Just by reading the names of these stories, one might think they will hear the bell of some Buddhist temple ringing somewhere far away. Some of these stories are written for women and children, that is, from that delicate material from which the most beautiful fairy tales in the whole world are made. These Japanese daughters and women are paradoxical. They are like us without being like us. And the mountains, the flowers, and the sky are completely different from ours. Yet, with a magical power that only Lafcadio Hearn possesses, in these strange stories of a world that is so incomprehensible to us, he gives us a fleeting impression of some spiritual reality.