A photograph of Lafcadio Hearn.

Lafcadio Hearn

Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkas (after which Lafcadio is named) to an Irish-born British Army doctor father, and a Greek mother. Two years later, the mother and her son moved to his father’s birthplace in Dublin, but due to her husband’s absence and cultural differences, Lafcadio’s mother became neurotic, and when Hearn was 4 years old, she was divorced by her husband and returned home alone. Later, his father remarried, so Hearn was raised by his great-aunt. From the age of eleven he studied at seminaries in France and England, but he lost his sight in his left eye in an accident, and the death of his father, his aunt’s bankruptcy, and his dislike of theology combined to force him to drop out of school at age seventeen. He lived in poverty in London and moved to the U.S. in 1869 and, after much hard work, he found a job as a journalist in Cincinnati, Ohio. While working as a reporter for a local magazine in New Orleans from 1877, covering a wide range of topics from literary criticism to crime, he also translated French literary works, such as Gautier’s, into English, published long stories Chita (1889) and Youma (1889), and a travelogue of the West Indies, titled Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), which gradually gained recognition. He came to Japan in the spring of 1890 and began teaching English at Matsue Junior High School in Shimane Prefecture in the summer. The following year he married Koizumi Setsu and moved to Kumamoto Fifth Higher School in November. In 1894, he became an editorial writer for the Kobe Chronicle and in 1896 became a naturalized Japanese citizen, changing his name to Koizumi Yakumo. In September of the same year, he began lecturing on English literature at the College of Letters, Tokyo Imperial University, but despite his popularity among students he resigned in 1903 due to a change in the university’s policy regarding foreign teachers. He was replaced by Natsume Sōseki. In 1904, at the age of 54, he died suddenly of a heart attack and was buried in Zōshigaya Cemetery in Tokyo. Hearn and his wife Setsu had three sons and a daughter.

Lafcadio Hearn, or Koizumi Yakumo, is well known, first and foremost, as a person who introduced Japanese culture to foreign countries through his writings. Hearn’s works, which depict Meiji Japan and tell old Japanese folktales in plain, clear, and attractive English, have not only been read by his students in academia and intellectuals, but have also been adopted as middle and high school textbooks, adapted into books for children, and widely read and loved by a general readership (sometimes forgetting that the author is a foreigner) perhaps more than any others written by foreign authors about Japan.

In 1890 (Meiji 23), at the age of 40, Hearn came to Japan and lived an unusual life for a foreigner of his time, taking a Japanese woman as his official wife, living in a Japanese house, and becoming a naturalized citizen until he died in Japan at the age of 54. During that time, he published more than a dozen books on Japan in the U.S., including Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan in two volumes (1894); Out of the East (1895); Kokoro (1896); Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897); Exotics and Retrospectives (1898); In Ghostly Japan (1899); Shadowings (1900); A Japanese Miscellany (1901); Kottō (1902); Kwaidan (1904); Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904); and The Romance of the Milky Way (1905).

The first of these, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, is his impression of Japan, describing his observations from the day he arrived in Yokohama to his first posting in Matsue, where he stayed for a little over a year. He observes with fresh and surprised eyes and writes vividly about the people living in the city and its surroundings, where old and new Japan coexisted in various ways in the Meiji 20s.

In terms of content, like his other works, it is composed entirely of short sketches and essay-like pieces, and can be categorized as reportage literature, such as travelogues, impressions, and descriptions of daily life. However, many of them are brilliant works of literature with their concise, bright, and clear style, skillful storytelling, and keen, sensitive observations. “From the Diary of an English Teacher” is a touching story of a group of students, which portrays the spirit of the youth of the time; their mixed feelings toward the West and their samurai spirit. It explores their emotional interactions with Hearn at the Jinjō Chūgakkō, or Ordinary Middle School, and Shihan-Gakkō, or Normal School, of Matsue, Izumo where Hearn worked.

“The Chief City of the Province of the Gods” portrays Lake Shinji (Shinji-ko) and the city of Matsue at dusk almost like an impressionist painting. However, the attractive and therefore well-known morning scene is depicted with a pounding sound of the kometsuki (rice pestle), the cries of vendors selling vegetables or other goods, “a sound of clapping of hands” echoing around the lake, and a pattering sound of geta (clogs) over the Ōhashi bridge. Hearn was blind in one eye and severely nearsighted in the other, and perhaps due to this he had excellent hearing. He wrote of the beauty he found in the sounds of insects and croaking frogs, which to the average European sounded like noise.

