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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chinese ghost stories : curious tales of the supernatural / by Lafcadio Hearn ; foreword by Victoria Cass. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4629-0016-9 (ebook)
1. Tales–China. 2. Supernatural--Folklore. 3. Ghost stories, Chinese. I. Title.
GR335.H39 2011
398.20951--dc22
2011002216
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Contents
The Tradition of the Tea Plant
To my friend
Henry Edward Krehbiel
THE MUSICIAN
WHO, SPEAKING THE SPEECH OF MELODY UNTO THE CHILDREN OF TIAN XIA—
UNTO THE WANDERING QING REN, WHOSE SKINS HAVE THE COLOR OF GOLD—
MOVED THEM TO MAKE STRANGE SOUND UPON THE SERPENT-BELLIED SAN XIAN;
PERSUADED THEM TO PLAY FOR ME UPON THE SHRIEKING YA XIAN;
PREVAILED ON THEM TO SING ME A SONG OF THEIR NATIVE LAND—
THE SONG OF MOLI HUA
THE SONG OF THE JASMINE-FLOWER
Preface
I THINK that my best apology for the insignificant size of this volume is the very character of the material composing it. In preparing the legends I sought especially for weird beauty; and I could not forget this striking observation in Sir Walter Scott’s “Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad”: “The supernatural, though appealing to certain powerful emotions very widely and deeply sown amongst the human race, is, nevertheless, a spring which is peculiarly apt to lose its elasticity by being too much pressed upon.”
Those desirous to familiarize themselves with Chinese literature as a whole have had the way made smooth for them by the labors of linguists like Julien, Pavie, Rémusat, De Rosny, Schlegel, Legge, Hervey-Saint-Denys, Williams, Biot, Giles, Wylie, Beal, and many other Sinologists. To such great explorers, indeed, the realm of Cathayan story belongs by right of discovery and conquest; yet the humbler traveler who follows wonderingly after them into the vast and mysterious pleasure-grounds of Chinese fancy may surely be permitted to cull a few of the marvelous flowers there growing—a self-luminous hua wang, a black lily, a phosphoric rose or two—as souvenirs of his curious voyage.
L. H.
NEW ORLEANS, MARCH 15, 1886.
Foreword
Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth,
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.
—Yeats: “Fragments,” The Tower, 1928
Lafcadio Hearn was a thief of myth. Born in 1850, into a time when the British Empire reached around the globe, he raided the world’s archives. Epic narratives, sacred recitals, ancestral prayers: all were fair game for his declared ambition: “I would give up anything to be a Literary Columbus.”1 Hearn wanted to recalibrate the literary voices he knew, to create a “universal literature.” Western storytelling had ossified, he claimed. “Naturalism”—with its solid portraiture of the minutiae of daily life—was narrow and dull. His “universal literature”2