Chapter 47
Later that night, seated on pillows by a kerosene lamp in the tatami room, Michael and Ceinwen went through Hearn’s papers. The only fiction was a bare-bones draft of a story that took place in a haunted forest, a forest filled with ghosts of suicide victims. In it, a ronin—a samurai without a daimyo master—traveled with his fellow ronin to a forest known as a place for suicides and filled with ghosts of the dead. They planned to kill themselves because they had failed to protect their master. But when they reached it, the daimyo appeared before them. He was a ghost and wanted revenge on his enemy—the usurper and his family—who had killed him and took over his fiefdom. The ghost then possessed the ronin, but at that point the story abruptly stopped.
“This story is genuinely cr
