Bakemono Yashiki (the Haunted House), Retold from the Japanese Originals: Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2)

A servant named Rokuzo walks home through feudal Japan, thirstier than any thirst he has ever known. He meets a beautiful woman struggling with an impossible burden, offers to help carry it, and finds himself led to a lavishly lit residence where wine flows and futures blur. But the hospitality curdles into something else entirely, and Rokuzo discovers the thin membrane between the living and the dead has torn loose. These are not American ghost stories dressed in kimono. They are the real thing: tales whispered in Edo-era teahouses, where the Tokugawa shoguns held power with an iron calm and restless spirits demanded their due. James S. De Benneville gathered these stories from vanishing oral traditions and early printed sources, preserving a Japan where aristocratic households harbor terrible secrets and a good deed can damn you for generations. The world he conjures is one of strict social hierarchies pressed against the raw vulnerability of the human heart, where a simple act of kindness opens a door that may never close.