In 1861, Brenane, aware that Hearn was turning away from Catholicism, sent him to the Institution Ecclésiastique, a Catholic church school in Yvetot, France. During that period he mastered his French.
Gallery of Lafcadio Hearn
Lafcadio Hearn poses for a photo when he was about 8 years old with his great-aunt, Sarah Brenane, in Ireland.
Gallery of Lafcadio Hearn
In 1863, Hearn was enrolled at St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw, a Catholic seminary at what is now the University of Durham. In this environment, Hearn adopted the nickname "Paddy" to try to fit in better and was the top student in English composition for three years.
Gallery of Lafcadio Hearn
Lafcadio Hearn, 16, poses for a photo in Ireland.
College/University
Career
Gallery of Lafcadio Hearn
A group of graduates of the middle school: 1 Mr. Hearn 2 Mr. Nishida 3 The old teacher of Chinese Classics.
Gallery of Lafcadio Hearn
Lafcadio Hearn in Tokyo with student Hachisaburo Fujisaki.
Gallery of Lafcadio Hearn
Hearn and his pupil M. Otani.
Gallery of Lafcadio Hearn
Lafcadio Hearn with his wife, Setsuko Koizumi, and their son.
Achievements
Commemorative stamp issued on the 100th anniversary of Hearn’s death.
In 1861, Brenane, aware that Hearn was turning away from Catholicism, sent him to the Institution Ecclésiastique, a Catholic church school in Yvetot, France. During that period he mastered his French.
In 1863, Hearn was enrolled at St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw, a Catholic seminary at what is now the University of Durham. In this environment, Hearn adopted the nickname "Paddy" to try to fit in better and was the top student in English composition for three years.
("I am conscious they are only trivial," wrote Lafcadio He...)
"I am conscious they are only trivial," wrote Lafcadio Heam from New Orleans in 1880 to his friend H. E. Krehbiel, speaking of the weird little sketches he was publishing from time to time in the columns of the Daily Item, the New Orleans newspaper which first gave him employment in the city where he spent the ten years from 1877 to 1887.
(Although it was printed anonymously in 1885, Lafcadio Hea...)
Although it was printed anonymously in 1885, Lafcadio Hearn is generally accepted as the author of La Cuisine Creole. In his introduction, Hearn describes the intriguing origin of this unique cuisine, explaining that, “it partakes of the nature of its birthplace - New Orleans - which is cosmopolitan in its nature, blending the characteristics of the American, French, Spanish, Italian, West Indian, and Mexican. There are also obvious influences from Native Americans, African Americans, and others in the American melting pot.”
(Out of the East came wonderful tales by a Westerner who l...)
Out of the East came wonderful tales by a Westerner who loved the old Japan - devotion, ancestor worship, courtesy, and kindness - and record his feelings for the rest of the world to read. This collection of "reveries and studies," as author and legendary Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn subtitled Out of the East, contains unforgettable tales like "The Red Bridal," in which the conflict between duty and human feelings leads to tragedy in classically Japanese style; moving personal memoirs like "with Kyushu Students," Hearn's account of his experiences teaching at Kumamoto Higher Middle School; and marvelous evocations of atmosphere like "The Dream of Summer Day."
(The 15 classic essays collected in Kokoro examine the inn...)
The 15 classic essays collected in Kokoro examine the inner spiritual life of Japan. The title itself can be translated as "heart," "spirit" or "inner meaning," and that's exactly what this collection teaches us about Japan. Sometimes touching and always compelling, the writings here tell the stories of the people and social codes that make Japan the unique place it is.
The Boy Who Drew Cats and Other Japanese Fairy Tales
(A talking tea kettle, a monstrous goblin-spider that live...)
A talking tea kettle, a monstrous goblin-spider that lives in a haunted temple, miniature soldiers that plague a lazy young bride, and other fanciful creatures abound in this captivating collection of eleven Japanese fairy tales. Youngsters are transported to an exotic, faraway world of samurai warriors, rice fields, humble cottages, and a magical spring in five tales excellently translated and adapted by noted writer and linguist Lafcadio Hearn.
