Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) had one life-long obsession: the quest for the odd, the exotic and the monstrous. Born in Greece from an Irish father serving in the British military and a Greek mother, his first name recalled Lefkada, the island of his birth. At age two he was brought to Ireland and discarded by both parents whose marriage soon broke up - he would never meet them again. Hearn was brought up with Christian severity by a wealthy great-aunt who mostly sent him away to boarding schools - also one in France, which gave Hearn his excellent command of that language; interestingly, he was a classmate of Guy de Maupassant, and maintained a life-long interested in French literature. In a fight at school in the U.K., Hearn lost the sight in one eye and this made him look rather grotesque: he had to go through life with one blind eye and one bulging, staring eye and was very myopic. He was also painfully introverted. The strictly religious upbringing gave him a strong dislike of organized religion and later in life Hearn professed himself as a pagan, harking back to both his Greek heritage and beliefs he encountered in Japan.
[Lafcadio Hearn]
After Hearn's great-aunt was swindled out of her money, Hearn had to start fending for himself, and at age 19 he crossed over to the United States to seek his fortune in the New World, where he ended up in Cincinnati. After working as a proof reader, he started doing journalistic work, finally becoming a reporter for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, achieving local fame for his lurid accounts of murders and other sensational crimes. At this time, already, Hearn was drawn to anecdote and exoticism. A relationship with an African-American woman, illegal at the time, led to his dismissal as editorial writer and, enticed by the exotic South, in 1877 Hearn moved to New Orleans, where during the next ten years he wrote for several papers, such as the Times-Democrat. His main interests were the Creole population and its culture, including its cuisine – Hearn even wrote a Creole cookbook. He wrote odd fantasies and arabesques for the paper and also contributed articles and sketches to national magazines, such as Harper's and Scribner's; in addition to publishing his first creative works: the novella Chita (about a tsunami that destroys an island in the Gulf of Mexico, sweeping everybody away, the only survivor a child clinging to the dead body of its mother), Stray Leaves from Strange Literature, a retelling of stories from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Buddhist legend, etc., as well as translations from the lushly decadent French author Théophile Gautier.
Hearn loved the dilapidated streets and crumbling wooden houses of the Creole town, the vestiges of French and Spanish culture, the ancestor worship and the voodoo ceremonies. But the South was modernizing, too, having recovered from the Civil War, as was symbolized by the World Fair of 1884 held in the city. Incidentally, the World Fair also became Hearn's first deeper acquaintance with Japan - he dedicated several articles to the Japanese pavilion and the fine workmanship of the crafts on display and befriended Hattori Ichizo, who was in charge of the Educational Exhibit. But all the newfangled electric lights brought on by the Fair meant that the Creole City was losing its charm and in 1887 Hearn left for more exotic climes. He was sent by Harper's as a correspondent to the West Indies and lived for two years in St. Pierre on Martinique, which led to two books about these exotic islands, one a travelogue and the other the novel Youma.
Then in 1890 Hearn had the chance to travel to Japan to write a series of articles, but once there, he liked the country so much that with the help of Basil Hall Chamberlain, the well-known English Professor at Tokyo Imperial University with whom Hearn had been corresponding, he stayed on and started working in various teaching jobs. His first teaching job was in Matsue, a town with an old history, rich in legends and folklore, in Western Japan on the Japan Sea coast – a place exactly after Hearn's heart. During his 15-month stay in Matsue, he married Koizumi Setsu, the daughter of a local samurai. Later, he became a naturalized Japanese with the name Koizumi Yakumo. The stay in then still heavily traditional Matsue was formative: Hearn developed into the collector of miscellany, the transcriber of local lore, countless bits of information from the old Japan that was fast being discarded by the Japanese themselves. He wrote about Buddhist festivals, fireflies, the Japanese smile, women's hair, any traditional subject that intrigued him.
[Hearn and his wife, Koizumi Setsu]
After a further teaching job in Kumamoto (a matter-of-fact modernizing city Hearn was not so fond of) and a stint as journalist in Kobe, in 1896 Hearn could move to Tokyo where he received a prestigious teaching position at Tokyo University (thanks again to the help from his friends). Hearn, an extremely hard worker who had ruined his health with his frenetic journalistic jobs and fits of extreme poverty in the U.S., died in 1904 of heart failure, aged only 54 years.
