I
chose to read some stories from Kwaidan this week. I read The
Story of Mimi-Hashi-Hoichi, Diplomacy, Of a Mirror and a
Bell, Jikininki,Mujina, and Rokura-Kubi. While
I do my best to stay away from horror in any form, (novel, movie,
haunted houses) from what I have seen and read it seems that most
horror stories today try to scare people more
through disgust and gore than through suspense and an
actual scary story line. These short stories however did not use gore
to try and scare the reader at all. This may be attributed to the
fact that these stories were merely meant to be a recording of
Japanese horror stories not to actually scare anyone. I can imagine
when these stories were actually being told in their original setting
that they may have been more "gored up" to get the point
across more effectively.
My favorite story from the ones I read was Mimi-Hashi-Hoichi. Even though these stories lacked in any super descriptive details and were just bare stories, this particular story seriously freaked me out. The idea of being blind(extremely vulnerable) and thinking that you are performing music for a room full of hospitable people when in actuality you are sitting outdoors in a cemetery surrounded by glowing flame spirits who want to hurt you is terrifying. The ending where the spirit comes and rips the ears off of the old man while the old man just sits there meditating was the scariest scene out of any of the stories I read in my opinion.
Another one of the stories that I really enjoyed was the Rokura-Kubi. I have a vietnamese friend who had told me about these creatures that have detachable heads that we had seen in a movie, so actually reading the story for myself was really exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment