THE EMPIRE MASTERPIECE
Kwaidan
MASAKI KOBAYASHI’S HUGELY INFLUENTIAL JAPANESE HORROR
WORDS ADAM SMITH
DEVOTEES OF 007 may recall You Only Live Twice, and the moment when Bond suavely attempts to explain the Japanese concept of ‘kiri-sute gomen’ to a deeply unimpressed Blofeld. “Spare me the Lafcadio Hearn,” the SPECTRE boss snaps. For most audiences, the literary allusion would have sailed straight over their heads — they were, perhaps, more interested in whether Kissy Suzuki had made it intact from Ian Fleming’s pages to the big screen. But for those in the know, it was a nod to a fascinating, if slightly marginal, figure in the literature of the uncanny.
Lafcadio Hearn was a Greek-Irish journalist who, after stints in America and the West Indies, moved to Japan in 1890, reinvented himself as Yakumo Koizumi, and dedicated his life to chronicling the country’s folklore and ghost stories. His best-known collection, Kwaidan: Stories And Studies Of Strange Things, was a publishing sensation in his adopted country — which had largely neglected such folk tales — and later, riding the craze for all things Japanese (‘Japonisme’) that followed the 1900 Paris Exposition, in Europe. (Fleming was one such foreign admirer, enough to not only namecheck the writer but, it is said, to base Blofeld’s appearance on him — the villain’s missing eye mirroring Hearn’s disfigurement.)