If you’ve been following NHK’s hit TV drama Bakebake (The Ghost Writer’s Wife) like my parents, you already know how Japan’s rich tradition of ghost stories and folklore continues to captivate audiences nationwide. The drama, inspired by the life and works of Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo), has brought renewed attention to the eerie yet beautiful tales that shaped Japan’s cultural imagination.
For those unfamiliar with Hearn, he published Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things in 1904, a remarkable compilation of Japanese ghost stories. Before its publication, these tales had been passed down locally in various regions of Japan, but this volume immortalised them and introduced them to the rest of the country- and eventually the world. Mind you, the book was first written in English and only later translated into Japanese.
Without Hearn’s work, stories like Hoichi the Earless (耳なし芳一), Yuki Onna (Snow Woman; 雪女), Rokurokkubi (a long‑necked yokai; ろくろ首), and Mujina (Japanese badger/raccoon dog; ムジナ) might never have reached us in their now‑familiar form.
Mujina is the creature that transforms into the famous yokai known as Nopperabo, on which the rakugo story Nopperabo is based. In that sense, this rakugo piece would not have been born without Hearn’s influence.
Hearn himself- a Greece‑born British citizen- married a Japanese woman named Setsu and became a naturalised Japanese citizen. Before that, he had been married to an African American woman during his time in the United States, despite interracial marriage being illegal at the time. He was a true revolutionary, someone who recognised the hypocrisy of the system and chose to follow his heart.
If you’d like to know more about Nopperabo, I also have a video of my rakugo performance.
English Rakugo NZ 