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Haunting, Japanese Style

We recommend the Japanese ghost stories lurking in our archives.

In the mood for seasonal reading? We recommend the Japanese ghost stories lurking in our archives. Ghosts play a major role in Japanese culture and, as the spooky stories here reflect, Japanese folklore is chockablock with haunts of many varieties.

The relentless spirit of a murdered woman assists in the capture of her homicidal mate in Okamoto Kido’s “The Kiso Wayfarer.”

In Takako Arai’s “Wheels,” a worker in a weaving factory who went mad and died at her spinning wheel assumes the form of a snake and slithers through the childhood bedroom of the narrator and her sister.

Set on a winding mountain road abandoned for a new superhighway, Kanji Hanawa’s “Compos Mentis” riffs on the universal urban legend of the vanishing hitchhiker. (Intriguingly, after the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan, a number of cabdrivers in the devastated Ishinomaki area reported picking up spectral passengers who disappeared in the course of the ride.)

And if you would prefer a more benign approach to the intersection of past and present, check out our March 2015 issue, “On Memory: New Japanese Writing.”

Like these pieces, all our content is archived, so if you’re looking for a great story from an earlier issue, you know we won’t, well, ghost you.

English

In the mood for seasonal reading? We recommend the Japanese ghost stories lurking in our archives. Ghosts play a major role in Japanese culture and, as the spooky stories here reflect, Japanese folklore is chockablock with haunts of many varieties.

The relentless spirit of a murdered woman assists in the capture of her homicidal mate in Okamoto Kido’s “The Kiso Wayfarer.”

In Takako Arai’s “Wheels,” a worker in a weaving factory who went mad and died at her spinning wheel assumes the form of a snake and slithers through the childhood bedroom of the narrator and her sister.

Set on a winding mountain road abandoned for a new superhighway, Kanji Hanawa’s “Compos Mentis” riffs on the universal urban legend of the vanishing hitchhiker. (Intriguingly, after the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan, a number of cabdrivers in the devastated Ishinomaki area reported picking up spectral passengers who disappeared in the course of the ride.)

And if you would prefer a more benign approach to the intersection of past and present, check out our March 2015 issue, “On Memory: New Japanese Writing.”

Like these pieces, all our content is archived, so if you’re looking for a great story from an earlier issue, you know we won’t, well, ghost you.

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