Just a few brief notes to the main story (posted here).
Mimi-Nashi Hōichi was the first story printed in “Kwaidan”, and it was Hearn’s personal favorite Japanese ghost story according to his grandson.
For this reproduction of it, I have taken the Project Gutenberg version of the text, to which I re-added the diacritical marks which they stripped out and updated the spelling and punctuation. For example, where Hearn wrote to-day, I changed this to today, and where he used the odd but popular for a brief period of time double punctuation mark ,— I updated this to either a comma, em dash, or colon as the text required. There were several other updates as well.
In addition, I added several annotations, both in the form of my own footnotes and as notes added to Hearn’s original footnotes. On his own footnotes, I prefaced his comments with “Hearn wrote:” and then add my own comment on the next paragraph (or paragraphs). In the case that his own comment was multiple paragraphs, I prefaced my comment with “My comment:”
If you are using a modern web browser with javascript enabled, you should see a circled number indicating footnotes, and when you click on this a box containing the footnote should pop up. If you don’t have javascript enabled or are using an older browser, or just something went wrong, the footnotes will all be at the bottom of the page.
On diacritical marks
Diacritical marks in English always present a dilemma: They give us important, often critical, information and therefore do aid tremendously in the pronunciation of foreign words; at the same time, they can look strange and be intimidating to many readers who aren’t familiar with them, and are thus often ignored. Although there have been a handful of words imported into English where diacritical marks are accepted—such as café and résumé—for the most part English words don’t use them. However, at risk of them being ignored, I’ve decided to use them.
Hearn originally used the Nihon-shiki system of romanizing Japanese words. This would have, for instance, rendered the main character of this story as Hôïchi. In my re-adding of the diacritical marks to this story, I have chosen to use the Revised Hepburn system, which is more familiar to most non-Japanese these days. The main character in this system would be written as Hōichi, using a macron instead of a circumflex, and leaving the i alone. This macron indicates that the vowel should be doubled in length.
(Read: How to pronounce Japanese)
The only of Hearn’s original diacritical marks that I have retained is the accent over the e. We already use this for several Japanese words in English, for example we often write saké, so it shouldn’t look too strange. This is fairly useful to remind us that the e is pronounced eh—not ay—rather than left silent as it might in English words.