KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

By Lafcadio Hearn




A Note from the Digitizer

On Japanese Pronunciation


Although simplified, the following general rules will help the reader
unfamiliar with Japanese to come close enough to Japanese pronunciation.


There are five vowels: a (as in fAther), i (as in machIne), u (as in
fOOl), e (as in fEllow), and o (as in mOle). Although certain vowels become
nearly "silent" in some environments, this phenomenon can be safely ignored
for the purpose at hand.


Consonants roughly approximate their corresponding sounds in English,
except for r, which is actually somewhere between r and l (this is why the
Japanese have trouble distinguishing between English r and l), and f, which
is much closer to h.


The spelling "KWAIDAN" is based on premodern Japanese pronunciation; when
Hearn came to Japan, the orthography reflecting this pronunciation was