Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904)

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[Q. auth.,] review of Sean G. Ronan & Toki Koizumi, Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo): His Life, Work and Irish Background (Ireland Japan Assoc., Confed. Hse., Kildare St., Dublin: Eason 1992), 72pp., in Books Ireland (Feb. 1992), b. Ionian island of Lefkas, hence name; Anglo-Irish surgeon and Greek girl; grew up in Dublin; migrated America at 19; worked as journalist; settled in Japan at forty; naturalised, and lectured at Imperial University; died 14 yrs. later; his texts, interpreting the West to Japan, still studied there; his masterpiece, Japan, an attempt at interpretation, studies the inner life of old Japan; this book by an Irish ambassador and the grandson of the subject includes photographs and bibliography citing a number of books about Hearn.

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Japanese-Ireland Association (1995) [Brochure]: ‘A work, Kokoro [q.d.] turns from the outer world of Japanese to explore, as he said at the time, ‘the hints and echoes of Japanese inner life. Exotics and Retrospectives looks into customs and traditions which Hearn admired and hped passionately would survive the onslaught of Western materialism which he abhorred; in Ghostly Japan and Kwaidan [he] developed his fascination for the macabre and mysterious ... Hearn’s work was unquestionably influcenced by IIrish folklore, writings and other stories that he head and read in his formative years in Ireland. He asmired the work of ... Berkeley, Swift and Burke as well as that of the Irish Literary Renaissance especially the interest of Ferguson and Yeats in old Celtic sagas.’

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Paul Murray, ‘Lafcadio Hearn and the Irish Tradition’, in Irish Studies Review, No. 15 (Summer 1996), pp.2-9, compares Hearn’s background with those of Shaw, Stoker, and Le Fanu; ‘Hearn’s Irish background was essentially Protestant despite his upbringing as a Catholic, so he was able to embody in himself the full ambiguity of the Irish Gothic tradition; his translations from French include Gautier’s ‘Arria Marcella’ in One of Cleopatra’s Nights (1882) and Flaubert’s Tentation de St. Antoine; he wrote vampire stories in ‘The Story of Chugoro’ in Kotto (1902) and elsewhere; took refuge mentally in France and immersed himself in French literature; corresponded with Yeats, telling that he had had a Connacht nurse who told him fairy-tales and ghost stories; journalistic writings on black culture in Cincinnati; published work on black culture of New Orleans; made Shinto central to his analysis of Japan, with its belief in the parallel world of spirits; translated Kwaidan, or weird stories, from the Japanese; ‘his view of peasant life in Ireland was remarkably similar to the Shinto-based ethos of pre-Meiji Japan and, in a sense, provides a bridge from his Irish youth to his mature Japanese work: “Anciently woods and streams were peopled for him [the peasant] with invisible beings; angles and demons walked at his side; the woods had fairies, the mountains their goblins, the marshes their flitting spirits, and the dead came back to him at times to bear a message or to rebuke a fault. Also the ground that he trod upon, the plants growing in the field, the cloud above him, the lights of heaven were all full of mystery and ghostliness”; commended Yeats’s ‘Hosting of the Air’ for its ability to convey the ‘pleasure of fear’ (On Poetry), and wrote a passionate letter of protest when the poem appeared in The Wind Among the Reeds in a revised version: “This wonderful thing ... must have been blown into you and through you as by the Wind of the Holy ghost’ (MS letter, 22 June 1901; Tokyo); other works incl. Stray Leaves from Strange Literature (1884), Chinese Ghosts (1887); wrote to Yeats, “But I hope you will not think me unsympathetic in regard to Irish matters ... forty-five years ago, I was a horrid little boy, ‘with never a crack in his heart’, who lived in Upper Leeson Street, Dublin ... So I ought to love Irish Things, and do.’ (MS, letter of 24 Sept. 1901; Tokyo). Bibl., Henry Goodman, ed., The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (NY 1949; 1972); On Poetry, ed. Hearn, R. Tanabe, T. Ochiai, and I. Nishizaki; Shadowings (Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1900); Elizabeth Bisland, ed., The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn [The Riverside Press, Cambridge] (Boston & NY: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910); Elizabeth Bisland, The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn [Vol. XIX of the Koizumi Edn. of the Writings of Lafcadio Hearn] (Boston & NY: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1923).

