Amazing read as always from Miyuki Miyabe. Her horror stories are always brilliant and nuanced, elegantly capturing the heart and soul of common folk during Edo period. Even her samurai characters are either retired or flawed in certain ways, eg a country bumpkin accent. There are no heroes in her stories, it's all regular folk with heartbreaking stories. She's such an excellent writer you end up empathising with the monster or ghost. It's because of human flaws - greed, jealousy, etc that morphs into evil after death. The dead have their stories too, and sometimes the living lie.