This will appeal to anyone wishing to enrich their understanding of Japan, those with an interest in Hearn, Irish literary tradition and life and literature in a cross-cultural context.

The dead wreak revenge on the living, paintings come alive, spectral brides possess mortal men and a priest devours human flesh in these chilling Japanese ghost stories retold by a master of the supernatural. Lafcadio Hearn drew on the phantoms and ghouls of traditional Japanese folklore - including the headless 'rokuro-kubi', the monstrous goblins 'jikininki' or the faceless 'mujina' who stalk lonely neighbourhoods - and infused them with his own memories of his haunted childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland to create these terrifying tales of striking and eerie power. Today they are regarded in Japan as classics in their own right. Edited with an introduction by Paul Murray

Eerie traditional Japanese ghost stories retold in a graphic novel format. Over one hundred years ago, the writer Lafcadio Hearn gathered and translated into English a selection of traditional Japanese ghost/mystery stories. They were published as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. In this new graphic novel, acclaimed manga creator Sean Michael Wilson retells six of these stories. All of them are very well known in Japan, where ghosts and demons are often called yokai, meaning "the mysterious and weird." Today these stories find expression mostly in movies and manga, but they remain rooted in the traditional ghost stories of the Edo era known as kaidan, which means "recited narrative of strange, mysterious, rare, or bewitching apparitions." The book includes an afterword by William Scott Wilson, the esteemed translator and editor of Japanese texts and samurai philosophy, who puts the stories into historical context. A 2016 YALSA Great Graphic Novels for Teens Recommendation

The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn: Light from the East by Antony Goedhals offers radical rereadings of a misunderstood and undervalued Victorian writer. It reveals that at the metaphysical core of Lafcadio Hearn’s writings is a Buddhist vision as yet unappreciated by his critics and biographers. Beginning with the American writings and ending with the essay- and story-meditations of the Japanese period, the book demonstrates Hearn’s deeply personal and transcendently beautiful evocations of a Buddhist universe, and shows how these deconstruct and dissolve the categories of Western discourse and thinking about reality – to create a new language, a poetry of vastness, emptiness, and oneness that had not been heard before in English, or, indeed, in the West.

This book examines the transnational phenomenon of Japonisme in the exoticist and “autoexoticist” literature of the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the way in which reciprocal processes of transcultural acquisition – by Japan and from Japan – were portrayed in the medium of literature, the book illustrates how literary Japonisme and the wider processes whereby Japan, with its alien exotic culture and unique refined aestheticism, was absorbing Western civilization in its own way in the late nineteenth century at the same time as the phenomenon of Japonisme was occurring in Western fine arts, which were inspired by traditional Japanese artistic practices. Specifically, the book focuses on the literary works of Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti, who travelled from France and America, respectively, to Japan, and Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki, who in turn went, respectively, to Germany and England from Japan. Exploring the eclectic hybridity of Japan’s modernization during the late nineteenth century, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Comparative Literature.

The fourteen chapters in this book examine various topics and contexts of travel writings on China, Japan and Southeast Asia. From the first Colombian on a trade mission to China, to French women travellers in Asia, and the opening of "Japan Fairs" in the US during the latter half of the nineteenth century, this book offers a kaleidoscopic glimpse of the various cultures in the eyes of their beholders coupled with insightful understanding of the various politics and relationships that are involved. While this book will appeal to expert scholars and students of travel literature and Asian studies, as well as those working on cultural studies, general readers will also find it an interesting and accessible addition to their collections.

The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry provides a stimulating, original and lively analysis of the Irish-Japanese literary connection from the early 1960s to 2007. While for some this may partly remain Oscar Wilde's 'mode of style', this book will show that there is more of Japan in the work of contemporary Irish poets than 'a tinkling of china/ and tea into china.' Drawing on unpublished new sources, Irene De Angelis includes poets from a broad range of cultural backgrounds with richly varied styles: Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon, together with younger poets such as Sinéad Morrissey and Joseph Woods. Including close readings of selected poems, this is an indispensable companion for all those interested in the broader historical and cultural research on the effect of oriental literature in modernist and postmodernist Irish poetry.

An in-depth and comprehensive account of the complex history of Japanese modernism from the mid-19th century 'opening to the West' until the 21st century globalized world of 'postmodernism.' Its concept of modernism encompasses not just the aesthetic avant-garde but a wide spectrum of social, political and cultural phenomena.

The East-West controversy over the significance and relevance of Lafcadio Hearn as a writer, thinker and interpreter of Japan continues unabated. Not surprisingly, the centenary of his death in 2004 presented an occasion for renewed debate and discussion by both sides of the divide. This volume, edited by one of Hearn’s leading contemporary apologists, in which he is also a significant contributor, presents twenty-two diverse essays drawn from over seventy papers delivered at conferences held in four cities in Japan in 2004, as well as at other international conferences that took place earlier. The contributors are Joan Blythe, John Clubbe, Susan Fisher, Ted Goosen, George Hughes, Yoko Makino, Peter McIvor, Hitobe Nabae, Cody Poulton and Masaru Toda. Their contributions range from Sukehiro Hirakawa’s ‘ A Reappraisal’ to Joan Blythe’s ‘Enduring Value of Lafcadio Hearn’s Tokyo Lectures’.

Another volume in the distinguished annual