(The most beautiful sight in Japan, and certainly one of t...)
The most beautiful sight in Japan, and certainly one of the most beautiful in the world, is the distant apparition of Fuji on cloudless days, - more especially days of spring and autumn when the greater part of the peak is covered with late or with early snows. You can seldom distinguish the snowless base, which remains the same color as the sky: you perceive only the white cone seeming to hang in heaven; and the Japanese comparison of its shape to an inverted half-open fan is made wonderfully exact by the fine streaks that spread downward from the notched top, like shadows of fan-ribs.
(The Black Forest is not the only place where fairies begu...)
The Black Forest is not the only place where fairies beguile and animals take human shape-the shadows of Mount Fuji to boast their own impressive catalogue of accounts of the weird and the wonderful. From cautionary tales to ghostly visions, the fairy stories of Japan are characterized not only by the customary amount of fantasy but also by a welcome dose of mischievous fun. For any lover of other-worlds, dreamscapes, and magical beings, this collection of Japanese folk and fairy tales provides quick transportation to a land of miniature warriors, willow-women, and ogre-isles, beautifully accented by the unmistakable exoticism of the Land of the Rising Sun.
(A collection of ghostly stories from Lafcadio Hearn. Deat...)
A collection of ghostly stories from Lafcadio Hearn. Deathless images of ghosts and goblins, touches of folklore and superstition, salted with traditions of the nation. While some of these stories contain ghosts and monsters, others are not ghostly or ghastly at all. 'Bits of Poetry' offers an engaging study on verse, and 'Japanese Buddhist Proverbs' explains the meaning of several aphorisms based on Japanese cultural references.
(This classic collection of Japanese ghost and folk storie...)
This classic collection of Japanese ghost and folk stories is of enormous importance to the field of Japanese studies. Japanese curios, with sundry cobwebs, excite the curiosity and imagination of a master spinner of tales, and the result is Kotto, another Lafcadio Hearn classic about old Japan. Here Hearn spins tales from old Japanese books to illustrate some strange beliefs. They are only curious, he says laconically, but some of these legends will make your spine tingle and your heart trip faster, like the one about a waterfall called Yurei Daki, or the Cascade of Ghosts.
(Kwaidan is a collection of supernatural occurrences as to...)
Kwaidan is a collection of supernatural occurrences as told by the Japanese oral historians. Witness horror straight from the Masters of Horror and be prepared to meet fantastic characters like spirits, goblins and insects that mimic human behavior. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes.
(In the course of the preparation of these volumes, there ...)
In the course of the preparation of these volumes, there was gradually accumulated so great a number of the letters written by Lafcadio Hearn during twenty-five years of his life, and these letters proved of so interesting a nature, that eventually the plan of the whole work was altered. The original intention was that they should serve only to illuminate the general text of the biography, but as their number and value became more apparent it was evident that to reproduce them in full would make the book both more readable and more illustrative of the character of the man than anything that could possibly be related of him.
(A translator of Flaubert and Gautier, Lafcadio Hearn was ...)
A translator of Flaubert and Gautier, Lafcadio Hearn was the master of a gaudy and sometimes self-consciously decadent literary style, but he was also a tough-minded and keenly observant reporter, with an eye for the offbeat, the sensual, and occasionally the gruesome. The writings of his American years collected in this Library of America volume - on subjects as wide-ranging as comparative folklore, the history of musical instruments, French literary avant-gardes, and New Orleans voodoo - reveal an omnivorous curiosity and an always eclectic sensibility.
Lafcadio Hearn's Japan: An Anthology of his Writings on the Country and it's People
(This collection of writings from Lafcaido Hern paints a r...)
