The cat's owner comes home 'much intoxicated' and, before you can think 'uh-oh' to yourself, he has taken a pen-knife from his waistcoat, 'grasped the poor beast by the throat and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket'. In 15 short minutes, this turned from being a story of affection for the narrator's black cat, Pluto, to a severe test of the nine-lives-of- felines theory. Though this is almost comically heightened horror delivery, the shock of Edgar Allen Poe's tales remains. When Christopher Lee, introducing his late-night Fireside Tales (Radio 2, Sunday), says 'It's time for your story,' he makes the prospect throb with menace. Its title, A Tale of Three Who Were Blind, has something of the moment about it too.) (The second story featured a man obsessed by a woman and determined to get her at any price. He is, to use a word to describe the moment, mesmerised.

Less poetically, he blurts out, 'I suddenly noticed she had taken off her clothes'. It was, the monk shudders, 'as if the woman's body, so close to mine, had enveloped me in the petals of its blossom'. She takes the Monk to the river and scrubs his 'back, sides, and buttocks' while murmuring off-putting things such as, 'Can you tell how hot I am? Look at me, I'm burning!' Meant to be the erotic core of this tale, the scene was splendidly funny.

In Light of Shadows masterfully conveys the magical allusiveness and eliptical style of this extraordinary writer, who Mishima Yukio called 'the only genius of modern Japanese letters.Solace comes in the form of a strange, saucy lady. Underscoring Kyoka's relevance for a contemporary international audience, Inouye adjusts Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's evaluation of Kyoka as the most Japanese of authors by demonstrating how the writer's paradigm of the suffering heroine can be linked to his exposure to Christianity, to a beautiful American woman, and to the aesthetic of blood sacrifice. Translator Charles Inouye places Kyoka's 'literature of shadows' (kage no bungaku) within a worldwide gothic tradition even as he refines its Japanese context.

It includes the famous novella Uta andon (A story by lantern light), the bizarre, antipsychological story 'Mayu kakushi no rei' (A quiet obsession), and Kyoka's hauntingly erotic final work, 'Rukoshinso' (The heartvine), as well as critical discussions of each of these three tales. In Light of Shadows is the long-awaited second volume of short fiction by the Meiji-Taisho writer Izumi Kyoka.

Japanese Gothic Tales by Kyōka Izumi