Here are some pages from Japanese Ghost Stories by Editorial Presença

Here are some pages from the recently released Japanese Ghost Stories in Lafcadio Hearn It is Benjamin Lacombe with translation by João Cardoso for the Presence Editorial. You can buy here with discount.

Synopsis of Ghost Stories from Japan

A unique book, of rare beauty, that celebrates Japan. Ten stories that represent a country, its culture and its traditions.

Lafcadio Hearn fell in love with Japan so much that he naturalized and lived there at the end of the 19th century, leaving a legacy of incalculable value: he collected, fixed and wrote the best ghost stories from Japanese folklore.

Benjamin Lacombe also fell in love with Japan, now offering us a magical journey through the ten best of those stories, through his illustrations – delicate and with incredible strength, they seem to float between the pages of text, surprising and haunting the reader.

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) Born in 1850, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn had a difficult beginning in life: after the death of his parents, he was raised by an aunt in Dublin, and, at the age of sixteen, he lost his sight while playing with his schoolmates that went wrong. Rejected by his family, he left Ireland for England and then France, before settling in the United States of America, where he became a journalist at the Enquirer. He discovered Japanese culture through contacts with the ambassador of the Empire of Japan. In 1874 – at a time when mixed marriages were illegal –, Hearn married Althea «Matthie»

Foley, of mixed origin. When this union was discovered, he was fired and he began working for the competing newspaper, the Cincinnati Commercial. He became interested in the Creole culture of New Orleans, having published, in 1885, a dictionary of Creole proverbs and a collection on culinary themes. In 1889, Harper’s Monthly sent him as a correspondent to the West Indies. After a first novel, Youma, he brought together a large number of traditional Martinique tales, which were the subject of several works. A year later, he accepted an invitation from his Japanese ambassador friend and settled in Yokohama, where he found work as a journalist in the English-speaking press. Hearn married the daughter of a samurai, Koizumi Stesuko, obtaining Japanese citizenship with the name Koizumi Yakumo in 1896. He then became interested in traditional Japanese ghost stories (yokai) and began writing his works about the Japan. An inveterate traveler, he lived successively in Kobe, Matsue and also in Tokyo, where he was appointed professor at Waseda University. A great admirer of Pierre Loti, Hearn was also an English translator of Flaubert, Anatole France, Théophile Gautier, Hugo, Maupassant, Mérimée, Nerval and Zola. He died in 1904 of heart disease in Tokyo. Numerous tributes have been paid to him in literature and comics, as well as in cinema and television.

Benjamin Lacombe (1982-) French author and illustrator born in Paris on July 12, 1982, is one of the main exponents of the new French illustration.

In 2001, he entered the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris (ENSAD), where he attended artistic training. Alongside her studies, she worked in advertising and animation. At nineteen, she signed her first comic book and several illustrated books.

His final course project, Cerise Griotte, which he wrote and illustrated entirely, is his first book for young people, published by Éditions du Seuil in March 2006. The following year, it was published by Walker Books (in the USA), being selected by the prestigious weekly publication Time Magazine as one of the ten best books for young people in 2007 in the United States of America. Since then, Benjamin Lacombe has written and illustrated around twenty books, some of which have been translated and awarded awards around the world, including Les Amants Papillons, Généalogie d’une Sorcière, La Mélodie des Tuyaux, Il Était une Fois… or, also, Les Contes Macabres. He regularly exhibits his work in galleries and collaborates, notably, with Ad Hoc Art (New York), Dorothy Circus Gallery (Rome), Maruzen (Tokyo), Nucleus (Los Angeles) and Galerie Daniel Maghen (Paris).