This collection of writings from Lafcaido Hern paints a rare and fascinating picture of pre-modern Japan Over a century after his death, author, translator, and educator Lafcaido Hearn remains one of the best-known Westerners ever to make Japan his home. Almost more Japanese than the Japanese - "to think with their thoughts" was his aim - his prolific writings on things Japanese were instrumental in introducing Japanese culture to the West. In this masterful anthology, Donald Richie shows that Hearn was first and foremost a reliable and enthusiastic observer, who faithfully recorded a detailed account of the people, customs, and culture of late nineteen-century Japan.
Chinese Ghost Stories: Curious Tales of the Supernatural
(Chinese Ghost Stories are a selection of the most enterta...)
Chinese Ghost Stories are a selection of the most entertaining Chinese traditional tales of the strange and fantastic. Hearn had a great affinity for the traditional ghost stories of China, and these stories clearly inspired him as he penned subsequent works. Set in richly atmospheric locales, these tales speak of heroic sacrifice, chilling horror, eerie beauty, and otherworldly intervention. This completely reset and pinyin-converted edition of Hearn's classic work contains a new foreword by Victoria Cass, which places the stories, their author, and his love for the strange and mysterious into perspective.
(In the Victorian era, Lafcadio Hearn introduced the cultu...)
In the Victorian era, Lafcadio Hearn introduced the culture and literature of Japan to the West. Celebrated for his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, as well as writings about the city of New Orleans, Hearn produced a diverse and inimitable range of works. This comprehensive eBook presents Hearn’s complete works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts appearing in digital print for the first time, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material.
Lafcadio Hearn, also called (from 1895) Koizumi Yakumo, is a Greek-Japanese writer, translator, and teacher. Hearn introduced the culture and literature of Japan to the W.
Background
Lafcadio Hearn was born on June 27, 1850, in Lefkáda, Levkas, Greece (at that time the United States of the Ionian Islands) to the family of Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn (of County Offaly, Ireland) and Rosa Antoniou Kassimatis, a Greek woman of noble Kytheran lineage. The family of Hearn's father wasn't happy with this marriage and the couple split up.
Education
In 1857 Hearn's great aunt Sarah Brenane - who by that time had become his official guardian - engaged a tutor to provide him with Catholic education. Hearn began exploring Brenane's library and read extensively in Greek literature, especially myths.
In 1861, Brenane, aware that Hearn was turning away from Catholicism, sent him to the Institution Ecclésiastique, a Catholic church school in Yvetot, France. During that period he mastered his French.
In 1863, Hearn was enrolled at St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw, a Catholic seminary at what is now the University of Durham. In this environment, Hearn adopted the nickname "Paddy" to try to fit in better and was the top student in English composition for three years.
In 1867, Hearn was sent to study at yet another boarding school in Rouen. Within a year, he had run away from the school to the Latin Quarter in Paris. His aunt Brenane responded by cutting off Hearn’s supply of money and packing him off to live with an elderly former maid of hers in a dingy house in London. Then, in another reversal, Brenane lost most of her fortune supporting a series of bad investments by a relative, leaving both herself and Hearn in straitened circumstances. During that time Hearn wandered the streets, spent time in workhouses, and generally lived an aimless, rootless existence. His main intellectual activities consisted of visits to libraries and the British Museum.
Stripped of financial resources and essentially alone in the world, Hearn, at the age of nineteen, went to seek out one of Brenane’s distant relatives living in Cincinnati. In 1869 he arrived in New York, where he would remain for two years. Little is known about this period; it is not clear how Hearn managed to survive. In 1871 he arrived in Cincinnati and was befriended by English-born printer Henry Watkin, who trained him in proofreading and copy editing. His career as a journalist began with a noteworthy run at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where he specialized in meticulously detailed and accurate descriptions of crimes, riots, public brawls, and gruesome murders. Most notably, he attracted national attention with his coverage of the so-called “Tan Yard Case,” stringing out the details of the investigation in cliffhanger style.
