Chinese Ghost Stories. Lafcadio Hearn
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Experiments aside, however, these tales were not just from the laboratory. Hearn loved Chinese ghosts. Four of his Chinese ghost stories detail personal sacrifice and the deep sense of pious awe for ancestors, family and emperor. Ancestral voices became increasingly of interest to Hearn. He observed later when he lived in Japan:
In this nineteenth century the Occidental family is almost disintegrated.… The Oriental family means not only parents and their blood-kindred, but grandparents and their kindred, and great-grandparents, and all the dead behind them. This idea of the family .… may extend, as in Japan, to many groups and sub-groups of living families,… to the whole nation as one great family: a feeling much deeper than what we call patriotism. As a religious emotion the feeling is infinitely extended to all the past.…15
As exotic and distant as they were, these ghosts had for Hearn a personal resonance: “The mystery of the universe is now weighing upon us,” claimed Hearn,
and it is especially a ghostly mystery.… That is why I say that all great art has something ghostly in it. It touches something within us which relates to infinity.16
In 1890 Hearn landed in Japan. He married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of an old samurai family and, per custom, he was adopted by his wife’s family. They had three sons and a daughter and all lived together, three generations under one roof. He taught English literature and dedicated the last fourteen years of his life to essays, folktale and fiction; Kwaidan, Stories and Studies of Strange Things is his most famous. In these stories he shed the voice of bookish foreigner, for he was among his subjects. No longer confined to his library for sources, he had family rituals, ancestral ghosts and local demons spread out before him. His accounts became direct and simple, suggesting not the Irish intellectual, but the Irish story-teller.17 The narrator for these tales is the fresh persona of a charmed innocent, an alarmed believer, a boy.
His best source for stories was his wife, Setsu. She described her role as Hearn’s informant:
When I tell him stories I always told him at first the mere skeleton of the story. If it is interesting, he puts it down in his note-book and makes me repeat and repeat several times. He instantly becomes exceedingly serious; the color of his face changes; his eyes wear the look of fearful enthusiasm. His face gradually changed pale; his eyes were fixed; I felt a sudden awe. When I finished the narrative he… asked me several questions regarding the situations, actions, etc., involved in the story.… ‘What do you think of the sound of “geta” (clopping of footsteps) at that time? How was the night? I think so and so. What do you think?’ etc. Thus he consulted me about various things besides the original story.… If anyone happened to see us talking from outside, he would surely think that we were mad.18
Footnote:
1 Beongcheon Yu, An Ape of Gods: The Art and Thought of Lafcadio Hearn, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1964, p. 100.
2 Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p. 177.
3 Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p. 176.
4 Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p 174–5.
5 Paul Murray, p. 25.
6 W. K. McNeil, “Lafcadio Hearn, American Folklorist,” Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 91, Oct–Dec. p. 949.
7 Paul Murray, Lafcadio Hearn: A Fantastic Journey, The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn, Japan Library, Folkstone, Kent, 1993, p. 31–33.
8 Also see Paul Murray, pp. 32–33 for discussion of contemporaneous interest in folklore and legend.
9 Paul Murray, p. 34.
10 Paul Murray, p. 82.
11 His first collection of non-European material was Stray Leaves from Strange Literature, published in 1884—also while he was in New Orleans.
12 Beongcheon Yu, p. 292.
13 Letter to Chamberlain, in Jonathan Cott, Wandering Ghost, p. 372.
14 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” Tree and Leaf, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965, p. 62.
15 Lafcadio Hearn, “Some Thoughts About Ancestor Worship,” Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, p. 290.
16 Jonathan Cott, p. 345.
17 Sukehiro Hirakawa, “Introduction: Lafcadio Hearn: Towards an Irish Interpretation: in Paul Murray, pp. 5–8.
18 W. K. McNeil, “Lafcadio Hearn, American Folklorist,” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 91, No. 362, Oct–Dec. p 962.
Victoria Cass
Baltimore, Maryland
The Soul of the Great Bell
She hath spoken, and her words still resound in his ears.
HAO QIU ZHUAN: c.ix.
THE WATER-CLOCK marks the hour in the Da Zhongsi—in the Tower of the Great Bell: now the mallet is lifted to smite the lips of the metal monster—the vast lips inscribed with Buddhist texts from the sacred Fahua jing, from the chapters of the holy Lingyan jing! Hear the great bell responding! How mighty her voice, though tongueless! GE-AI! All the little dragons on the high-tilted eaves of the green roofs shiver to the tips of their gilded tails under that deep wave of sound; all the porcelain gargoyles tremble on their carven perches; all the hundred little bells of the pagodas quiver with desire to speak. GE-AI! All the green-and-gold tiles of the temple are vibrating; the wooden goldfish above them are writhing against the sky; the uplifted finger of Fo shakes high over the heads of the worshippers through the blue fog of incense! GE-AI! What a thunder tone was that! All the lacquered goblins on the palace cornices wriggle their fire-colored tongues! And after each huge shock, how wondrous the multiple echo and the great golden moan and, at last, the sudden sibilant sobbing in the ears when the immense tone faints away in broken whispers of silver—as though a woman should whisper, “Xie!” Even so the great bell hath sounded every day for well-nigh five hundred years—Ge-ai: first with stupendous clang, then with immeasurable moan of gold, then with silver murmuring of “Xie!” And there is not a child in all the many-colored ways of the