Japanese Fox-Spirit Narratives in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan

Record summary

Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan includes Japanese supernatural narratives involving foxes, including the culturally important kitsune motif of animal transformation and deceptive or intimate relations with humans. The book is a major English-language transmission point for Japanese legends and can be compared with earlier Japanese textual traditions and later ethnographic accounts. Hearn translated, adapted, and stylistically reshaped source materials, so the volume should not be treated as a verbatim record of a single village belief. The relevant comparison concerns narrative motifs, translation, and changing ideas about fox spirits.