RATHER THAN LOOK AT ME

Someone wrote these things down. That much is certain.

Five stories begin in real Japanese books printed between 1903 and 1927 — books that record a strange occurrence and give very little of the people in it. This volume 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.

A masterless swordsman gives a statement in a priest’s room, on the second night after he came down from the mountain. A woman writes over four nights at a hearth, for a child too young to remember. An inquirer arrives in a harbour town to look at two ceilings, and keeps what he saw apart from what he was told.

Everyone here is careful. They tell you where they were standing, what the light was, how close they got — and exactly where their own account stops. The unease comes up through that care, not around it.

These are new stories, not translations. After each one, a short note returns to the source and shows what the printed page says, and where its account stops; fuller notes wait at the back for anyone who wants the page itself.

The stories are invention. The records are real. A record of a thing is not the thing.

Kwaidanote Casefiles, Book One. The five records behind it have notes of their own on this site: the blood ceiling, the one-wheeled cart, the living hell, the monk who went into the ground alive, and the foxes that wanted a body.