



Produced by an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer.








KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

By Lafcadio Hearn



A Note from the Digitizer

On Japanese Pronunciation

Although simplified, the following general rules will help the reader
unfamiliar with Japanese to come close enough to Japanese pronunciation.

There are five vowels: a (as in fAther), i (as in machIne), u (as in
fOOl), e (as in fEllow), and o (as in mOle). Although certain vowels
become nearly "silent" in some environments, this phenomenon can be
safely ignored for the purpose at hand.

Consonants roughly approximate their corresponding sounds in English,
except for r, which is actually somewhere between r and l (this is why
the Japanese have trouble distinguishing between English r and l), and
f, which is much closer