After the success with “Tan Yard,” Hearn took to nocturnal prowling in search of the most bizarre stories he could find. He also made his first known sortie into literature, with a journal of worldly satire, dubbed Ye Giglampz by his friend and co-editor, artist Henry Farney (the name was Farney’s joke at Hearn’s expense, as he found Hearn’s enlarged right eye, further magnified by the monocle he affected at the time, as large as a carriage lantern or “gig lamp”).
In 1874 Hearn married a local African American girl, breaking the Ohio laws against miscegenation. The marriage lasted 3 years and cost Hearn his job. He started working for Cincinnati Commercial.
In 1877 a restless Hearn moved to New Orleans, ostensibly to cover an electoral scandal for the Enquirer. Instead, he submitted vignettes and prose poems: a series of love letters addressed to New Orleans. Hearn scrambled to keep himself alive as best he could in the year that followed, and eventually found work with the newly founded New Orleans Item. In the meantime, he had become intimately acquainted with the prostitutes, petty criminals, lunatics, and eccentrics of the local underground, which color he worked into his articles. This journalistic work, which appeared not only in the Item but in national magazines, is the first breakthrough phase in Hearn’s literary career.
In 1884 Hearn made the first of two visits to the Caribbean, that would inaugurate the second phase in his literary career. Fascinated by the tropical climate and the heterogeneity of colonial culture on the plantations, he began research for his first novel, Chita, which appeared in Harper’s magazine in 1889, to enormous success. The germ of the story was an account from Cable of the eradication of Last Island in the Gulf of Mexico and the resulting deaths of several vacationing Creoles from the mainland. The melodramatic unfolding of a tragic separation and reunion in death, Chita was criticized in the Nation as “the slightest possible melody set to an elaborate accompaniment a rarely fine subject made tiresome by a lush style.” However, the novella was popular and, on the strength of the public’s response, the editors of Harper’s sent Hearn, at his request, to Martinique. He would remain there for two years, producing numerous travel essays and a second novella entitled Youma. The success of Chita was not borne out in the Caribbean material that followed it, and after two years Hearn was ready for a new assignment - Japan.
With backing from Harper’s, Hearn sailed east with the intention of casting around in his usual, dilatory manner for an indeterminate period of time and writing up the results. Arriving in 1890, he was destined to find in Japan the closest thing to a homeland he ever knew. Ignoring his deal with the magazine, he chose instead to pursue a living teaching western literature in Japanese schools, a course that would eventually win him a post as full professor at Tokyo University in 1895. In 1891 he married Setsuko Koizumi and eventually became a Japanese subject, taking the name Yakumo Koizumi.
On discovering Japan, Hearn entered his third and final phase, which was his most prolific, writing on Japanese subjects for western audiences. Not only did Hearn endeavor to act as a cultural ambassador between Japan and the West, but he also pursued his own particular interest in ghoulish stories, unearthing and bringing to light, by translation and adaptation, several volumes of folkloric Japanese ghost stories, of which the most famous is Kwaidan.
Toward the end of his life, however, Hearn seemed to lose some of the sense of glamorous enchantment that shaped his first writings about Japan. His last book, published posthumously as Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation, was the first and only example of his dissatisfaction. He worried that Japan was becoming too westernized and too dependent on the West as a result, and he was generally disappointed with contemporary Japanese life as it developed into a more modern, industrial state.
On 26 September 1904, Lafcadio Hearn died of heart failure at the age of 54 years. His grave is at the Zōshigaya Cemetery in Toshima, Tokyo.
Patricios Lefcadios Hearn was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church. Abandoned by his parents, Hearn was left in the custody of his ultra-devout Irish Catholic great-aunt Brenane who sent him to Jesuit schools in Normandy and England, which caused in Hearn a life-long hatred for the Jesuits, Catholicism, and organized religion in general. That turned him into an agnostic. However, most of his biographers agree that this religious upbringing had some effect on Hearn, making him, if not superstitious, at least greatly intrigued by superstition, the occult, and everything macabre and outre. When Hearn became a naturalized Japanese, assuming the name Koizumi Yakumo he converted to Buddhism.
