Subject

The Ones Who Wrote It Down 記録

Every tale on this shelf reaches us through a decision by somebody to record it: an anonymous compiler working in the script of clerks, a parlour game that required a hundred strange things a night, a philosopher who set the beliefs down exactly in order to be rid of them, a civil servant who promised to change not one word, a foreign writer who named two of his sources and not the rest. These notes are about the records themselves — who made them, what they were for, and what each one leaves out.

Notes

Lafcadio Hearn Named Two of Them The preface to Kwaidan says the stories came from old Japanese books. It names five books, and tells you where exactly two of the seventeen stories came from.
Konjaku, the Unfinished Book The collection this site cites most is missing three of its volumes, and its compiler left blank squares in the text where the names were meant to go.
The Hundredth Candle A hundred ghost stories, a hundred wicks, one drawn out after each tale. The oldest account of the game is an account of it being interrupted before the end.
Inoue Enryō Wanted Them Gone He quoted his sources, refused weak evidence, and called his own conclusions conjecture. The object of all of it was to put an end to what he was describing.
Tōno, and the Promise Not to Change a Word Yanagita's preface of 1910 says he added and subtracted nothing, and wrote it just as he felt it. Both claims are in the same sentence.
Sasaki Kizen Wrote Down the Names He gave Yanagita the stories of Tōno and was thanked under a pen name. In his own books he printed his narrators' names — except the one who gave him most.

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