Patrick “Lafcadio” Hearn was known for burning the midnight oil. Contemporaries would often find his 5-foot-3-inch frame hunched over his writing desk at night, his face nearly touching the page as he scoured it with his one good eye, excising yet another draft of minor imperfections. Such imagery is fitting for an eccentric and deeply impassioned writer whose career was defined by “ghostly sketches” and “studies of strange things.”

The Outsider: The Life and Work of Lafcadio Hearn, by Steve Kemme. 272 pages, TUTTLE PUBLISHING, Nonfiction.

Despite an extensive bibliography that includes travelogues, muckraking journalism, translations of the French Romantics and supernatural folklore, Hearn was often the most interesting subject in his work. This has caused many biographers and novelists to try to capture his life in words, from Elisabeth Bisland’s personal and moving account of her dear friend in “The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn” to novels like Monique Truong’s “The Sweetest Fruits” and Roger Pulver’s “The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn,” which recount Hearn’s story with poetic licensing.

“The Outsider: The Life and Work of Lafcadio Hearn” is the latest biography to take a stab at bringing one of history’s great Japanophiles back to life. Written by Steve Kemme, president of the Lafcadio Hearn Society/USA and a former reporter at The Cincinnati Enquirer (the same paper where Hearn learned his trade), it was published by Tuttle this month.

Kemme first discovered Hearn through Jon Hughes’ “Period of the Gruesome,” a collection of Hearn’s most lurid crime reporting from Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1870s. But it was Hearn’s writings on Japan that got him hooked.

“I was most impressed with his ‘Kwaidan’ book. How he had refashioned Japanese folktales into his own literary style,” Kemme says, referring to Hearn’s 1930 collection of scary stories. “I thought they were so well written and just captured the essence of Japan’s spirit.”

“The Outsider” contains numerous excerpts of Hearn’s writing, designed to show his prodigious talent with the pen and the development of his style over the course of his career. But the challenge for any biographer is to animate the pages with the personality of their subject. And with Hearn, there’s also the challenge of detailing his upbringing, of which little is substantiated other than his Dickensian levels of suffering.

Japan Times

Born in 1850 to a Greek mother and Irish father on an island called Lefkada in the Ionian Sea, Hearn was abandoned by both parents by the age of 7. He was then raised by a pious Irish great-aunt who treated his fear of the dark by locking him in a windowless room come nightfall. At age 16, he sustained a disfiguring eye injury in a playground incident, which haunted him for the rest of his life, and was rendered penniless in both London and Cincinnati before he was 20.

“Hearn's letters to his brother James and to his half-sister, Minnie Atkinson, helped greatly in fleshing out some of the details of his early years,” Kemme says. “I also found O.W. Frost's ‘Young Hearn’ to be invaluable in providing information about his family history and his childhood. ... He corresponded with some of Hearn's relatives and actually traveled to Greece, Ireland, England and France to gather material.”

Kemme was also able to benefit from archival material at the public library in Cincinnati, and he traveled to Hearn’s first hometown in Japan — Matsue, Shimane Prefecture — as well as Martinique and New Orleans to further inform his research. But while “The Outsider” charts the entire course of Hearn’s 54-year life, his years in Cincinnati and Japan, both of which were formative periods, make up the meat of the book.
"The Outsider: The Life and Work of Lafcadio Hearn" author Steve Kemme

“One of the things I wanted to do with this biography was to show how important the Cincinnati years were to his development,” Kemme says. “He wrote about so many different topics there and no matter what the topic was he would delve into it with full force.”

Tuttle alone has published numerous books on Hearn, but the timelessness of his work is no surprise to Kemme.

“I think his openness to other cultures and people who were on the fringes of society resonates with a lot of people today,” he says. “Hearn was embracing of other cultures; of people who weren’t like him. That’s why he moved to Japan — because he didn’t want to live in a Western industrial country, he wanted to live in a culture that was totally different from the ones he had experienced already.”

Partly because of his own insecurities, Hearn found succor in communities that other members of the literary class shunned. He frequented the dancehalls and bars of emancipated slaves in Cincinnati, explored Creole culture in the bayous of New Orleans, lived with Caribbean islanders in Martinique, and rubbed shoulders with burakumin (a minority group long considered outcasts) and provincial storytellers in Japan.

In this sense, “The Outsider” is an apt title: Hearn was always most comfortable when navigating, physically and intellectually, spaces where other writers dared not venture.

Kemme was also keen to emphasize Hearn’s colorful personality. In the book’s introduction, he writes, “For a diminutive man with a soft flute-like voice, Lafcadio Hearn often made a strong impression on those he met — and not always for the best.”

This sentiment reveals much about the Hearn he presents: an irascible, moody, petulant, yet deeply sensitive and inquisitive writer who endeared people with his wit and towering intellect, only to fall out with most of them upon the tiniest of perceived infractions. Even supportive editors and mentors who championed his work were cut from his inner circle with immediate effect.

Readers might wonder how “The Outsider” fits into the canon of Hearn literature, or whether it advances Hearn scholarship in any meaningful way. Kemme says his primary intention was for the book to be approachable.

“From the beginning, I had it in mind to have it as a general interest book; not as an academic book designed only for Hearn scholars,” he says. “I wanted the general public to become interested in him, too. And that’s how I tried to write it.”