Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda AkinariMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A wonderful collection of strange and elegant stories from 18th century Japan. The title ("Ugetsu Monogatari," or "Rain-Moon Tales") alludes to the beig that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with a lingering moon. These nine stories are based on earlier versions of Chinese tales. Ueda Akinari retold these stories in a Japanese setting.
The highlights for me were probably "The Chysanthemum Vow" and "The Reed-Choked House."
For a more detailed review, I think The Guardian has one that gives a good overview of the book:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
The Japanese word for this kind of tale is kaidan, which means "narrating the strange": a lower-key, more delicate enterprise, in other words, than the bloodcurdling designs of Walpole and his followers, and closer perhaps to what we now think of as "the uncanny".
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