What do you think?
Rate this book
Kotto: Curiosidades del Japón revestidas de telarañas
Lafcadio Hearn se ha convertido en un autor de referencia obligada para quien quiera adentrarse en la magia del Japón tradicional. En Kotto, publicado en 1902, Hearn intercala, entre las leyendas de seres sobrenaturales, reflexiones breves pero ilustrativas sobre las creencias del budismo, ensayos acerca de las costumbres japonesas y descubrimientos propios, como el diario personal de una mujer de la era Meiji.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1902
12 people are currently reading
141 people want to read
About the author
Lafcadio Hearn
1,461 books452 followersGreek-born American writer Lafcadio Hearn spent 15 years in Japan; people note his collections of stories and essays, including
Kokoro
(1896), under pen name Koizumi Yakumo.
Rosa Cassimati (Ρόζα Αντωνίου Κασιμάτη in Greek), a Greek woman, bore Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χερν in Greek or 小泉八雲 in Japanese), a son, to Charles Hearn, an army doctor from Ireland. After making remarkable works in America as a journalist, he went to Japan in 1890 as a journey report writer of a magazine. He arrived in Yokohama, but because of a dissatisfaction with the contract, he quickly quit the job. He afterward moved to Matsué as an English teacher of Shimané prefectural middle school. In Matsué, he got acquainted with Nishida Sentarô, a colleague teacher and his lifelong friend, and married Koizumi Setsu, a daughter of a samurai.
In 1891, he moved to Kumamoto and taught at the fifth high school for three years. Kanô Jigorô, the president of the school of that time, spread judo to the world.
Hearn worked as a journalist in Kôbé and afterward in 1896 got Japanese citizenship and a new name, Koizumi Yakumo. He took this name from "Kojiki," a Japanese ancient myth, which roughly translates as "the place where the clouds are born". On that year, he moved to Tôkyô and began to teach at the Imperial University of Tôkyô. He got respect of students, many of whom made a remarkable literary career. In addition, he wrote much reports of Japan and published in America. So many people read his works as an introduction of Japan. He quit the Imperial University in 1903 and began to teach at Waseda University on the year next. Nevertheless, after only a half year, he died of angina pectoris.
Rosa Cassimati (Ρόζα Αντωνίου Κασιμάτη in Greek), a Greek woman, bore Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χερν in Greek or 小泉八雲 in Japanese), a son, to Charles Hearn, an army doctor from Ireland. After making remarkable works in America as a journalist, he went to Japan in 1890 as a journey report writer of a magazine. He arrived in Yokohama, but because of a dissatisfaction with the contract, he quickly quit the job. He afterward moved to Matsué as an English teacher of Shimané prefectural middle school. In Matsué, he got acquainted with Nishida Sentarô, a colleague teacher and his lifelong friend, and married Koizumi Setsu, a daughter of a samurai.
In 1891, he moved to Kumamoto and taught at the fifth high school for three years. Kanô Jigorô, the president of the school of that time, spread judo to the world.
Hearn worked as a journalist in Kôbé and afterward in 1896 got Japanese citizenship and a new name, Koizumi Yakumo. He took this name from "Kojiki," a Japanese ancient myth, which roughly translates as "the place where the clouds are born". On that year, he moved to Tôkyô and began to teach at the Imperial University of Tôkyô. He got respect of students, many of whom made a remarkable literary career. In addition, he wrote much reports of Japan and published in America. So many people read his works as an introduction of Japan. He quit the Imperial University in 1903 and began to teach at Waseda University on the year next. Nevertheless, after only a half year, he died of angina pectoris.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
July 29, 2019
Lafcadio Hearn lived an interesting life. Born in Greece in 1850 and raised in Ireland, he emigrated at a young age to the U.S. and became a successful writer for newspapers, living in and writing about Cincinnati and New Orleans. Defying a law against interracial marriage, he married an African American woman in his early 20s (1874), later divorced her, then headed to Japan, where he had a family and is well known to this day as Koizumi Yakumo. The Paris Review published an article about Hearn on its website on July 2, 2019, which gives a much broader account of his life, interests, and achievements.
