Madam, - Some 20 years ago, when I was the mother of two very small children, I happened one night upon a Japanese film being shown on television. The theme was familiar from our own mythology - the perils of breaching the barrier which normally separates supernatural beings and humans.
This film conveyed the emotions of the protagonists in a particularly powerful way, and small children were an important feature. The unfolding was slow, stylised, beautiful and deceptively simple, as it dealt with the interplay of pity and love and trust and duty and honour.
As the credits rolled, a cry summoned me upstairs, and I was left ignorant of the name of the film or its director. For years, memories from this film resonated with me, but attempts to track it down, even after the advent of the internet, led down dead ends, until some months ago when I noticed the word Kwaidan cropping up on a couple of websites.
In quick succession I discovered that there was a film called Kwaidan, which meant Ghost Stories; that the director of the film was Masaki Kobayashi; that it was released in 1964 and won the Cannes Film Festival's Special Jury Prize the following year; that the film was based on stories written by an Irishman named Patrick Lafcadio Hearn - no, by someone called Koizumi Yakumo . . .that in fact these two were one and the same man.
I discovered that Kwaidan contained four stories of the supernatural, but that "my" story - Yuki-Onna or Snow Woman - had subsequently been released separately as a short. I found Kwaidan in a specialist video store and sat down to watch Yuki-Onna, the second of the four, on its own the first evening and then the whole film the following night.
Was I disappointed after all these years? Certainly not. All four stories are powerful; Yuki-Onna is a masterpiece.
I have read with great interest the recent information in The Irish Times about Lafcadio Hearn's centenary and look forward to learning more about him over the coming months. In the meantime, I would commend any of your readers who enjoy film to experience for themselves Kobayashi's rendering of four of the stories of this most unusual Irishman.
They have a treat in store. - Yours, etc.,
DEIRDRE TINNEY, Neville Road, Rathgar, Dublin 6.