"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

#Spooktober 2: Jikininki

The Jikininki is a human-eating Japanese ghost who features in Lafcadio Hearn’s collection of spooky stuff called Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

For those of you who follow the blog, I have written about him here and particularly I talked about three of his tales:
  • Oshidori, a tragic tale of love and loss featuring two ducks;
  • The Story of Hōichi the Earless, a spooky tale of a musician who’s enchanted into performing for a ghostly court (I will feature it here as a #ThrowbackThursday next week);
  • The Yuki-Onna as a winter tale: a snow ghost interacts with two woodcutters, with jarring consequences.

Today on my Patreon we feature one of two tales of the Jikininki, a corpse-eating ghost.

Happy #Spooktober!

Hills Like White Elephants

I don’t think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it’s a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it’s part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It’s not for the

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August 18, 2026 6:00 am
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Mapping the Furrow

Seamus Heaney was a major Irish poet, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He’s especially known for writing about rural life, memory, language, and Irish history. Death of a Naturalist is both the

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August 17, 2026 6:00 am
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Keanu Reeves & China Miéville: The Book of Elsewhere

It would be a vast understatement to say that this book was a surprise. Not being familiar with the comics (so unfamiliar, in fact, that I didn’t even know they existed), the first impact with the main storyline was “ok, what the hell am I

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August 16, 2026 9:00 am
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Hills Like White Elephants

August 18, 2026

I don’t think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it’s a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it’s part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It’s not for the

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Mapping the Furrow

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Seamus Heaney was a major Irish poet, born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He’s especially known for writing about rural life, memory, language, and Irish history. Death of a Naturalist is both the

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