Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, by Lafcadio Hearn This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things Author: Lafcadio Hearn Posting Date: February 18, 2010 [EBook #1210] Release Date: February, 1998 Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KWAIDAN: STORIES AND STUDIES *** Produced by an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer. KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things By Lafcadio Hearn A Note from the Digitizer On Japanese Pronunciation Although simplified, the following general rules will help the reader unfamiliar with Japanese to come close enough to Japanese pronunciation. There are five vowels: a (as in fAther), i (as in machIne), u (as in fOOl), e (as in fEllow), and o (as in mOle). Although certain vowels become nearly "silent" in some environments, this phenomenon can be safely ignored for the purpose at hand. Consonants roughly approximate their corresponding sounds in English, except for r, which is actually somewhere between r and l (this is why the Japanese have trouble distinguishing between English r and l), and f, which is much closer to h.