When I was a child I liked to watch horror dramas on TV.
Many of them were based upon ‘so-called real’ stories and broadcasted mainly in summer to chill spine.
After I watched them, I got too terrified to go to toilet or sleep alone at night.
Still, the ghost stories have been irresistible to me.
Like Celtic fairy tales, Japan has a lot of legendary ghosts and fairies.
They have been passed down from local seniors, and some people corrected and edited them to publish a book.
Lafcadio Hearn, or Yakumo Koizumi was one of them.
He was born in 1850 on a Greek island as a son of British parents and had lived in England, Ireland, France, America and then Japan, where he married a local lady, Setsu Koizummi.
In Japan he got a job of teaching English, while wrote ghost stories based on Japanese folklores.
His book “Kwaidan” contains many traditional Japanese ghost stories, which are familiar to the Japanese, and some of them have been made into film.
The other well known was a cartoonist Shigeru Mizuki.
He had lost his left hand at the World War Ⅱ. Using only the right hand he created a great many of cartoons, illustrations and essays.
He traveled over Japan to correct interesting folklore and depicted the ghosts and fairies as humorous characters.
His comic “Ge-Ge-Ge-No-Kitaro” had been made into animated cartoon and have been broadcasted for about half a century.
My father liked to draw various bogeyman with reference to Mizuki’s illustrations.
Now, time has passed and we have less or no opportunities to watch horror programs on TV.
In addition, due to abnormal weather (not only global warming), summer night has become so hot that we no longer forget hotness only with a spine-chilling story.
I miss mild and peaceful summer of Showa era (1926-1986).
