“Make sure you show my work.”to overcome it. A mother dies during a
cholera epidemic, yet her love for her
infant son is so powerful that she con-
tinues to nurse him for three years after
her death—an outcome, as in many of
the tales, somehow both sentimental and
horrifying. “Of a Promise Broken” re-
lates the story of a widower who reneges
on a deathbed vow made to his beloved
wife: never to marry again. The new
bride, just seventeen, is menaced and
eventually beheaded by the ghost of the
old one, a conclusion followed by this
coda, in which the “I” is Hearn himself:
“That is a wicked story,” I said to the friend
who had related it. “The vengeance of the
dead—if taken at all—should have been taken
upon the man.”
“Men think so,” he made answer. “But that
is not the way that a woman feels. ...”
He was right.
What makes these stories, preserved
from ancient times, especially readable
today is the preternaturally postmodern
form they are given in Hearn’s deeply id-
iosyncratic telling. He inserts himself into
them in the most casually disruptive ways:
offering interpretations or digressive asides
about the person who first told him the
tale in question, or saying that there is
more to the story but he has forgotten it.
He interrupts one tale to complain,
Charles Kinbote-like, about the ubiqui-
tous sight of telegraph poles in the hotel
where he was staying when he first heard
the story he is relating. Elsewhere, he lets
us know that he is drawing from some-
one else’s book (an Englishman’s “Japa-
nese Fairy-Tale Series”)—relaying the
story “in my own words,” Hearn assures
us, but with the book open beside him
as he writes. At the end of “The Corpse-
Rider,” he complains that he does not
find its conclusion “morally satisfying.”
Metafiction goes back hundreds of years
before Hearn, but meta-folk feels like an
offshoot that one has not previously en-
countered. As so often with Hearn, there
are two ways to feel about this. Unques-
tionably, it makes for a more interesting
and sophisticated reading experience, and
yet these authorial intrusions in ancient
narratives represent a kind of claim to
them, a display of control.
And here we touch on the interest-
ing question of how he was exposed to
many of these ghost stories in the first
place. His second wife, Setsu, knowing
his love for folk literature in general and
ghost stories in particular, scoured sec-
ondhand bookstores for such stories,
read them, committed them to mem-
ory, and then recited them in English
to Hearn in their bedroom, late at night,
“having lowered the wick of the lamp
on purpose,” as she put it. Listening to
her, he became so childishly terrified
that his reaction sometimes scared Setsu,
who would worry that she had gone too
far. Then he would take notes.W
hat drew Hearn so powerfully to
these stories about the return of
the departed? It’s fair to situate him
within the Victorian gothic-horror move-
ment (his life and work were contem-
poraneous with Bram Stoker’s), and his
unhappy Irish boyhood coincided with
the folklore-prizing Irish literary revival
beginning in the latter part of the nine-
teenth century (the subject of an inter-
esting late-in-life correspondence with
Yeats). The embrace of folk-based su-
pernatural principles also fit nicely with
the revulsion Hearn felt toward institu-
tional religion, having experienced the
hypocritical pieties of his great-aunt’s
household and the cruelties of his Roman
Catholic boarding school.
But a more personal explanation sug-
gests itself as one notices the shared prem-
ise of tale after tale: nearly every one of
them is about a young woman who dis-appears. Sometimes she is wronged and
stranded in the invisible world; some-
times she performs miracles in order to
be reunited with a loved one she left be-
hind. The possibility that the dead, whose
absences are so painful and hard to un-
derstand, are still among us, and may still
want something from us: this is the seat
of horror, but also of fantasy.
It seems impossible that Hearn was
unaware of the personal echoes in a tale
like “Before the Supreme Court,” in
which a young girl named Kinumé
emerges from three days of unconscious-
ness in a state of utter alienation: “She
rose from the bed, looked wildly about
the room, and rushed out of the house,
exclaiming:—‘This is not my home!—
you are not my parents!’” In the middle
of a tale called “The Eternal Haunter,”
in which a man has a relationship with
a tree spirit, Hearn stops to apostrophize:
Perhaps—for it happens to some of us—
you may have seen this haunter, in dreams of
the night, even during childhood. Then, of
course, you could not know the beautiful shape
bending above your rest: possibly you thought
her to be an angel. ... Once that you have
seen her she will never cease to visit you. And
this haunting,—ineffably sweet, inexplicably
sad,—may fill you with rash desire to wander
over the world in search of somebody like her.
But however long and far you wander, never
will you find that somebody.Though he seems to have been a