Anyone familiar with Japan culture, should have heard of the name of Lafcadio Hearn. His name has become synonymous with being one of the first foreigners to arrive in Japan during the Meiji era and his attempts at understanding and explaining Japanese culture have endured to this day through his prolific writing encompassing both fiction and non-fiction. Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was a writer during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth. His writings--fiction and nonfiction alike--typically drew on his firsthand observations of life in what were then considered exotic places: New Orleans, the West Indies, and Japan.

Hearn was born on the Greek island of Lefkas, on June 27, 1850. He was the son of Surgeon-major Charles Hearn (of King's County, Ireland) and Rosa Antonia Kassimati, who had been born on Kythera, another of the Ionian Islands. His father was stationed in Lefkada during the English occupation of the islands. Lafcadio was initially baptized Patricio Lefcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn in the Greek Orthodox Church.

After his parents’ divorce when he was six, he was brought up by a great-aunt in Dublin, Ireland. His father’s brother Richard was at one time a well-known member of the Barbizon set of artists, though he made no mark as a painter due to his lack of energy. Young Hearn had a rather casual education, but in 1865 was at Ushaw Roman Catholic College, Durham. He was injured in a playground accident in his teens, causing loss of vision in his left eye and soon after, his father died.

A year later, due to his great-aunt’s bankruptcy by a Jesuitical adventurer Henry Molyneux, he was forced to withdraw from school. The religious faith in which he was brought up was, however, soon lost, and at 19 he was sent to live in the United States of America, where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. For some years he lived in utter poverty, until he found a friend in the English printer and communalist Henry Watkin (March 6, 1824-November 21, 1910). With Watkin’s help, Hearn picked up a living in the lower grades of newspaper work.

Hearn quickly advanced through the newspaper ranks and became a reporter for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, working for the paper from 1872 to 1875. With creative freedom in one of Cincinnati’s largest circulating newspapers, he developed a reputation as the paper’s premier sensational journalist, as well as the author of sensitive, dark, and fascinating accounts of Cincinnati’s disadvantaged. He continued to occupy himself with journalism and with out-of-the-way observation and reading, and meanwhile his erratic, romantic, and rather morbid idiosyncrasies developed.

While in Cincinnati, he married Alethea ("Mattie") Foley, a black woman, an illegal act at the time. When the scandal was discovered and publicized, he was fired from the Enquirer and went to work for the rival Cincinnati Commercial.
In 1874 Hearn and the young Henry Farny, later a renowned painter of the American West, wrote, illustrated, and published a weekly journal of art, literature, and satire they titled Ye Giglampz that ran for nine issues. The Cincinnati Public Library reprinted a facsimile of all nine issues in 1983.

In the autumn of 1877, Hearn left Cincinnati for New Orleans, Louisiana, where he initially wrote dispatches on his discoveries in the “Gateway to the Tropics” for the Cincinnati Commercial. He lived in New Orleans for nearly a decade, writing first for the Daily City Item and later for the Times Democrat. The vast number of his writings about New Orleans and its environs, many of which have not been collected, include the city’s Creole population and distinctive cuisine, the French Opera, and Voudou. His writings for national publications, such as Harper’s Weekly and Scribner’s Magazine, helped mold the popular image of New Orleans as a colorful place with a distinct culture more akin to Europe and the Caribbean than to the rest of North America. His best-known Louisiana works are Gombo Zhèbes, Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs in Six Dialects (1885); La Cuisine Créole (1885), a collection of culinary recipes from leading chefs and noted Creole housewives who helped make New Orleans famous for its cuisine; and Chita: A Memory of Last Island, a novella based on the hurricane of 1856 first published in Harper’s Monthly in 1888.

Harper’s sent Hearn to the West Indies as a correspondent in 1889. He spent two years in the islands and produced Two Years in the French West Indies and Youma, The Story of a West-Indian Slave (both 1890).

In 1890, Hearn went to Japan with a commission as a newspaper correspondent, which was quickly broken off. It was in Japan, however, that he found his home and his greatest inspiration. Through the goodwill of Basil Hall Chamberlain, Hearn gained a teaching position in the summer of 1890 at the Shimane Prefectural Common Middle School and Normal School in Matsue, a town in western Japan on the coast of the Sea of Japan. Most Japanese identify Hearn with Matsue, as it was here that his image of Japan was molded. Today, The Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum and Lafcadio Hearn’s Old Residence are still two of Matsue’s most popular tourist attractions. During his 15-month stay in Matsue, Hearn married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a local samurai family, and became a naturalized Japanese, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo (Eight Clouds), by which he is widely known in Japan today. The couple had three sons and a daughter together and their descendents (now grandchildren and great-grandchildren) are still very much involved in keeping the Hearn/Yakumo name and writings well-known throughout Japan and beyond.

In late 1891, Hearn took another teaching position in Kumamoto, Kyushu, at the Fifth Higher Middle School, where he spent the next three years and completed his book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). In October 1894 he secured a journalism position with the English-language Kobe Chronicle, and in 1896, with some assistance from Chamberlain, he began teaching English literature at Tokyo (Imperial) University, a post he held until 1903. On September 26, 1904, he died of heart failure at the age of 54.

In the late 19th century Japan was still largely unknown and exotic to the Western world. With the introduction of Japanese aesthetics, however, particularly at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, the West had an insatiable appetite for exotic Japan, and Hearn became known to the world through the depth, originality, sincerity, and charm of his writings. In later years, some critics would accuse Hearn of exoticizing Japan, but as the man who offered the West some of its first glimpses into pre-industrial and Meiji Era Japan, his work still offers valuable insight today.

Lafcadio Hearn’s Legacy

Hearn’s house and garden in Matsue, Shimane prefecture has been preserved and next door there is the Koizumi Yakumo Memorial Museum with displays about Hearn’s writings, life in Japan and residence in Matsue.

Hearn’s former home in Kumamoto, Kumamoto prefecture in Kyushu has also been preserved. The residence is in the center of town. (Tel: 354-7842)

Hearn’s summer house in Shizuoka prefecture was moved to Meiji Mura in Inuyama just north of Nagoya city and can now be seen there, together with a large number of other historical buildings.

Lafcadio Hearn’s grave is in Zoshigaya cemetery near Ikebukuro in Tokyo. He’s epitath reads: A man of faith, an undefiled flower blooming like eight clouds, who dwells in the mansion of right enlightenment

Some selected works by Lafcadio Hearn

Some Chinese Ghosts (1887)
A Winter Journey to Japan (1890)
Youma, the Story of a West-Indian Slave (1890)
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894)
Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (1895)
Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896)
Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East (1897)
Exotics and Retrospectives (1898)
Japanese Fairy Tales (1898)
Sequels In Ghostly Japan (1899)
Shadowings (1900)
Japanese Lyrics (1900) - on haiku
A Japanese Miscellany (1901)
Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs (1902)
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1903)
Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904)
The Romance of the Milky Way and other studies and stories (1905)
Karma (1918)
Karma and Other Stories and Essays(1921)

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