preface by Matthias Hayek
translated by Alejandro Tobar and Isabel Soto
illustrated by Benjamin Lacombe
Another lavishly edited book by Benjamin Lacombe (the illustrator of Carmen, you may recall). The stories, as one might expect, are pretty weird. Only the first one, La gratitud del Samébito (The Gratitude of the Samebito), has something of a happy ending. Juegos de Yōkai (Yōkai Games) is not a story but a brief description of some Edo-period games that use yōkai as characters.
The longest part, Kitsune, taken from Hearn’s 1894 book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (full text here), is a not particularly coherent collection of myths and anecdotes about foxes, with a rather disheartening conclusion along the lines that the modern (of course, Western) education will eventually rid the Japanese of supersition.
Year by year fewer victims of fox-possession are taken to the hospitals to be treated according to the best scientific methods by Japanese physicians who speak German.
How could he (or anyone) know back then that amabie (アマビエ), a three-legged yōkai that was first mentioned in 1846, would resurface in 2020 as “a new coronavirus countermeasure”?!
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