This week I read Hearn's 1902 book, Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, With Sundry Cobwebs, basically a miscellany of old tales (translated by him), poetry, and short essays. It came out a couple years before his death at age 54, and he touches on various philosophies connected to Buddhism, Shinto, and the Orient in general, at times it seems with some prescience of his own death.
The first nine tales, he tells us in the preface, are his own translations from "old Japanese books." And the first of these, "The Legend of Yurei-Daki," is a four-page story about a woman who, on a dare, goes off at night with her baby wrapped up and on her back to a haunted waterfall. It's called Yurei-Daki (The Cascade of Ghosts). She makes it there, and although she hears a spirit call out her name, she also makes it back unharmed, to where her friends have been anxiously awaiting her return. Everything seems copacetic, except that the clothes on her back are sopping wet. As her friends get a closer look with the lantern light they realize it's not water at all that's soaked her. The story ends: And out of the wrappings unfastened there fell to the floor a blood-soaked bundle of baby clothes that left exposed two very small brown feet, and two very small brown hands—nothing more. The child's head had been torn off!
Aaaaahhhhh!!! This grabbed my attention and kept it for the whole book.
The second tale, "In a Cup of Tea," was the fourth story in Masaki Kobayashi's film Kwaidan (1965). After "In a Cup of Tea" there are a few more ghostly tales. They are more or less about human interaction with the spirit world rather than tales of horror like the one about the waterfall and missing baby head.
Then the book takes sharp turns. "A Woman's Diary" is, as you might expect, a series of excerpts from a woman's diary. This one is very personal and sad, as she writes about losing her baby daughter and son soon after they were born and, extremely depressed, she feels like a failure to her husband and to their arranged marriage, and we're left to wonder if her diary entries suddenly came to an end because she herself came to an end by her own hands. She describes parts of Tokyo where I've lived and currently work, including Shinjuku, Yotsuya, and Okubo, and reading these bits gave me a sense that the late 1800s weren't so very long ago.
He moves on to discuss crabs and insects, writing about the latter:
Even the little that we have been able to learn about insects fills us with the wonder that is akin to fear. The lips that are hands, and the horns that are eyes, and the tongues that are drills; the multiple devilish mouths that move in four ways at once; the living scissors and saws and boring-pumps and brace-bits; the exquisite elfish weapons which no human skill can copy, even in the finest watch-spring steel—what superstition of old ever dreamed of sights like these? ―"Gaki" (III)
And he provides pages of his translations of haiku on the theme of fireflies. He also seeks links between the microcosmic (insects, tiny spirits, a dewdrop) and the macrocosmic . . .
But I cannot rid myself of the notion that Matter, in some blind infallible way, remembers; and that in every unit of living substance there slumber infinite potentialities, simply because to every ultimate atom belongs the infinite and indestructible experience of billions of vanished universes. ―"Fireflies" (VII)
Something I didn't know till recently is that Hearn's grave was only a few blocks north of the building where I lived in Bunkyō-ku in the 1990s, where I first read some of Hearn's books. I used to take walks around that area but somehow missed Zōshigaya Cemetery, where he rests in the area of Minami-Ikebukuro.
This week I read Hearn's 1902 book, Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, With Sundry Cobwebs, basically a miscellany of old tales (translated by him), poetry, and short essays. It came out a couple years before his death at age 54, and he touches on various philosophies connected to Buddhism, Shinto, and the Orient in general, at times it seems with some prescience of his own death.
The first nine tales, he tells us in the preface, are his own translations from "old Japanese books." And the first of these, "The Legend of Yurei-Daki," is a four-page story about a woman who, on a dare, goes off at night with her baby wrapped up and on her back to a haunted waterfall. It's called Yurei-Daki (The Cascade of Ghosts). She makes it there, and although she hears a spirit call out her name, she also makes it back unharmed, to where her friends have been anxiously awaiting her return. Everything seems copacetic, except that the clothes on her back are sopping wet. As her friends get a closer look with the lantern light they realize it's not water at all that's soaked her. The story ends: And out of the wrappings unfastened there fell to the floor a blood-soaked bundle of baby clothes that left exposed two very small brown feet, and two very small brown hands—nothing more. The child's head had been torn off!
