KWAIDANOTE publishes books in English about the strange and uncanny traditions of Japan. The tales are drawn from Japanese writing that never agreed with itself — Buddhist miracle collections of the ninth century, the anecdote books of the Heian court, Edo gatherings of recorded wonders, provincial gazetteers, and folklore taken down in the villages in the 1910s and 1920s.
Retellings. The books retell tales from those records as complete stories in English. Every retelling is an original English composition; none of them pretends to be a translation. Each tale is followed by a short note, Behind the Tale, which says where the story came from, what the old record actually claims, where the surviving accounts disagree, and what this telling supplied on its own.
Notes. The essays on this site explain the traditions behind the books — what a bakeneko is, what the diviners of the Heian court actually did. They report what the sources say and mark where the evidence runs out. A legend being written down is not the same as the event having happened, and the notes try not to blur the two.
Fiction. If KWAIDANOTE publishes original fiction, it will be labelled as fiction on the book and on this site. Invented documents, cases, and people will not be presented as records.
The word kwaidan is usually rendered "ghost story," and for the first books that was accurate enough. It stopped being accurate. The records these tales come from do not sort themselves into the dead and the living: the same page that reports a returning wife will report a fox that keeps an appointment, a god who declares a plague to be his own will, a household object that has waited a hundred years, or a monk whose legend outgrew him within a century of his death.
So the shelf is not a shelf of ghost stories. It is a shelf of the strange and the uncanny — kii and kaii — which is what the Japanese records were keeping all along.
Japanese Horror Folktales Collection takes one figure of the tradition at a time — the shape-shifting cat, the serpent, the fox, the living spirit, the human pillar, the thing that attaches itself to a household — and gathers what the old books say about it.
Mystics of Old Japan turns to people who actually lived, and whose lives became inseparable from legend: the court diviner Abe no Seimei, and the monk Kūkai, known for eleven centuries as Kōbō Daishi.
Kwaidanote Casefiles is the newest, and it works the other way round. Each book begins in printed records — the kind this site writes about — and writes into what they leave out: the houses and the weather and the debts, and the ones who had to go on living beside the thing. Those stories are invention, and the books say so on the copyright page. The records are real, are named at the back of each volume, and can be read. The first is Rather Than Look at Me, five stories from records printed between 1903 and 1927. Its own note before the files puts the distinction better than this page can: a record of a thing is not the thing.
The three series are available on Amazon. The library lists every volume, with a sample tale from each.
The books and the notes are written and edited under the name KWAIDANOTE.
If you find an error — a wrong date, a misattributed source, a tradition described inaccurately — please write to kwaidanote@gmail.com. Corrections are made on the page itself, and each note shows the date it was last revised.