Tales of Moonlight and Rain

Nine tales of the supernatural, published in 1776 and never out of print since. A wife waits seven years for a husband who comes home to a ruined house and to a ghost. A priest who loved a boy too much eats his corpse and becomes a demon on the mountain, until a passing Zen master leaves him a blue hood and a single line of verse. A man's sworn brother keeps a promise by falling on his own sword, so that his spirit can cross in one night what a living man cannot walk in many days. A young man is loved by a beautiful woman who is a white serpent. A householder wakes at midnight to find the spirit of his own gold sitting by his pillow, wanting to argue about money.

Ueda Akinari wrote the finest prose of the Edo period, and this book is the source of Mizoguchi's film Ugetsu. A complete new translation of all nine tales and Akinari's 1768 preface, with the poems set as verse, a translator's note, and endnotes on his Chinese and Japanese sources.