Aaaaahhhhh!!! This grabbed my attention and kept it for the whole book.
The second tale, "In a Cup of Tea," was the fourth story in Masaki Kobayashi's film Kwaidan (1965). After "In a Cup of Tea" there are a few more ghostly tales. They are more or less about human interaction with the spirit world rather than tales of horror like the one about the waterfall and missing baby head.
Then the book takes sharp turns. "A Woman's Diary" is, as you might expect, a series of excerpts from a woman's diary. This one is very personal and sad, as she writes about losing her baby daughter and son soon after they were born and, extremely depressed, she feels like a failure to her husband and to their arranged marriage, and we're left to wonder if her diary entries suddenly came to an end because she herself came to an end by her own hands. She describes parts of Tokyo where I've lived and currently work, including Shinjuku, Yotsuya, and Okubo, and reading these bits gave me a sense that the late 1800s weren't so very long ago.
He moves on to discuss crabs and insects, writing about the latter:
Even the little that we have been able to learn about insects fills us with the wonder that is akin to fear. The lips that are hands, and the horns that are eyes, and the tongues that are drills; the multiple devilish mouths that move in four ways at once; the living scissors and saws and boring-pumps and brace-bits; the exquisite elfish weapons which no human skill can copy, even in the finest watch-spring steel—what superstition of old ever dreamed of sights like these? ―"Gaki" (III)
And he provides pages of his translations of haiku on the theme of fireflies. He also seeks links between the microcosmic (insects, tiny spirits, a dewdrop) and the macrocosmic . . .
But I cannot rid myself of the notion that Matter, in some blind infallible way, remembers; and that in every unit of living substance there slumber infinite potentialities, simply because to every ultimate atom belongs the infinite and indestructible experience of billions of vanished universes. ―"Fireflies" (VII)
Something I didn't know till recently is that Hearn's grave was only a few blocks north of the building where I lived in Bunkyō-ku in the 1990s, where I first read some of Hearn's books. I used to take walks around that area but somehow missed Zōshigaya Cemetery, where he rests in the area of Minami-Ikebukuro.
January 27, 2022
Not unlike other of Hearn's books I've recently read, Kotto is arguably the "darkest." As with Kwaidan and Shadowings, this volume begins with folk tales from Japan, including the last to be adapted by Masaki Kobayashi in his 1965 film celebrating Hearn's work, and follows into a handful of essays tangentially related to Japanese culture from Hearn's era.
I say this is Hearn's "darkest" mainly for the essays "A Woman's Diary," "Pathological," and "Kusa-Hibari," a loose cycle (I am unsure if it was intended by Hearn) on the loss of the life of loved ones: "A Woman's Diary" features translation of... a woman's diary... in which the speaker loses three children soon after their respective births, and passes away herself shortly after the third death; "Pathological" features Hearn's musings on a cat he owned, whom he believes had been dreaming of taking care of a litter who were stillborn as a result of the cat being assaulted by a passerby one night when the cat left Hearn's house to go hunting; "Kusa-Hibari" sees Hearn reflect on a small cricket he kept as a pet for a little while, who would play a mating tune on its legs, common to crickets of all sorts, despite living far longer than its generation, sustained by a personal stove Hearn owned, necessarily meaning any theoretic mates would have been long dead in the cricket's last days - the cricket itself startles Hearn one day when he realizes the absence of the song, to discover the cricket had died after eating its own legs, starved by Hearn's maid's neglect (though Hearn himself never acknowledges his own failure to feed the cricket himself, having foisted the task first upon his personal student, then on the maid during the student's vacation). Most of the other essays among the back half of this volume deal in the subject of Man's mortality, often in the context of the reincarnation-cycle of Buddhic Samsara, and so ending on vaguely "positive" notes, but still lending a certain weight to the text at large.