Politics
Hearn was also an astute political philosopher. To the doctrinaire leftist, he was a reactionary. To the doctrinaire rightist, he was an iconoclast. In truth, he was nothing so simple. He was a cultured bohemian, a spiritual agnostic, an anti-industrial capitalist. Hearn never felt at home in bustling cities and was appalled by slum conditions in the newly industrialized areas of America and Japan. Yet he remained an emphatic champion of liberty, and never bought into the solutions of the pseudo-progressive doctrines of his day.
Views
Along with his own writings, Hearn took it upon himself to introduce the reading public to the writers he most admired, through translations and paraphrases, notably French authors Pierre Loti, Jules le Maitre, Gerard de Nerval, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Zola, Daudet, Flaubert, Theophile Gautier, and Guy de Maupassant - all of them highly influential on the development of Hearn’s own prose, and all of the writers in whom Hearn found the cognate of his “worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.” Over time, the number of such articles would grow to exceed two hundred in five years. In 1882 Hearn met a personal influence, George Washington Cable, who introduced Hearn to more highbrow literary circles and helped him find a wider audience in national magazines.
However, the greatest single influence on Hearn was, arguably, the social Darwinist philosopher Herbert Spenser, whom Hearn never met. He discovered Spenser in 1883. Spenser was a materialist who sought to combine the hard sciences - notably biology and natural history - with ethics. From 1883 on Hearn’s outlook was an unusual mixture of the fantastic and the scientific, the hypnotic-hallucinatory and the rigorously empirical. Many critics have argued that the result, as played out in his prose, was an excessively material concern for the actual words as dedicated to the illusory and bizarre content, generally to the detriment of the content.
Personality
Handicapped by partial blindness, Hearn was a colorful, imaginative, but morbidly discontented man.
While in Japan he encountered the art of Jū-Jutsu which made a deep impression upon him. Hearn first encountered the martial art at the gymnasium of a school for which he worked. His Jū-Jutsu teacher was Jigoro Kano who was the incumbent principal of the school and the founder of judo and the very person who invited Hearn to the Fifth School.
Physical Characteristics:
Hearn's time in these schools marked him in a more was accidentally struck by a schoolmate in the left eye, which became permanently clouded. Not only was Hearn half-blinded by this incident, but, while his left eye was filmed over, his right eye, already severely myopic, became enlarged in compensation. From then on, Hearn regarded himself as disfigured, taking pains to conceal his left eye and making sure he was never pictured in illustrations or photographs except for from his right side. In manner, he became considerably more retiring and downcast.
Quotes from others about the person
Ferris Greenslet stated in his introduction to Hearn’s Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist: “The integrity of Hearn’s intellectual life consisted of his strangely single-hearted devotion to both artistic and scientific truth. Hearn steadily envisaged the horror that envelops the stupendous universe of modern science, and by evoking and reviving ancient myths and immemorial longings, cast over the darkness a ghostly light of vanished suns.”
Ferris Greenslet, in his introduction to a volume of Hearn’s early writings, said: “[The] philosophy of Spenser came to him with something of the power and function of an evangelical religion, bringing with it not only conversion but ‘conviction of sin’ and ‘regeneration’. From this time on, there was a new seriousness in his life and a new gravity in his work. Henceforth he would be concerned with the Exotic and Monstrous chiefly as they could be employed as parables of the gospel according to Herbert Spenser.”
As Anne Rowe pointed out in The Enchanted Country: Northern Writers in the South 1865-1910: “Hearn, for example, explores the life of a black voodoo purely for the interest it generates in itself, and in his sketch of a Creole servant girl he depicts the mysterious ways of the Negroes who lived closely with whites but whose private thoughts remained always a mystery to their masters. To a much greater degree than other writers, Hearn sought to present black men in their own milieu, as a valuable source of literary material in their own right.”
