Description

Born in Greece and abandoned as a child, Lafcadio Hearn lived the life of an exile. He travelled the world and became a famous writer but always felt like an outsider – in Dublin, London, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and French-speaking Martinique. To him, none of these places felt like home.

Hearn’s life in America was punctuated by a string of successes and failures. In Cincinnati he became the city’s best-known crime reporter but was fired after marrying a black woman. Devastated, he moved to New Orleans, where he championed French Creole and Caribbean culture in pieces for Harper’s and Scribners–and created a new image for the city as a place of voodoo and debauchery (the image which many Americans still hold today as a result).

Hearn arrived in Japan at a time of historic change. Sent there as a correspondent for Harper’s, his commission was soon terminated over a dispute about pay. Alone and jobless, he settled in the remote town of Matsue, firmly believing that Japan would provide him with an endless supply of rich writing material–perhaps enough to last a lifetime. And he was right!

Over the next dozen years, Hearn published 15 books which were lauded by the likes of Mark Twain, William Butler Yeats, Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin. Hearn’s books on Japan made him famous as the leading writer on Japan and Japanese culture–a position he still occupies today.

This book recounts the many colourful episodes in Hearn’s life including:

His troubled childhood in Greece and Ireland, and emigration to America with no job or money
His career as a popular newspaper writer and essayist in Cincinnati and New Orleans where he found great success but was never fully accepted
His journey to Japan where he became a Buddhist, married the daughter of a Samurai and took the Japanese name Yakumo Koizumi
Hearn’s worldwide fame as a writer, especially for his essays and books on ghosts, demons, monsters and the supernatural world of Japanese folklore

Author Steve Kemme is president of the Lafcadio Hearn Society/USA and a leading expert on Hearn’s life and writings. This book includes a foreword by Bon Koizumi, Hearn’s great-grandson and director of the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum in Matsue, Japan, along with 30 family images which portray the pivotal people and places in Hearn’s amazing life.

‘Lafcadio Hearn understands contemporary Japan better, and makes us understand it better than any other writer, because he loves it better.’ – Basil Hall Chamberlain