I say this is Hearn's "darkest" mainly for the essays "A Woman's Diary," "Pathological," and "Kusa-Hibari," a loose cycle (I am unsure if it was intended by Hearn) on the loss of the life of loved ones: "A Woman's Diary" features translation of... a woman's diary... in which the speaker loses three children soon after their respective births, and passes away herself shortly after the third death; "Pathological" features Hearn's musings on a cat he owned, whom he believes had been dreaming of taking care of a litter who were stillborn as a result of the cat being assaulted by a passerby one night when the cat left Hearn's house to go hunting; "Kusa-Hibari" sees Hearn reflect on a small cricket he kept as a pet for a little while, who would play a mating tune on its legs, common to crickets of all sorts, despite living far longer than its generation, sustained by a personal stove Hearn owned, necessarily meaning any theoretic mates would have been long dead in the cricket's last days - the cricket itself startles Hearn one day when he realizes the absence of the song, to discover the cricket had died after eating its own legs, starved by Hearn's maid's neglect (though Hearn himself never acknowledges his own failure to feed the cricket himself, having foisted the task first upon his personal student, then on the maid during the student's vacation). Most of the other essays among the back half of this volume deal in the subject of Man's mortality, often in the context of the reincarnation-cycle of Buddhic Samsara, and so ending on vaguely "positive" notes, but still lending a certain weight to the text at large.
December 28, 2012
يبدأ هذا الكتاب بذكر عدة قصص شعبية يابانيه مشهورة، ثم عدة أساطير لينتهي بثلاثة أو أربعة فصول مقالات تتحدث عن “يوميات متزوجة” و عناصر لها تأثير دلالي وعميق على الفرد الياباني، كاليعسوقة وشجرة الصفصاف و الوحوش الأسطوري آكل الأحلام Baku ..
الكتاب جيد، لكنه كان سيكون أروع لو حمل تفصيل أكبر وأكثر في مواضيعه !
أظن أنني سأبحر في عمي قوقل لأستزيد من مواضيع الفصول.
حتى ذلك الحين، ستبقى هذه المراجعة بسيطة ^^
الكتاب جيد، لكنه كان سيكون أروع لو حمل تفصيل أكبر وأكثر في مواضيعه !
أظن أنني سأبحر في عمي قوقل لأستزيد من مواضيع الفصول.
حتى ذلك الحين، ستبقى هذه المراجعة بسيطة ^^
February 26, 2008
This book contained some decent stories and a translation of a woman's diary which were enjoyable, but the author's subtly dismissive attitude toward the Japanese and their cultural idiosyncracies was something of a turn off.
July 15, 2019
Hearn's eight book on Japan (1902).
January 6, 2026
Lafcadio Hearn was the son of an Irish surgeon with the British military in Greece. His mother was Greek, from Lafkados. Sadly, their marriage did not last long, and by age 7 Lafcadio was sent to Dublin in the care of a Catholic aunt. He was always literary and drawn to spirituality, and keenly observed human beliefs and social behaviors. His life was adventurous: he was a journalist in Cincinnati in his youth, and also in New Orleans. He wrote accounts of murders, social unrest, racial injustice, and religions of New Orleans. This book is one of the later collections, after a career as an educator and translator in Japan. He collects stories of ghosts and encounters with spirit beings, as well as accounts of the beliefs animating everyday life in late 19th century Japan: fireflies as decorations in gardens and homes, the diary of a young wife who endures terrible loss, demonic insects, the hauntings of Buddhist temples, the songs of children. I read a 1971 edition illustrated with woodcuts and line drawings by Genjiro Yeto: willow in moonlight, crawling insects on a screen, a wife at her loom, a young mother fleeing a dangerous spirit, a hungry baku. Here is a passage on the biology and societal significance of fireflies: "But I cannot rid myself of the notion that Matter, in some blind infallible way, remembers; and that in every unit of living substance there slumber infinite potentialities, simply because to every ultimate atom belongs the infinite and indestructible experience of billions of billions of vanished universes."