Basil Hall Chamberlain in Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan for the Use of Travellers and Others, stated that: “Hearn understands contemporary Japan better, and makes us understand it better than any other writer because he loves it better.” Other critics, however, were not so understanding and expressed doubts about Hearn’s uncritical and often sentimental account of Japan. In an early review in the Spectator, Hearn’s book, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, met with this fairly typical response: “The author has a charming style and a very pretty and felicitous taste in language; he writes so prettily, in fact, that it is difficult not to fancy that he sometimes sacrifices ugly facts to preserve the harmony of his tale.”
"What Western brain could have elaborated this strange teaching, never to oppose force by force, but only direct and utilize the power of attack; to overthrow the enemy solely through his own strength, to vanquish him solely by his own efforts? Surely none! The Western mind appears to work in straight lines; the Oriental, in wonderful curves and circles."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Herbert Spenser
Writers
Pierre Loti, Jules le Maitre, Gerard de Nerval, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Gustave Flaubert, Theophile Gautier, Guy de Maupassant
Sport & Clubs
Jū-Jutsu
Connections
On 14 June 1874, Hearn, aged 23, married Alethea ("Mattie") Foley, a 20-year-old African American woman, an action in violation of Ohio's anti-miscegenation law at that time. In August 1875, in response to complaints from local clergyman about his anti-religious views and pressure from local politicians embarrassed by some of his satirical writing in Ye Giglampz, the Enquirer fired him, citing as its reason his illegal marriage. Hearn and Foley separated but attempted reconciliation several times before divorcing in 1877.
Hearn’s life in Japan was greatly enhanced by his marriage to Setsuko Koizumi, who was from a local samurai family. Her parents officially adopted Hearn. In this marriage, they had three sons and a daughter: Kazuo Koizumi, Iwao Inagaki, Kiyoshi Koizumi, and Suzuko Koizumi.
The New Orleans of Lafcadio Hearn: Illustrated Sketches from the Daily City Item
Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was a master satirist who displayed a fiery wit both as a writer and as an artist. For seven months in 1880, he surprised and amused the readers of New Orleans with his wood-block "cartoons" and accompanying articles, which were variously funny, scathing, surreal, political, whimsical, and moral.
2007
Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn
Chronicles the life of one of the nineteenth century's most colorful literary figures, detailing Hearn's career as a newspaper reporter, his poetry of the New Orleans underclass, and his move to Japan.
1991
Lafcadio Hearn
This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.
2014
A Fantastic Journey: the Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn
Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), the writer of Greek-Irish parentage who thrilled and scandalized America both with his life and writings in the 1870s and 1880s, before spending two years in the French West Indies (1888-90) and, finally, reaching Japan in 1890 where he would spend the rest of his life. In Japan he would personal happiness in marriage, become its greatest-ever interpreter to the West and translate its horror (Kwaidan) tradition in immortal fashion.
2014
The Annotated Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn
There was no one who did more in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to bring the inner thoughts and ideas of Japan - its religions, its superstitions, its art, its way of thought, all that animates its people - to the West than did Lafcadio Hearn. He lived in Meiji Era Japan and became one of its citizens, linking East with West, but received no public recognition, no decorations; yet, the world places a crown of laurel upon his head.
2013
The Grass Lark: A Study of Lafcadio Hearn
It is remarkable how persistent a "minor" writer may be. He may lack the large vision and universal message of the great writer, but instead possess a clear, true, intense view of particular places, peoples, and situations that renders his work unique and irreplaceable. Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is such a figure in American literature.
1999
Blue Ghost: Lafcadio Hearn's Work
A biographical and critical study of the great American interpreter of Japanese literature, life and culture.
Lafcadio Hearn: A Bibliography of His Writings
Hearn composed his best prose-minute examinations of Japan, its people, and its folkways. He has been extremely popular in Japan since. Hearn's Bibliography cited in Besterman [2816] with 2500 titles described. The annotations are descriptions are quite detailed.