Osoroshi

My recent bedtime reading is Osoroshi (怪談) of Miyabe Miyuki (宮部美幸).

It is, in essence, a collection of several inter-related horror stories, presented in a way somewhere between The Decameron (十日談) of Giovanni Boccaccio and Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (聊齋誌異) of Pu Songling (蒲松齡). As usual , Miyabe is good at constructing attractive plots, describing them with a strong medieval flavour, but less sophisticated in terms of hard core logical deduction. In this collection of strange stories, she certainly makes good use of her edge.

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The central idea of this book is very simple: Many of us have a hidden story to tell; it represents the dark side of our past that we would bag to be forgiven.

The trouble is, many a time we don’t even know who is in the position to listen to our story and forgive us.