Hearn's first book about Japan, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, was published in 1894 and until his death, every year a new book would follow, including the famous Kwaidan (1903). In these books, Hearn concentrated on folklore, ghost stories, insects, quaint things and, of course, graves. Hearn became known to the world by his writings about Japan, and is more famous in Japan than in the West, where critics accuse him of treating his adopted country in an exotic way. True, Hearn was not a great original author, he was a re-teller, an interpreter of other cultures for a Western public. But his hunting for strange pieces of literature from the whole world reminds me of Borges; while his writings, mostly short, diverse, about any topic that happened to strike his fancy, are like a superior blog.
Hearn has always been honored in Japan because of his reverence for the Japanese tradition, for which he even gave up his own culture, although much of that tradition was in the process of being discarded by the Japanese themselves. In contrast to other foreigners in Japan at that time, he was not arrogant and did not look down on the Japanese - on the contrary, he disliked the Western community and evaded it as much as possible. Hearn lived in his own imagination and his many books provide fascinating vignettes about old customs and quaint lore, about the odd, the exotic and the monstrous - subjects Hearn sought after for his whole life. But as the selections below show, in Japan Hearn also found happiness. They are not only interesting as glimpses of Japanese culture, but also as Hearn's visions of the bizarre.
My favorite book by Hearn is Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, originally published in two volumes in 1894, because Hearn's observations about Japan, just after his arrival in both Yokohama and Matsue, are the freshest. Take for example "My first Day in the Orient". Hearn had long been in love with Japanese culture before he arrived in Yokohama on April 4, 1890, and here he describes his first impressions of the country during a ride by kuruma (rickshaw) out of the European quarter of Yokohama into the Japanese town. Also today's reader can still experience that "first charm of Japan, intangible and volatile as a perfume."
In "The Chief City of the Province of the Gods" Hearn describes his arrival in Matsue, the capital of remote Shimane Prefecture. Hearn received a position as teacher English and arrived there on August 30, 1890. This essay gives his first impressions of the city he loved most in Japan. Other impressive essays are for example "In the Cave of the Children's Ghosts," "In a Japanese Garden" (in which Hearn describes the garden of a samurai house he rented in Matsue, now open to the public as "Lafcadio Hearn's Residence" together with a neighboring "Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum"), the strange "Of Women's Hair" and "From Hoki to Oki" about his visit to the Oki Islands.
In the pages of this book are the customs, the superstitions, the charming scenery, the revelations of Japanese character, and all the other elements that Lafcadio Hearn found so bewitching. Here, for example, are essays on such subjects as the Japanese garden, the household shrine, the festivals, and the bewildering Japanese smile—all aspects of Japanese life that have endured in spite of the changes that have taken place during the modernization of Japan. The Japanese character and the Japanese tradition are still fundamentally the same as Hearn found them to be, and for this reason, his writing is still extremely revealing to modern readers.
Hearn's work is in the public domain. Below is a list of his books about Japanese culture, starting with "Glimpses:"
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan I, 1894
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan II, 1894
Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan, 1895, Hearn's second Japan book; especially the sketch "The Dream of a Summer Day" is beautiful.
Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, 1896; I like "At a Railway Station" in this third volume.
Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan, 1895, Hearn's second Japan book; especially the sketch "The Dream of a Summer Day" is beautiful.
Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, 1896; I like "At a Railway Station" in this third volume.
Exotics and Retrospectives, 1898 - here "Fuji-no-Yama" is very good, as well as "The Literature of the Dead".
In Ghostly Japan, 1899 - I like "Fragment".
Shadowings, 1900 - excellent pieces are "The reconciliation," "Kimiko" and "Semi".
A Japanese Miscalleny, 1901 - great stories are "Of a Promise Broken" and "The Story of Kogi the Priest"; a superior essay is "Dragonflies."
Kotto: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs, 1903.
Kwaidan, 1903, is of course very famous, also thanks to the film by Kobayashi Masaki from 1965; I prefer "The Story of Mimi-nashi Hoichi".
And Hearn's final book is the posthumously published The Romance of the Milky Way, 1905, in which "A Letter from Japan" is of particular interest.
Kwaidan, 1903, is of course very famous, also thanks to the film by Kobayashi Masaki from 1965; I prefer "The Story of Mimi-nashi Hoichi".
And Hearn's final book is the posthumously published The Romance of the Milky Way, 1905, in which "A Letter from Japan" is of particular interest.