This fall, the Folio Society will publish Japanese Ghost Stories, a stunning, collectible collection of twenty spine-tingling tales illustrated by award-winning artist Yuko Shimizu. Set in the haunted world of Ancient Japan, the classic tales were collected and translated by Lafcadio Hearn, a 19th-century traveller and resident of Japan whose collections of supernatural stories drawn from folklore are wildly popular in Japan. Japanese Ghost Stories is translated by Royall Tyler and also illustrated by artist Yuko Shimizu. The Folio Society edition of Japanese Ghost Stories will include an all-new introduction from Japanese novelist, Yoko Ogawa, whose novel The Memory Police was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the International Booker Prize and the World Fantasy Award. Japanese Ghost Stories is available on the Folio Society’s website, just in time for Halloween.

Japanese Ghost Stories features twenty transportive and sometimes terrifying tales, including “The Story of Aoyagi,” in which a young samurai falls in love with a mysterious woman only to discover she is not what she seems; “Oshidori,” the haunting tale in which a mandarin duck mourns the loss of her lover, who was shot and killed by a hunter’ “The Dream of Akinosuké,” in which a man becomes the king of an ant kingdom; and “Rokuro-Kubi,” an action packed story in which a monk battles five flying heads.

 In Japanese Ghost Stories, the dead wreak revenge on the living, paintings come alive, spectral brides possess mortal men and a priest devours human flesh. These tales draw on the phantoms and ghouls of traditional Japanese folklore—including the headless ‘rokuro-kubi’, the monstrous goblins ‘jikininki’ and the faceless ‘mujina’ who stalk lonely neighbourhoods. The stories are massively popular in Japan and highly regarded by folklore aficionados and horror enthusiasts alike.

The stories in Japanese Ghost Stories are provided by Lafcadio Hearn, a writer, journalist and translator whose works introduced Western readers to the culture, folklore and literature of Japan. Born on the Greek island of Lefkada to an Irish father and Greek mother, he emigrated to the United States before settling in Japan in 1890. There he married, became a Japanese citizen under the name Koizumi Yakumo, and devoted himself to recording the country’s stories, customs and beliefs. His ghost stories—Kwaidan, In Ghostly Japan, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan—which were drawn from Japanese folklore, appeared in collections throughout the 1890s and 1900s. He remains today a much-celebrated figure in Japan.

Japanese Ghost Stories is accompanied by 5 haunting double-page illustrations—as well as a front is, cover, slipcase and endpaper art—by the New York-based Japanese artist Yuko Shimizu, who has received multiple Gold and Silver Medals from the Society of Illustrators. Japanese Ghost Stories marks Shimizu’s third collaboration with The Folio Society, following Japanese Tales (2018) and The Great Gatsby (2025). 

Shimizu is a multi-award-winning Japanese illustrator based in New York City. She is also an instructor at The School of Visual Arts and has more than twenty years of experience illustrating. Her work includes multiple disciplines; from pages of The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, and The New Yorker to WIRED, covers for DC Comic, Penguin Random House, and Scholastic, and advertising for BBC, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Universal Pictures, SONY, Paramount, MTV, Nike, Hasbro, and Target, to name a few. Additionally, she has collaborated with the United Nations, Smithsonian Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Library of Congress.