As he clearly states in the preface of the book, Hearn’s intended purpose was, using the easy-to-read form of reportage, to capture “the inner life of the Japanese […] although their religion, their superstitions, their ways of thought, the hidden springs by which they move.” Such attempts at cultural theory include: “Shinjū”, which develops from an actual lovers’ suicide into a general explanation; “Notes on Kitzuki”, which focuses not on religious studies but on Shintoism as alive in the Japanese mind; “The Japanese Smile”, which has long established the image of the so-called “Japanese smile” as an expression of self-control; and “In a Japanese Garden”, which focuses on the introduction of the samurai residence he himself rented and lived in near the castle, discussing the theory of ikebana (the Japanese-style flower arrangement), the aesthetics of stones, and the gardening in Japan.

The main feature that makes Hearn’s writings interesting is that, in the form of travelogues and sojourn diaries, he makes use of his knowledge of folklore to vary the content of his descriptions by incorporating folk tales, ghost stories, and folk beliefs related to each region, and he presents his readers with a dual image of past customs alongside modernization efforts. At the opening ceremony of “Matsue Shin-Ōhashi” (New Matsue Bridge), an old couple crosses the bridge led by the governor’s hand, with ancient customs, overlapping the scene of nation-building in the Meiji era and the sad story of Gensuke, who was once made a human pillar; such juxtapositions add depth to the description. “At Mionoseki” recounts the legend of Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami, who is worshipped at Mio Shrine in a small fishing port, then mentions the arrival of an Imperial Navy cruiser the next morning. The travelogue “From Hōki to Oki” introduces the stories of Mongaku Shōnin, Emperor Go-Daigo, and the exiled Emperor Go-Toba, while noting the openness of Japanese buildings and the relationship between the features of landscapes and the uniquely Japanese beauty of “irregularity.”

These non-Western ethnographic perspectives and leanings toward different cultures and races had already been evident during his American period. In Cincinnati, he wrote newspaper articles about the sorrowful life stories of Black people living on the docks along the Mississippi River and superstitions and songs of African origin. In New Orleans and the West Indies, he shed light on the Creole culture of mixed Black and French descent, and also attempted linguistic and ethnographic studies in his travelogues and folklore writings. Hearn’s work in Japan is an extension of these American interests.

What is remarkable about Hearn’s approach to Japan and his attitude when discussing different cultures is that—unlike most nineteenth century Westerners—he was not limited to a perspective of the superiority of Christian civilization. This is what differentiates Hearn from the Western supremacist Chamberlain, or from Pierre Loti, who had a cold and cynical eye behind his exoticism. For example, Hearn loved to collect Japanese folk songs, which Chamberlain considered unworthy of the beautiful name “Music”; he also felt affection for a roadside Stone Jizō which Loti once described as resembling an “ugly dwarf”. Hearn found in these Jizo statues a gentle, innocent smile, the result of a Buddhist inspiration that had seeped into the Japanese psyche. This smile, unique to the Japanese people, to suppress their emotions, would show itself even in times of sorrow (“The Japanese Smile”). He also hated it when his fellow countrymen treated Japanese women only as lowly wives.

Hearn depicted Meiji Japan as a mixture of the old and the new, and after moving to Kumamoto and Kobe, he wrote documentary-style short stories that revealed the post Sino-Japanese War society. His subjects were the small lives of unknown soldiers and women. Hearn loved the old and beautiful Japanese customs and the Japanese spirit manifest in the daily lives of ordinary people, while he hated the new Japan, which was eager to embrace modernization and Westernization. Hearn was repulsed by the westernized intellectual class among the Japanese, and he did not fit in with his colleagues who had returned from abroad, or even from Kumamoto and Tokyo, which were more urbanized than Matsue and which he did not like. In the Preface, Hearn writes, “the rare charm of Japanese life, so different from that of all other lands […] is to be found among the great common people, […] who still cling to their delightful old customs, their picturesque dresses, their Buddhist images, their household shrines, their beautiful and touching worship of ancestors.” Also, in “In a Japanese Garden,” he worries, “Yet all this—the old katchiū-yashiki and its gardens—will doubtless have vanished forever before many years. […] and the quaint Izumo city, touched at last by some long-projected railway line—perhaps even within the present decade—will swell, and change, and grow commonplace, and demand these grounds for the building of factories and mills. Not from here [Matsue] alone, but from all the land the ancient peace and the ancient charm seem doomed to pass away.” In short, Hearn distrusted and disliked modern Western society—science, rationalism, and industrialization—and was deeply concerned about Japan’s attempts to open itself up to them. In particular, he strongly condemned the missionaries, saying that the spread of Christian values and beliefs would only destroy Japan’s ancient beauty and morals, and that they would do more harm than good.

