legend of Yurei-Daki exacts vengeance, not on O-Katsu herself but on the baby strapped to her back, whose head is ripped off. Many of the themes will be familiar to western readers – vampirism, for example, or the return of the dead to settle scores with the living, often on the part of women – but their vividness and originality will often startle western readers. The colourful, often ingenious, means by which the supernatural impacts on the mortal world can be highly original and extremely violent. The reader of these stories enters a world at once alien and familiar.

One hundred and fifteen years after his death, Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese ghost stories have not lost their power to shock and enthral.

Japanese ghost stories lafcadio hearn