Double Inscription and the Concept of Origin in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan

To many Western readers, Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, published in 1904, is a seminal work of what they perceive as Japanese kaidan literature. The fact that this work was first published in English for Western readers reveals the transcultural as well as translational nature of this literary genre that is called kaidan in the English- speaking context. The question of the origin of kaidan therefore makes it an interesting case of translation, since this book, in effect, is at once a translation and an inscription of the origin of Japanese kaidan literature in the Western context. It is in this double inscription that this paper begins to interrogate “the concept of origin” in kaidan stories. The paper will carry out a detailed analysis of the “preface” of Hearn’s Kwaidan and examine the ways in which the “origins” of these stories are discussed and constructed. The paper will then examine the self-negating and self-productive structure of the representative kaidan tale, “Yuki-Onna” (sometimes translated as “The Woman of Snow”) which, according to its storyline, is a story that cannot be told. The paper will then analyze the narrative structure of this story that marks strangely on its impossibility, and reveals how the idea of origin is produced as an effect not only through repeated iteration / translation, but also out of the structural demand of a narrative that posits and erases, at once, the notion of origin.