March 10, 2024
I often pick a volume of Lafcadio Hearn's work whenever I feel the need to gain perspective. And, so, Kotto doesn't disappoint in this regard. As is often the case with Hearn, he undertakes an exploration of several subjects. He begins with ghost stories and tales of the supernatural before going on to observations about fireflies, crickets, cats, and the simultaneous frustration and joy of human existence throughout time and the universe. But what particularly grabs the reader's attention in this volume is the diary of a common woman, the wife of a porter. It is appears as the centerpiece of the book in terms of placement and length. Hearn says her diary is almost unique, for women of her social class were unlikely to be able to write, much less find the time to muse on existence. Her story traces the loss of three children until she herself becomes ill and is noted as quickly dying. Other chapters touch upon Japanese philosophy, linguistics, and culture. In all, Hearn as usual serves as an interpreter of Meiji Era Japan to the Western world.
September 16, 2025
Lafcadio Hearn is renowned for his dedication to preserving Japanese myths and legends while making them accessible to a global audience. His translations are notable for including the original Japanese text, which not only ensures authenticity but also facilitates comparisons between various interpretations.
This approach is particularly important due to the intricate nature of the Japanese language.
By incorporating the original text alongside his translations, Hearn enhances the accessibility of these cultural works to the general public, particularly to the Japanese-speaking audience.
The fables and additional writings included in this collection provide valuable insights into Japanese life from centuries past. Hearn's commitment to safeguarding these cultural narratives is worthy of recognition and appreciation.
This approach is particularly important due to the intricate nature of the Japanese language.
By incorporating the original text alongside his translations, Hearn enhances the accessibility of these cultural works to the general public, particularly to the Japanese-speaking audience.
The fables and additional writings included in this collection provide valuable insights into Japanese life from centuries past. Hearn's commitment to safeguarding these cultural narratives is worthy of recognition and appreciation.
May 1, 2021
Interesante introducción a la cultura japonesa. El libro se compone de cortos capítulos con algunas leyendas, una traducción de parte del diario de una mujer japonesa, y pequeñas curiosidades que hacen al libro muy rico. El autor, nacido en Europa pero que creció y trabajó en EEUU se mudó a Japón luego de reseñar otras culturas novedosas para los estadounidenses (cómo lo era en su momento la de New Orleans), y fue uno de los primeros “visitantes” a Japón, donde se enamoró, convirtió al budismo y adoptó otro nombre.
December 25, 2020
เรื่องสั้นคลาสสิก อ่านสนุกค่ะ เรื่องหนึ่งยาวไม่เกินห้าหน้า อ่านได้เพลินๆ ไม่เชิงว่าเป็นเรื่องผีสยองขวัญ แต่เป็นเรื่องผีที่เล่าผสมผสานกับวัฒนธรรมญี่���ุ่น #แนะนำอ่าน มากๆค่ะ ผู้ใหญ่อ่านได้ เด็กอ่านดีค่ะ 😊😊
July 27, 2024
Uno de los libros más sombríos de Hearn. Brillante...
Las historias forman parte de la tradición oral del pueblo nipon. Y otras son conclusiones propias del autor, tras los años de asimilación de la rica cultura de ese país.
Las historias forman parte de la tradición oral del pueblo nipon. Y otras son conclusiones propias del autor, tras los años de asimilación de la rica cultura de ese país.
June 11, 2020
มีความคลาสสิกดี ไม่น่ากลัว อ่านเพลินๆๆไปจร้า
June 25, 2023
Ancient, boring, more like a folk tales than horror stories. Understandable
December 31, 2025
Another set of stories that are haunted and wonderful. The second half is a real, transcribed diary of a Japanese woman from the past and I was so moved. I didn't expect that in a book of 'spooky stories,' and it made my heart weep for a woman who lived and died over a hundred years ago.
[[Ok turns out I didn't finish it so I will and I will come back to this review lol]]
[[Ok turns out I didn't finish it so I will and I will come back to this review lol]]
January 4, 2008
Decapitated babies, swallowed souls, and goblins. Good read. I love this guy.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews