“Nihon-no Kokoro” in the Mirror of Japanese Kaidan

Abstract

The article is an attempt to analyze the genesis of Japanese kaidan genre (“a tale of extraordinary things” or “a story of weird and mysterious things“) beginning from its origin in Edo period (1603 - 1867) till present time. The development of this classical story of the supernatural has some very specific features, which make us regard kaidan to be one of the archetypal models of Japanese literature and culture on the whole. Kaidan has got an extremely strong impact first from Chinese XIV century fantastic novel and then from Western mystic literature of the XIX century. Having absorbed the richness of Japanese folklore, this genre has produced a typically national peculiarity due to a very specific mechanism of cultural adaptation, which makes kaidan a bright phenomenon of Japanese culture of world scale. In our days kaidan continues to evolve due to mythological mentality of Japanese people, and vice a verse, it has been kaidan that helped to form some patterns of Japanese national character.