YUREI

Twenty-five Japanese tales of the returning dead — not a kind of creature, but one dead person in particular, come back to something still unsettled between them and the living.

A ghost, in the books these tales come from, is not a kind of creature. It is one dead person in particular, and the first question anyone in the room asks is which. The dead of these pages had places at tables and names in registers, and when they return, the living want to know which one has come, from where, and for what.

Most of the dead in these pages come back to something the living failed to do. A body was never taken away. A funeral was set aside, or begun and not finished. But not all of it is the living’s fault. Some come to pay what they themselves still owe; some come because they were wept for, and say so; and some come and go with no errand anyone can name.