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John Moran, ‘The most famous Irishman you’ve never heard of’, in The Irish Times (20 Sept.2004): ‘[...] next Sunday is the centenary of the death of an extraordinary Irishman who, at different times of a life lived in full, was Patrick Hearn, Lafcadio Hearn and Koizumi Yakumo, who reached the top of his profession as a journalist and translator in Cincinnati and New Orleans, who achieved broader acclaim as a writer for leading US magazines with sketches and feuilletons from New Orleans and Martinique, who had rave reviews for two early novels and who went on to world renown as an interpreter of Japan, where he died aged only 54. / Despite the significance of the anniversary the main act of commemoration will be a small exhibition next month at the Chester Beatty Library, in Dublin. Ireland’s neglect compares embarrassingly with events in Greece, where he was born, in New Orleans, where he lived for 10 years, and in Japan, where he married, had four children and spent his final 14 years. It’s a neglect that also flies in the face of a renewed worldwide interest in the writer. On September 9th, for example, New Orleans City Council voted to designate a house in which Hearn lived as an official landmark. / Until relatively recently Hearn was best known for his exquisite sketches of life, customs and folk tales in Japan between 1890 and 1904, a time of great change, when the country was abandoning its ancient customs and beginning a process of rapid industrialisation. During Hearn’s period there he satisfied a great hunger in the West for Japonism with his sublime evocations of old Japan. / Some years after his death, however, Hearn’s star began to wane, due in part to his being seen as a writer who romanticised fin-de-siècle Japan at a time when Western readers had begun to lose their appetite for exotic tales from the “inscrutable” Orient. More significantly, disenchantment intensified as Japan developed imperialist ambitions and Western public opinion turned against it with its involvement in the second World War. / In post-war Japan many liberals were embarrassed that those on the ultra-nationalist far right shared Hearn’s enthusiasm for ancient Japanese culture, a view that had already brought only ruin and ostracism. Other critics have said he looked at the country through rose-tinted glasses. Nonetheless, Hearn has remained an abiding interest, and today most Japanese children are as familiar with Hearn and his wife’s interpretations of Japanese ghost stories, or kwaidan, as Irish children are with Cuchulainn.’ Further, US critic Macolm Cowley called Hearn ‘the writer in our language who can best be compared with Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm’ , in 1949. Cites Jonathan Cott’s 1990 biography, Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey Of Lafcadio Hearn. An updated version of The Grass Lark, Elizabeth Stevenson’s detailed and affectionate biography, was published in 1999. Simon J. Bronner’s Lafcadio Hearn’s America, from 2002, was another excellent compilation of Hearn’s journalism; also Paul Murray, a biography in 1993 pref. by R. F. Foster. [For full version see infra.]

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References
Albert Manguel, Black Water Anthology of Fantasy Literature (1983), pp.502-06, selects ‘Of a Promise Kept’, from A Japanese Miscellany (1901).

Peter Ellis Books (Cat. 2004) lists An American Miscellany (London: Heinemann 1925), 500pp. [1st UK edn.], intro. by Albert Mordell; printed on American sheets with American title, suggesting use of Dodd, Mead overstock; collection of articles and stories written before Hearn went to Japan.

Thomas A. Goldwasser Rare Books (San Francisco; Cat 17 [2004]): Lafcadio Hearn, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin 1898); 2nd printing of 1st edn.; cloth, enscribed to ‘Dr. J. W. Robertson Compliments of Ambrose Bierce, Feb. 18, 1899’. Robertson was a physician in Livermore (East Bay, SF), and founder of a sanitorium and book collector, chiefly of Poe.

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Quotations
Odd, Queer, Strange ...: In a letter Hearn wrote, ‘I am pledging myself to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous’. [q. source.]

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‘Buddhism has a voluminous theology; a profound philosophy, a literature as vast as the sea. Shinto has no philosophy, no code of ethics, no metaphysics; and yet, by its very immateriality, it can resist the invasion of Occidental religious thought as no other Orient faith can. Shinto extends a welcome to Western science, but remains the irresistible opponent of Western religion; and the foreign zealots who would strive against it are astounded to find the power that foils their uttermost efforts indefinable as magnetism and invulnerable as air. Indeed the best of our scholars have never been able to tell us what Shinto is. To some it appears to be merely ancestor-worship, to others ancestor-worship combined with nature-worship; to others, again, it seems to be no religion at all; and to the missionary of the more ignorant class it is the worst form of heathenism. Doubtless the difficulty of explaining Shinto has been due simply to the fact that the Sinologists have sought for the source of its books: in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, which are its histories; in the Norito which are its prayers; in the commentaries of Motowori and Hirata, who were its greatest scholars. But the reality of Shinto lives not in books, nor in rites, nor in commandments, but in the national heart, of which it is the highest emotional religious expression, immortal and ever young. For underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive.’ (Quoted from Hearn’s first book on Japan, in Paul Murray Paul Murray, ‘Lafadio Hearn, 1850-1904’, in Ian Nash, ed., Britain and Japan Biographical Portraits, Vol. II [?1997], pp.137-50; p.146.

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Notes
Plaque: Lafcadio Hearn’s childhood home is marked by a plaque in Dublin, facing Wellington Place; there is a Lafcadio Hearne Collection at Clifton Waller Barrett Library, MS Division, University of Virginia Lib, which contains an unfinished autobiography; the Japan-Ireland Association awards an annual Lafcadio Hearn Gold Medal for persons or organisations making a signification contribution to Irish-Japanese relations; there is also a Lafcadio Hearn Museum at the Sundai Ireland International Schol, Newbridge, Co. Kildare.

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Robert Lowell, “Father’s Bedroom”: ‘In my Father’s bedroom: / blue threads as thin / as pen-writing on the bedspread, / blue dots on the curtains, / a blue kimono, / Chinese sandals with blue plush straps. / The broad-planked floor / had a sandpapered neatness. / The clear glass bed-lamp / with a white doily shade / was still raised a few / inches by resting on volume two / of Lafcadio Hearn’s / Glimpses of unfamiliar Japan. / Its warped olive cover / was punished like a rhinoceros hide. / In the flyleaf: / “Robbie from Mother.” / Years later in the same hand: / “This book has had hard usage / On the Yangtze River, China. / It was left under an open porthole in a storm.’ (“Life Studies”, in Life Studies [Pt. 3] (London: Faber & Faber 1959) [Pt. III], p.47.

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