The Kwaidan Collection by Lafcadio Hearn: Review by Karen Haber
The Kwaidan Collection, Lafcadio Hearn, illustrated by Kent Williams (Beehive Books 978-1-948886-32-1) $100.00, 144+pp, hc) April 2023. Cover by Kent Williams.
The Kwaidan Collection is not only a fascinating illustrated volume of vintage supernatural Japanese folk tales, brilliantly interpreted by acclaimed multimedia artist Kent Williams, it’s historically significant. These stories were literally rescued by the eccentric multilingual world traveler Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) in the early 20th century when the impact of Western culture was flattening and erasing traditional Japanese folk culture.
Originally published in Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904), these eerie Japanese tales and legends have been given vibrant life and strangeness through the intense, brilliant work of multimedia artist and painter Kent Williams and the inspired design of publisher and design director Maëlle Doliveux. There’s an introduction by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, a foreword by writer Kyoko Yoshida, and a biographical afterword by Bon Koizumi, Hearn’s great-grandson and director of the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum in Japan.
Despite their age, these unusual tales carry a great deal of chilly impact in their accounts of ghosts, possessed forests, undead samurai, man-eating goblins, and corpse brides, to name only a few of their subjects.
Williams’s wonderfully spooky atmospheric painted illustrations are the perfect accompaniment and feature an array of techniques and references, some in full color and others rendered in pen and ink. They provide depth and space to contemplate the source and tradition of these tales, and shiver-inducing touches: the earless monk, a trickster fox, shadowed ghostly faces.
An oversize hardcover volume offers a lot of production value: bound-in sewn signatures, 204 pages printed on creamy acid-free uncoated paper, illuminated letters, spot drawings and full-page illustrations, all wrapped in an embossed die-cut slipcase silk-screened and foil-stamped with artwork.
The Kwaidan Collection is another in a series of outstanding illuminated volumes from Beehive Books, a unique publisher who deserves an award for sheer dedication to imagination and quality of their many unusual publications.
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Karen Haber is the author of nine novels including Star Trek Voyager: Bless the Beasts, and co-author of Science of the X-Men.
She is a Hugo Award nominee, nominated for Meditations on Middle Earth, an essay collection celebrating J.R.R. Tolkien that she edited and to which she contributed an essay. Her recent work includes Crossing Infinity, a YA science fiction novel of gender identity and confusions.
This review and more like it in the December 2024 issue of Locus.
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