Kaidan: 100 Japanese Ghost Stories

In Japan, ghosts belong to summer - and this book is not a collection. It is a game. Kaidan revives hyakumonogatari kaidankai , the Edo-period gathering of one hundred weird tales, as an illustrated book of 100 Japanese ghost stories that you play by candlelight.

The rules open the book: light one hundred candles, read one story, put out one flame, and let the room grow darker ten stories at a time, until a single candle stands between you and the hundredth tale. Edo tradition holds that when the last flame dies, something arrives. Most players stop at ninety-nine.

Inside are one hundred tales in ten chapters, retold in new words from the classic sources - Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan , Ueda Akinari's 1776 Ugetsu Monogatari , A. B.

Mitford's Tales of Old Japan , Richard Gordon Smith's folklore notebooks, the kabuki stage - alongside original stories in the traditional voice and modern urban legends retold as the folklore they have become.

The famous yurei are here: the faceless mujina of the Akasaka road, Yuki-Onna the Woman of the Snow, Hoichi the Earless, Okiku counting her nine plates, the Peony Lantern, the vampire cat of Nabeshima, the returning bride O-Tei, the Boy Who Drew Cats, Aoyagi of the willows.

So are the yokai - kappa, tanuki, tengu, the corpse-eating jikininki, the house-child zashiki-warashi - and their modern heirs: Hanako of the Third Stall, the Slit-Mouthed Woman, Kokkuri-san, and the taxi ghosts of a seaside town whose late-night fares vanish from the back seat.

A visual edition designed as part of the game: Sixteen full-page ink illustrations in a modern manga style, from the faceless woman by the moat to the last burning candle Ten framed chapter openers that count the candles down - 100, 90, 80 - to the last ten A small candle glyph on every story, counting the flames down from 100 to 0 as you read A closing plate of a hundred lit candles in a temple courtyard, and an afterword naming every source A How to Play page with the original Edo rules, f