In the century that has passed since the death of Lafcadio Hearn on Sept. 26, 1904, the Japanese people have studiously formulated and maintained a myth -- and they have done it with all the tools and vigor of nostalgia at their disposal.
According to this myth, Hearn, orphan of Europe, grubber in subcultures from Cincinnati and New Orleans to Martinique, transformed himself after arriving in their country in 1890 into the defending champion of Japanese culture. No other foreigner, so this popular myth goes, has been as privy to Japanese secrets, or as devoted to their imaginative recreation; no foreigner then or since has loved Japan as deeply.
In the West, meanwhile, Hearn is but a footnote on the faded pages of exotica; a misunderstood mystery of a man who seemed to identify solely with cultural phenomena that had passed their sell-by-dates. It was almost as if this man had to re-create a past before he could start living in the present.
But who was this intensely shy man of occult and, to the Victorian mind-set, highly imprudent tastes, this freakish misfit who found solace for his imagination and, most important of all, respect for himself as a human being, only in Japan?
Lafcadio Hearn was born on the Greek island of Lefkas in 1850 -- his mother, Rosa, a native of the island; his father, Charles, a surgeon in the British navy, temporarily posted to a military fort on the island. In 1852, Rosa took Lafcadio to Dublin, and the two were promptly deserted by Charles, who sailed away to a new life and eventually another marriage.
Rosa, functionally illiterate, could barely cope with life in Ireland, and soon left her son in the care of her husband's aunt and returned to Greece.
Lafcadio, a toddler with virtually no recollection of either mother or father, was then sent by this pious Catholic great aunt to a school in County Durham, northeast England. It was there that Hearn lost his sight in one eye, apparently in a game in which people swing on ropes around a pole. It was also at school that he started to build his muscles -- a defense against the isolation and estrangement he increasingly felt. Hearn's mistrust of the church and disdain for missionaries that were to become so blatant in Japan no doubt had their origins here.
After a few years his great aunt lost her money, forcing Hearn to leave school. He spent a year subsisting in London before, in 1869, sailing for the United States. After arriving in America at age 19, Hearn made his way to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was to spend eight years, more than half of them as a working journalist.
Hearn's haunt in Cincinnati was the so-called Dead Man's Corner, his fellow travelers the derelicts and shady wheeler-dealers of the local underclass. As a journalist -- and Hearn's writing about these characters is first rate, if obsessively grisly -- he was fascinated by their mores, their lingo and their songs. As such, Hearn came out of Cincinnati as a budding ethnographer, a man with a needle-sharp eye for the grotty details of subcultures. It is this gift and skill that he was later to apply to his own special Japan, compiling, in the end, what becomes an oeuvre of ethnographic studies on everything from gumbo to geisha.
Then, in 1877, Hearn moved to New Orleans. The languorous atmosphere of New Orleans, then a shadow of its pre-Civil War self, appealed to a man who had now decided to spend his life looking for truth precisely there, in the shadows. He subsequently went further south to Martinique, where he would have stayed had it not been for his inability to write to his satisfaction in French.
It is this Hearn, at his wit's end having lost all his meager savings in an ill-fated investment in a restaurant -- and feeling alienated from an America gearing itself up for the technological revolution of the next century -- who, as luck would have it, was invited to Japan.
It is ironic that this journalist, practically ostracized by mainstream American society, aficionado and recorder of the more ghoulish qualities of the human condition, would be asked to play a part in Meiji Japan, a country that saw as its prime task a swift and far-reaching imitation of all things modern and Western.
The further irony is that Hearn turned out to be the chronicler of certain traditional aspects of the Japanese spirit that the Japanese people, once that modernization was safely under way (and Hearn was dead), were eager to express as an accompaniment to their newly found role as an emerging world power.
Hearn set foot on Japanese soil for the first time at Yokohama, in April 1890. It is fair to say that he felt at home from the beginning. Unlike virtually all other visitors to Japan from the West, he did not see himself as a preaching representative of a superior culture. He was in Japan to absorb its culture, not to sermonize his own.
He threw himself into his new exotic garden with a genuine sense of wonder and discovery -- setting out a patch for himself that other Westerners had little interest in, and then cultivating it with an intense passion.
He naturally gravitated, given his predilections, to the esoteric and mystical, introducing them as exemplary and representative. And as he observed, examined and wrote, he realized that he had finally found an identity for himself: Lafcadio Hearn -- Chief Recorder of the Vanishing Japan.
