The Kwaidan Collection
An Illuminated Edition
Spirits surround us in the latest Illuminated Edition: a tome of all the Japanese ghost stories and strange tales collected and translated by author Lafcadio Hearn and depicted by the majestic brushwork of artist Kent Williams.
Brimming with over sixty illustrations, and featuring essays from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, scholar Kyoko Yoshida and Hearn's great-grandson and director of the Lafcadio Hearn Museum Bon Koizumi, this oversized slipcase volume enraptures the imagination as it chills the blood.
Drawn from Hearn's two most celebrated books, KWAIDAN and SHADOWINGS, this new title constitutes a complete compendium of the otherworldly and macabre folk tales that Hearn collected and translated during his travels through Japan in the late 19th century.
Kent Williams is an accomplished and multiple award-wining painter, comics artist, and draftsman, known for his richly textured and expressionist paintings. His illustrations sweep worlds of spirits across the page in an unsettling vibrant tumble. Corpse brides; flesh-eating jikininki goblins; the faceless mujina who haunt forgotten places; the rokuro-kubi, who remove their heads at night: all brought to life as never before under Williams' visionary brush. A stunning and startling new entry in Beehive Books celebrated, award-winning Illuminated Editions series.
The edition is housed in a shimmering die-cut sculpturally embossed slipcase, printed on uncoated acid-free paper, and published in an oversized 9x12" trim format.
Lafcadio Hearn, also known as Koizumi Yakumo, was a Greek-Japanese writer, translator, and teacher who introduced the culture and literature of Japan to the West. His writings offered unprecedented insight into Japanese culture, especially his collections of legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. A Greek national, he lived and worked as a journalist in the Unites Stated before before moving to Japan and becoming a Japanese citizen. In 1890, Hearn met and married Koizumi Setsuko, the daughter of a local samurai family, with whom he had four children. His writings about Japan offered a glimpse into a world that was largely unknown to Westerners of the time.
Kent Williams is an accomplished painter, comics artist, and draftsman, known for his richly textured and expressionist paintings, his striking cover artwork for Marvel, DC, and Vertigo, as well as The Fountain, a graphic novel adaptation of Darren Aronofsky's 2006 epic film. In addition, he is a prolific multimedia artist with notable forays into printmaking, photography, and film. He has won multiple silver medals from the Society of Illustrators and a Gold Award from Spectrum, and was awarded a 2001 fellowship at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab.
Darren Aronofsky's directorial debut π won the Director's Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Independent Spirit award and the Open Palm. The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010) earned countless accolades and multiple nominations; Black Swan won an Academy Award. His biblically inspired epic Noah (2014) was his first film to open at #1 at the US box office.
Kyoko Yoshda is a fiction writer, translator, and professor of American Literature at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Her debut short fiction collection Disorientalism came out in 2014. She has translated books by Masataka Matsua, Ai Nagai and Dave Eggers.
Bon Koizumi is the great-grandson of Lafcadio Hearn and director of the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum, and a specialist in folklore studies. In 2017, he was awarded the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Commendation in 2017 for his contributions to cultural exchange between Japan and Ireland.
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