For once, I’m reading a Japanese book written during the Edo period, although most of the stories are set in the medieval period (between Heian and Edo). This collection of tales by Akinori Ueda (roughly translated, the title is:  Tales of Rain and Moon) deals mainly with the supernatural and historical. In one tale, a famous monk meets the ghost of a vengeful retired emperor, who explains how his vengefulness led him to become a demon and seek revenge on the Taira clan and Go-shirakawa:  in others, snake spirits seduce young men, cheating men receive supernatural punishment, the spirit of gold discourses on whether Buddhist or Confucianist ideas of destiny determine who is wealthy, a village is terrorized by a gay necrophiliac cannibalistic demon monk, etc. The edition I read was a very scholarly one, with the intro and endnotes individually being as long as the tales themselves. (The problem with the scholarly approach is that it begins to annoy you that you can’t read the stories in the original. They are of course not in modern Japanese, and the translator rhasphodizes about the binding of the first edition…)  These stories are definitely high context and allusive, continually mentioning beautiful places immortalized in poetry, classical poems (although this can’t really come through v. well in translation), and Chinese literature. After awhile, I got tired of flipping and abandoned the endnotes:  most of the stories do work just as well as ghost tales as didactic literature.