As such, Hearn established a pattern of writing about Japan that lasted a century. Western writers on the life of the Japanese continued in the Hearnian tradition, bewailing to their readers, and to any Japanese people who would listen, the tragic loss of all things good, quaint, mysterious and Japanese.
From Yokohama, Hearn first went to Matsue, arriving in September 1890; and though he spent only about a year there as a teacher, he has been associated with this town on the Sea of Japan coast ever since. In a way this makes sense, for it was in Matsue that he first delved into those areas of religious practice, provincial custom and folklore that were to form the vantage points of his outlook on Japan.
In Matsue, in February 1891, he married Setsu Koizumi, 17 years his junior; and the couple, together with members of her family and servants, moved to Kumamoto in Kyushu, where Hearn had accepted a teaching position at a high school.
It was in Kumamoto that he passed the most unhappy spell of his last years. For one thing he had never been accustomed to looking after anyone but himself. Now he had a family, a burden he had dreaded since youth. He also began to see an ominous trend in his beloved adopted country. Japan had set itself on the path of empire, forcing its interests upon Asia. Hearn, an enemy of empire West and East, dearly wished for Japan to abandon the rush to the modern. In a speech delivered in Kumamoto on Jan. 27, 1894, he said: "In the case of Japan, I think, there is a possible danger -- the danger of abandoning the old, simple, healthy, natural, sober, honest way of living. I think Japan will be strong as long as she preserves her simplicity."
In other words, Hearn saw Japan following the trail blazed by the West -- one that led to colonies and national aggrandizement, and he, who barely spoke or wrote Japanese but was now a self-styled expert on "the real Japan," was urging them to stay simple and austere. That was where Japan's beauty resided, he believed: in traditional simplicity and stoic austerity.
In July 1894, Hearn left teaching and returned to journalism, joining the staff of the Kobe Chronicle. Kobe was a bustling little city, whose movers and shakers were intent on wholesale Westernization. However, Hearn, antipathetic to Western racist views of Orientals, increasingly saw himself as a Japanese. It was in the following year that he became a naturalized Japanese, taking on his wife's surname and a first name symbolic of the region of her home. He became Yakumo Koizumi.
In August 1896, he made his final move in Japan, to Tokyo, taking up a teaching position at Tokyo Imperial University, today's University of Tokyo. He taught there until 1903 when, as a result of a controversy over whether he should have an inflated foreigner's salary or a meager Japanese one, he left under a considerable cloud.
His health was deteriorating. A heart complaint that had dogged him for years, exacerbated by a near fatal bout of dengue fever in his New Orleans days, returned. In April 1904, he transferred to Waseda University, but that was not to last long. On Sept. 26, his heart gave out and he passed away.
Hearn's original fiction from his pre-Japan days, despite the fascinating locations of its narratives, is not inspired. He was all too aware of this himself and chose to be a re-teller of tales, a creative translator of folklore. This is the essence of his gift.
Hearn's 11 books on Japanese themes gained him a formidable posthumous reputation in the West. But as Japan pressed further and further in its imperial drive, Western readers began to view his preoccupations with the ideal, the exquisite and the spiritual as irrelevant.
At the same time, the Japanese came to sense that they needed a soulful underpinning for their new roles on the world stage. Who could provide it better, in ready-made English-language form, than Lafcadio Hearn? They adopted him as their spokesman. And they have kept him pretty much center-stage ever since.
As for the man himself, there is no doubt he was disillusioned -- the perfect word for Hearn -- with his adopted country.
Hearn had never had much time for the new Japanese male, whom he saw as an arrogant copyist of decadent Western ways; and he was thoroughly disgruntled with the treatment he was receiving in "the new Japan."
During his lifetime, he was largely unrecognized by foreigners in Japan and Japanese. His only choice was to go back to the country that made him into a writer in the first place -- America, where he was planning a series of lectures and hoping to land an academic job.
In a letter to the British Japanologist Arthur Diosy, dated April 28, 1903, Hearn wrote: "Perhaps you do not know that most of my books were written under great disadvantage. I did the best I could, almost alone, and the result has been well-spoken of by European men of letters. But in Japan, all this has been studiously ignored."
Hearn was an outsider who had found, at last, his natural home in Japan. But he was too restless and melancholic, too trapped by personal obsessions, and too disaffected with his surroundings and his times to realize just how good his fortune was.
