If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination ... imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes.

So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo's insistently modern culture.

The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are – by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.

Featuring short stories “Shadow Wife,” the tale of the vengeful swordsman prodigy Hisama Sakakibara, and “The Crawler,” the story of stubborn treasury official Genbei Chitsugi, this masterpiece collection of historical ghost stories depicts the pathos of lower-class samurai who live for and are held captive by the sword.

When the body of Saga Atsushi, Japan’s preeminent connoisseur of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), is pulled from the ocean off the coast of Tohoku, having apparently committed suicide, the shocked Japanese art world turns out to mourn his death. Among them is Ryohei, an up-and-coming young ukiyo-e scholar and research assistant to Saga’s colleague-turned-rival, Professor Nishijima. But a chance encounter with an old friend makes Ryohei wonder if there might be more to Saga’s death than meets the eye…