The Molten Notebook

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was an Anglo-Greek journalist whose uncanny tales from Japanese folklore still raise a delicious thrill. His writings from Japan enthralled a generation of readers to whom Japan, only recently opened to the West, remained an exotic country. And, even more interestingly, he was as popular – and now probably more so – with Japanese readers.

Hearn rarely stayed in one place longer than it took to write his fill about it. In Cincinnati, his gory reports from crime scenes and slaughterhouses put readers off their breakfasts. He explored cafes and riverboats in black Bucktown, where he noted songs and met his first wife.

Fired from the Cincinnati Enquirer for “deplorable moral habits” — likely for his interracial marriage — he soon fled the cold for New Orleans, where he was one of the last to interview the voodoo queen Marie Laveau. Then he was off to the Caribbean island of Martinique, whose porteuses, or carrier women, trekked across mountains and forests with hundred-pound loads on their heads. His chief passions seemed to be a pagan past and beautiful women, of fame and ill-fame alike.

And so it’s not surprising that Hearn, weary even of the tropics, should visit Japan. What’s surprising is that of all the places he had traveled, it’s where stayed. Hearn took Japanese citizenship, a Japanese name, and even an arranged Japanese wife, who spoke as little English as he spoke Japanese. A most unconventional man in America, his chosen culture was built on social convention, courtesy and propriety. Hearn was a man of such contradictions, writes Jonathan Cott in the 1990 biography Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn.

In much of his behavior as a family man, profoundly committed to traditional ways, Lafcadio accepted a world of antinomies: Old Japan/New Japan, prudery/sensuality, moralism/tolerance, married love/passion, creative isolation/ sociability, commitment/escape.

The biography is chockablack with Hearn’s own words: whole newspaper stories, folktales, great chunks of letters. (Cott had initially set out to write brief introductions to an anthology.) It hews closely to the stuff of his own life; I would have perhaps liked him to trim the quotes and provide more context on the reception of his work, but that, perhaps, is another story.

Hearn was born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn in 1850 on the Greek island of Leucadia. His father was a traveling army doctor, his mother beautiful but mentally unstable. Young Hearn was soon handed over to an elderly relative, swindled out of an inheritance, and packed off to boarding schools in France and Ireland. (The French would prove useful for bolstering his income with translations of Guy de Maupassant, Théophile Gautier, and others.)

Barely five foot three inches tall, Hearn wore enormous hats and covered the left side of his face when speaking to hide his blind eye. Whatever he wanted to see, he brought within inches of his good, bulging eye or examined under a pocket telescope.

Hearn’s writing brims full of sensory detail, from the lush swaying of palms to the tonal palette of Japanese landscapes. He notes the “immense sonority” of sandals crossing a bridge and the alternating rhythm of tones they create.

Then I notice how small and shapely the feet of the people are — whether bare brown feet of peasants, or beautiful feet of children wearing tiny, tiny geta, or feet of young girls in snowy tabi. The tabi, the white digitated stocking, gives to a small light foot a mythological aspect, — the white cleft grace of the foot of a fauness.

In his reportage, Hearn casts the stuff of real life into the forms of melodrama, ghost story, and romance. In one tale, he describes the doruma idols that, in one particular town, are one-eyed until they grant a prayer. With a satisfying, sentimental tidiness, the tale ends with him tipping his host — who then gives his doruma a new eye. As for fiction, Hearn often asked his wife Setsu to tell Japanese tales until he felt them in his bones. His Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things is perhaps his most well-known collection.

As with most places he had stayed, Hearn grew weary at times of Japan. He revisited a temple whose elderly priest and quiet air had enchanted him in his early days, only to find the priest dead and his cat aloof. His work as an English teacher took him to Tokyo, a city he despised for “absurd fashions” and “wickedly expensive living.”

Hearn nevertheless chose to stay. Known in his later years as Koizumi Yakumo, he died at age 54 beside his wife and sons. Why Japan? While Cott doesn’t play shrink for Hearn, the reader may be tempted to find reasons in his rootless past.