What does it mean to be an expatriate, particularly when you feel more at home and assimilated in an adopted country than in your own?

The life of a man, born on June 27, 1850, can tell us a great deal about this state of existence outside the borders of one's native land. It also informs those of us who have chosen to live, work and, perhaps, marry and have families in Japan what our choice may have entailed.

More than a century has passed since his death in Tokyo, but Lafcadio Hearn's legacy still casts a long shadow. To this day, he is considered by most Japanese to be the foreigner who understood them the best. And yet, those very Japanese generally know no more about the man — referred to in this country by his adopted name of Yakumo Koizumi — than that he retold a few ghost stories dredged from Japan's long-forgotten past.