The Kwaidan

With almost-realistic psychoanalytical twists, Asian Horror has always been something that both fascinates me and scares me off. I love the concepts behind Japanese folklore, especially the demons, since they aren't really bad, but simply a part of the mortal world. Ghosts are strange unstoppable forces of nature. Meeting one almost seems to be a product of complete luck most of the time; ordinary folks can end up in horrible situations, just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing exemplifies this like the Kwaidan, a collection of stories about ghosts, spirits, and strange occurrences by Lafcadio Hearn.

Reading stories from the Kwaidan was one of the strangest experiences I've had yet. I felt like I never really knew what was going to happen next, and the endings varied from happy to grotesque---while some stories hardly had resolved endings at all. And the spirits themselves seemed to vary greatly, in the sense that they were anywhere from good, bad, to undefinable---whereas most western scary stories only contain evil spirits. While some left me laughing at the ending (the faceless people), others baffled me, or left me just plain creeped out. The early story of the monk who plays for an undead court of spirits, fetched every night by the voice of a warrior---that story struck me as genius, while the imagery of the man's head bleeding from his missing ears was grotesque. After watching Yuki-Onna from the film Kwaidan in class, I actually went through and watched the entire film in my own time.

Speaking of Yuki-Onna---I have something of a love-hate relationship with those female Japanese ghosts dressed in all white, with long dark hair known as the "Yurei." They've always both terrified and fascinated me, ever since I first heard of Ju-on, or The Grudge. While I'll never see that film (I have a HUGE aversion to just the imagery of Yurei), I once read an article about the mythos of those specific spirits in which the author talked about the Yurei as an embodiment of the Japanese male's fear of the vengeful woman. It's fascinating to think about where and why these stories originated, before they were collected in works such as the Kwaidan---facts that for many of them, may even now remain a mystery.