Kaidan: 100 Japanese Ghost Stories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798181919112)

Long before it was a Halloween ritual, telling ghost stories was a Japanese summer tradition, a way to cool the blood on a sweltering Obon night when the dead come home guided by lantern light. Kaidan revives that tradition as a book you can play. It is built on the old Edo parlor game hyakumonogatari kaidankai, the gathering of one hundred weird tales: light one hundred candles, read one story, snuff one flame, and let the room go dark around you, story by story, until only the last candle stands.

One hundred stories. One hundred candles. This book is the game.

Inside are quiet, beautifully creepy tales retold from the masters of Japanese folklore and written fresh in the old style, the kind that never shout and never explain. A woman by the moat turns and has no face. Two dead children whisper from a secondhand quilt. A taxi picks up a fare who leaves the seat soaked with cold seawater. The chill does its work, exactly as it was meant to.

• The Faceless Woman, the Woman of the Snow, and the wandering taxi ghosts of a modern seaside town
• Yurei and yokai: the river-dwelling kappa, the shapeshifting tanuki and fox-wife, the mountain tengu, the faceless mujina, the corpse-eating jikininki
• Kabuki's most famous specters and a hungry, vengeful cat haunting the house of Nabeshima
• Tales drawn from Lafcadio Hearn, Ueda Akinari, A. B. Mitford, and Richard Gordon Smith, alongside originals in the traditional voice
• Ten chapters that count down from "The First Ten Candles" to "The Last Ten Candles," the pages darkening as you go

A "How to Play" page opens the book and tells you the rules. Read it alone or pass it around a circle of friends. Give it to the one who loves Japanese horror, or keep it for the long August nights when the heat won't break and the only sensible thing is a story that raises gooseflesh.

There is one catch. Most players stop at ninety-nine, because the old game holds that when the hundredth candle dies, something comes. Read ninety-nine and stop, like everyone else.

Or don't.