‘The Reconciliation’ first appeared in Shadowings (1900)

This is Part 6 of a series of seven stories by Hearn which are set in Kyoto. For an introduction to Hearn’s Kyoto stories, please click here.

Synopsis:

A young samurai of Kyoto, reduced to poverty by the ruin of his lord, had to take work in the provinces. Before leaving he divorced his wife and married another with better prospects. However, the second marriage proved unhappy, and he realised that he had in fact loved the first wife. She haunted his thoughts and he longed to see her again. So he sent his second wife back to her parents and returned to Kyoto. He went to visit the house where he and his first wife had lived, but it was overgrown and apparently abandoned – but in a small back room he found her and confessed all, begging for forgiveness. She replied to him gently, and said she understood that it was because of poverty that he had left. They spent the night catching up with each other’s news and making plans for the future, and as dawn broke they fell asleep exhausted. Later when the samurai awoke, he found a faceless figure next to him. It was her corpse, ‘so wasted that little remained save the bones and the long tangled hair’.

Sickened and shocked, the samurai learns from a neighbour that the wife had pined so much after the divorce that she became ill and had died some time ago with no one to care for her.

Commentary:

Lafcadio Hearn’s interest in ghost stories is well-known, and in Japan he is remembered above all for the collection in Kwaidan. As an admirer of Edgar Allen Poe, Hearn shared the Romantic fascination with death and the macabre, and as a child he was convinced that he had seen ghosts. The notion of a posthumous existence informs much of his work, not so much in terms of a human soul but in terms of individual atoms. He was also well-versed in Buddhism and the idea of karma, which resonates so strongly in the story. His interest in ghosts was an important part of his fondness for Japanese culture, for he greatly sympathised with the way Japanese talked to the deceased, practised ancestor worship, and cherished a rich folklore of otherworldly spirits. Kyoto too is very much a city of ghosts.