"Japan," asserts the fictitious character Lafcadio Hearn on page 97, "has chaos at its core. The closer one approaches that core, the deeper one fathoms the world of illusion and warped contradiction. Such a country is begging for citizens such as Yakumo Koizumi, that is, me."

THE DREAM OF LAFCADIO HEARN, by Roger Pulvers. Kurodahan Press, 2011, 189 pp., $14 (paper)

What kind of egotist would make such outrageous assertions, and why would he be worth reading about?

As Australian novelist, playwright and theater director Roger Pulvers explains in his introduction, "Hearn was a story reteller of genius, a writer with an instinctive knack of grasping a foreign culture's spirituality, legends, rituals and myths."