小泉八雲（こいずみやくも）
Lafcadio Hearn
The writer (1850–1904) who carried Japanese ghost stories into English as Kwaidan.
Born in Greece, raised in Ireland, a journalist in America, Hearn came to Japan in 1890, taught in Matsue and Kumamoto and Tokyo, married Koizumi Setsu and took the name Koizumi Yakumo. He wrote about Japan for Western readers for fourteen years, and in Kwaidan (1904) he retold strange tales from old books and from his wife’s telling: the snow woman who spares a woodcutter, the faceless mujina on the Akasaka road, the flying heads of the rokurokubi, the blind musician Hōichi. Shadowings (1900) has the samebito, the shark-man whose tears become rubies.
Hearn’s versions are literature built on tradition, and they are often better known than any version told in a village; this site identifies them as his wherever they appear.
Related yokai
Yuki-onna
雪女（ゆきおんな）
A pale woman seen on winter roads, sometimes deadly, sometimes harmless, and never described the same way everywhere.
Rokurokubi
轆轤首（ろくろくび）
A seemingly human figure whose neck stretches at night—and one name that once covered more than one uncanny form.
Samebito
鮫人（さめびと）
In a story Lafcadio Hearn published in English in 1900, a man on the Long Bridge of Seta shelters a creature banished from the Dragon Palace — and is repaid in tears that harden into jewels, which only come when the grief behind them is real.