I’m not one for short stories about things that go bump in the night, but the ones I do indulge in are from Western authors simply due to accessibility - being raised in America (and briefly Europe) does that to you. Reading Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things was an experience, to say the least. An anthology of traditional Japanese ghost stories was a bit out of my wheelhouse. I found myself enjoying it much more than I thought I would, though. That’s likely due to the differences between Kwaidonand my expectation of usual Euro-American ghost stories, and even further, the inherent differences between Eastern and Western culture. The most interesting difference between ghost stories in the west and those I read in Kwaidon was the art of their conclusions. In western media, we have a penchant for going after concrete endings. The supernatural being perishes and the heroes live, or vice versa. Solid. We can put down the book now and go on with our lives without having to thi...