On a snowy March night, in a place called Seaidô, a group of people gather to tell kaidanes or tales of ghosts, the strangest and most inexplicable they know. The eccentric owner of the place and a three-legged frog are the hosts.

The story of a mysterious blind man waiting for someone on a pier, the tale of a monkey mask, the one of a well in whose interior an unimaginable secret is hidden, or that of a sinister one-legged woman are just a few stories in those that besides ghosts, we will see reflected the human passions, feelings even more terrifying than any supernatural appearance.

Written from a modern perspective, but showing a clear longing for the past, Ghosts and samurai, is an exciting journey through Japan of the Edo period and earlier, a country that no longer exists, full of customs, myths and ancestral legends and to which we can only access through literature.

Okamoto Kidô (1872-1939), famous for his stories about Inspector Hanshichi and for his plays Kabuki, was always interested in ghost stories, a genre that Japanese society of his time despised, something that did not prevent him from becoming with the passage of time in one of the most beloved authors of popular Japanese literature.

Editorial Quaterni presents a new book by one of the most interesting writers of the first half of the twentieth century, translated entirely from Japanese.