are like us and yet not like us; and the sky and the hills and the flowers
are all different from our. Yet by a magic of which Mr. Hearn, almost alone
among contemporary writers, is the master, in these delicate, transparent,
ghostly sketches of a world unreal to us, there is a haunting sense of
spiritual reality.


In a penetrating and beautiful essay contributed to the "Atlantic Monthly"
in February, 1903, by Paul Elmer More, the secret of Mr. Hearn's magic is
said to lie in the fact that in his art is found "the meeting of three
ways." "To the religious instinct of India -- Buddhism in particular,--
which history has engrafted on the aesthetic sense of Japan, Mr. Hearn
brings the interpreting spirit of occidental science; and these three
traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich
and novel compound,-- a compound so rare as to have introduced into
literature a psychological sensation unknown before." Mr. More's essay
received the high praise of Mr. Hearn's recognition and gratitude, and if
it were possible to reprint it here, it would provide a most suggestive
introduction to these new stories of old Japan, whose substance is, as Mr.
More has said, "so strangely mingled together out of the austere dreams of
India and the subtle beauty of Japan and the relentless science of Europe."

March, 1904.

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Most of the following Kwaidan, or Weird Tales, have been taken from old
Japanese books,-- such as the Yaso-Kidan, Bukkyo-Hyakkwa-Zensho,