The Haunted Drum

A drum made a hundred years ago for a woman who jilted its maker. A sound with no echo, which has cursed six or seven lives that its last survivor can count. And a young drummer, raised in a famous Noh household in Tokyo, who has always wanted to hear a drum that says only "po... po... po...".

In "The Haunted Drum" (あやかしの鼓, 1926), Yumeno Kyūsaku, author of Dogra Magra, writes a deathbed testament in which a drummer, Otomaru Kyūya, sets down how he came to be named the murderer in three strange deaths. The story runs from a Kyōto craftsman's heartbreak in the old capital, through a ruined noble family and a dressing room lined with mirrors, to a night of fire in Azabu and a final return to a house in Kudan. Its chief pleasures are its atmosphere, a chain of reversals in which no one is who they first seem, and its conviction that the sound of an instrument can seize a human heart.

This is a new English translation made directly from the Japanese, with endnotes on Noh, dress, place and period detail, and with the author's own inconsistencies of date preserved and flagged. It contains scenes of cruelty and sexual coercion in the manner of its period.