"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."

#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!

books and literature

Isaac Asimov’s Gold (and other stories)

It’s unfortunate that I’m coming to this after the very unsatisfactory collection of “fantasy” stories (Asimov never wrote fantasy: he wrote satire), because this was another disappointment. The book is half short stories and half non-fiction, for random reasons, and the non-fiction half is random writings

Read More »
books and literature

The Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol + Exit Strategy

I’m not crying: a piece of some murdering bot must have gotten in my eye. Rogue Protocol is the third novella in the Murderbot Diaries, and deals with the titular character going deep undercover to figure out what happened in the “mining incident” that was

Read More »
Share on LinkedIn
Throw on Reddit
Roll on Tumblr
Mail it
No Comments

Post A Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

RELATED POSTS

Isaac Asimov’s Gold (and other stories)

It’s unfortunate that I’m coming to this after the very unsatisfactory collection of “fantasy” stories (Asimov never wrote fantasy: he wrote satire), because this was another disappointment. The book is half short stories and half non-fiction, for random reasons, and the non-fiction half is random writings

Read More

The Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol + Exit Strategy

I’m not crying: a piece of some murdering bot must have gotten in my eye. Rogue Protocol is the third novella in the Murderbot Diaries, and deals with the titular character going deep undercover to figure out what happened in the “mining incident” that was

Read More