Hearn’s upbringing played a major role in the formation of his anti-Western values. The combination of a lonely and unhappy childhood, in the care of a strict Catholic great-aunt and monastic boarding house, a deep-seated antipathy toward Christianity, created by a difficult first half of his life, combined with a longing for his Greek mother from whom he was separated at an early age, led Hearn to develop a longing for and affirmation of a non-Western, premodern culture and the Greek polytheistic world. In the first place, Hearn did not come to Japan as a government-sponsored teacher, missionary, or official, and had no backing in his home country. Hearn’s visit to Japan was directly prompted by the recommendation of Harper’s Magazine, which had published his Two Years in the French West Indies appealing to the Western exoticism of the time and the budding American interest in its new neighbor. However, the terms of the assignment were ambiguous and unfavorable, and in fact, the contract was cancelled shortly after Hearn’s arrival in Japan. Hearn had by then already made the acquaintance of Hattori Ichizō of the Ministry of Education at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans in 1884, where he had seen Japanese exhibits, and had read Chamberlain’s English translation of the Kojiki and was deeply impressed. With Hattori’s help and Chamberlain’s recommendation, he was willingly transferred to Izumo, a province he had longed to visit.

Matsue, a quiet castle town facing the blue oceans of the Japan Sea, is a town upon which Hearn could project his inner Greek paradise, with its ancient land of eight million deities (yaoyorozu-no-kamigami) and frank, unaffected people. Here he formed a deep friendship with Nishida Sentarō, a young Japanese teacher of English in the Jinjō Chūgakkō, and married Koizumi Setsu, a daughter of a samurai family, with whom he would have a strong and loving relationship for the rest of his life. Setsu was a valuable companion, along with Nishida who shared his knowledge generously with Hearn, as well as Amenomori Nobushige, with whom Hearn would later develop a close friendship in Tokyo. Later, Hearn spoke broken Japanese, which his family called “Herun-san kotoba” (Hearn’s language), and he began to write letters to his wife in Japanese kana, though he could not read. The ghost story literature and newspaper articles about the incidents he used as material for his work were told to him by Setsu. Hearn’s descriptions of Japan reveal a warmth in the way he regards Japanese customs and women, and a deep understanding that ventures beyond the external appearance to the innermost hearts of people. For Hearn, Japan was the first place where he could find domestic happiness and emotional stability.

Hearn’s more than one dozen books are basically expansions or stand-alone versions of elements of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. Year by year, his reportage became less a mixture of elements and the literary condensation became more intense in the later years. Kokoro, his masterpiece of the middle period, explores the inner life of the Japanese people and the cultural and spiritual climate of Japan by adding his psychological analysis to minor incidents he saw and heard around him. In his later years, Hearn’s works are mainly retold stories (Kwaidan and others) such as “Yuki-Onna” (A Snow Woman), “The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi”, and “Mujina”. His last book, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, is, so to speak, the culmination of Hearn’s study of Japan. It is an exceptionally formal, rather lengthy treatise with a scholarly approach that examines the relationship between Japanese Shinto and the family and society. However, Hearn’s true talent lies in the short story.

In short, Hearn’s works have been an introduction to Japan for foreigners as well as an opportunity for Japanese people to rethink Japan. His works were published one after another in the U.K. and the U.S. In 1922, a complete collection with biography and letters was compiled, and German and French translations followed soon. One of the reasons why Hearn’s work was widely read in the Western world then was that Japan, with its mysterious image, had just opened its doors to the world and was at the height of its power after gaining victory in Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars. Despite personal slander from such figures as Chamberlain, with whom he had a disagreement in his later years, Hearn’s literature was praised by Hofmannsthal and other authors. In addition, many people, such as ceramic artist Bernard Howell Leach, came to Japan because Hearn had aroused their interest in the country. However, during World War II, Hearn’s reputation in the U.S. and Britain fell for glorifying the enemy, Japan, and ever since then he has been neglected by the new generation of Japanologists (as of the time of writing). On the Japanese side, of course, his works were translated early on, and many of his students became professors of English literature. Although many writers and critics have been fascinated by and interested in Hearn, his depictions of Meiji Japan, moreover, evoke in his readers a kind of nostalgia for the soul, retrieve a picture of Japan that is almost forgotten by the modern Japanese people. Furthermore, Yanagi Muneyoshi, the discoverer of the beauty of Korean ceramics, held up Hearn as a model of how to approach a foreign culture by entering and understanding the heart of its nation.