I was hoping to read A Wild Sheep Chase for this week, but I didn't see it in the resources, and there also wasn't a copy available in the library so I decided to read the recommended Kwaidan stories instead, since they were free...
In The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi, the first thing I noticed was how in-tune with nature the author seemed to be. He wrote about nature spiritually. He called the beach haunted, but then wrote about it in a way where I wasn't sure if it really was haunted, or if it was just meant to be a poetic metaphor. For example, he said that when the waves crashed loudly at night, it sounded like people were yelling. If this wasn't a ghost story book, I would just assume that this was a metaphor. Religion in this story has a lot of influence on spirits compared with in ghost stories in Western culture, where generally ghosts don't really care or think about religion, probably partly due to the fact that ghosts are incompatible with most of Western religion (I think..?). It seems like in this author's culture, spirits are considered more normal and commonplace. They aren't always discussed as scary or amazing, just as a part of life that happens... I don't know much about the Shinto religion, but I believe it used to be really popular in Japan and involved making shrines on roadsides and in people's yards for spirits to take shelter in. Possibly the Shinto culture is the same or similar to the culture of this author. Hoichi must be very magical if he was able to completely recover after his ears were chopped off.
There was an interesting juxtaposition on the first page of Diplomacy, where there is a chaotic scene of a man about to be executed unfolding in a peaceful Japanese garden. Again, there is a very matter-of-fact perspective about the paranormal: "If any person be killed while feeling strong resentment, the ghost of that person will be able to take vengeance upon the killer. This the samurai knew." The ending of Diplomacy was interesting, despite being oddly abrupt. It made me wonder if the ghost of the dead man ever ended up biting the stone, since it was the only desire he knew and it would be weird if he didn't act on it, in my opinion.
The writing of these stories reminds me of Aesop's Fables or some other book of simple stories that have moral lessons at the end. It's very simplistic and straightforward with the occasional bit of dry quirkiness that may or may not have been intentional. It's not usually the type of writing that I see for Western ghost stories. It's weird how the girl in Of a Mirror and a Bell is obsessed with mirrors, like she got sad that she never got her family mirror and thought about the old saying, "a mirror is the Soul of a Woman." It's kind of funny to me how random this story is. The idea of a lot of loud crazy townspeople trying to smash the bell as powerfully as they can is a fun visual image, and so is are the religious leaders who get so annoyed with the loud noises that they roll the bell down a hill into a swamp. And then they went on a random tangent about nazoraëru before getting back to the bell in the swamp. The end of this story was also super weird but in a funny way I guess. They lead up this whole time to the wealth, and then never said what it was. Am I supposed to be getting a message out of this story such as be humble or don't be greedy? The farmer guy at the end was humble and greedy. I don't understand why the spiriti revealed herself to him and no one else. This story left me scratching my head. Maybe it is assumed that I would understand this ending as a member of Japanese culture. Possibly there were symbols that a Japanese person would understand and I wouldn't.
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