About Hearn:
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (June 27, 1850 - September 26, 1904),
also known as Koizumi Yakumo (????) after gaining Japanese
citizenship, was an author, best known for his books about Japan.
He is especially well-known for his collections of Japanese legends
and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange
Things. Early life Hearn was born in Lefkada (the origin of his
middle name), one of the Greek Ionian Islands. He was the son of
Surgeon-major Charles Hearn (of King's County, Ireland) and Rosa
Antonia Kassimati, who had been born on Kythera, another of the
Ionian Islands. His father was stationed in Lefkada during the
British occupation of the islands. Lafcadio was initially baptized
Patricio Lefcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn in the Greek Orthodox
Church. Hearn moved to Dublin, Ireland, at the age of two. Artistic
and rather bohemian tastes were in his blood. His father's brother
Richard was at one time a well-known member of the Barbizon set of
artists, though he made no mark as a painter due to his lack of
energy. Young Hearn had a rather casual education, but in 1865 was
at Ushaw Roman Catholic College, Durham. He was injured in a
playground accident in his teens, causing loss of vision in his
left eye. Emigration The religious faith in which he was brought up
was, however, soon lost, and at 19 he was sent to live in the
United States of America, where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. For
a time, he lived in utter poverty, which may have contributed to
his later paranoia and distrust of those around him. He eventually
found a friend in the English printer and communalist Henry Watkin.
With Watkin's help, Hearn picked up a living in the lower grades of
newspaper work. Through the strength of his talent as a writer,
Hearn quickly advanced through the newspaper ranks and became a
reporter for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, working for the paper
from 1872 to 1875. With creative freedom in one of Cincinnati's
largest circulating newspapers, he developed a reputation as the
paper's premier sensational journalist, as well as the author of
sensitive, dark, and fascinating accounts of Cincinnati's
disadvantaged. He continued to occupy himself with journalism and
with out-of-the-way observation and reading, and meanwhile his
erratic, romantic, and rather morbid idiosyncrasies developed.
While in Cincinnati, he married Alethea ("Mattie") Foley, a black
woman, an illegal act at the time. When the scandal was discovered
and publicized, he was fired from the Enquirer and went to work for
the rival Cincinnati Commercial. In 1874 Hearn and the young Henry
Farny, later a renowned painter of the American West, wrote,
illustrated, and published a weekly journal of art, literature, and
satire they titled Ye Giglampz that ran for nine issues. The
Cincinnati Public Library reprinted a facsimile of all nine issues
in 1983. New Orleans In the autumn of 1877, Hearn left Cincinnati
for New Orleans, Louisiana, where he initially wrote dispatches on
his discoveries in the "Gateway to the Tropics" for the Cincinnati
Commercial. He lived in New Orleans for nearly a decade, writing
first for the Daily City Item and later for the Times Democrat. The
vast number of his writings about New Orleans and its environs,
many of which have not been collected, include the city's Creole
population and distinctive cuisine, the French Opera, and Vodou.
His writings for national publications, such as Harper's Weekly and
Scribner's Magazine, helped mold the popular image of New Orleans
as a colorful place with a distinct culture more akin to Europe and
the Caribbean than to the rest of North America. His best-known
Louisiana works are Gombo Zhebes, Little Dictionary of Creole
Proverbs in Six Dialects (1885); La Cuisine Créole (1885), a
collection of culinary recipes from leading chefs and noted Creole
housewives who helped make New Orleans famous for its cuisine; and
Chita: A Memory of Last Island, a novella based on the hurricane of
1856 first published in Harper's Monthly in 1888. Little known
then, even today he is relatively unknown in New Orleans culture.
However, more books have been written about him than any other
former resident of New Orleans other than Louis Armstrong. His
footprint in the history of Creole cooking is visible even today.
Harper's sent Hearn to the West Indies as a correspondent in 1889.
He spent two years in the islands and produced Two Years in the
French West Indies and Youma, The Story of a West-Indian Slave
(both 1890). Later life in Japan In 1890, Hearn went to Japan with
a commission as a newspaper correspondent, which was quickly broken
off. It was in Japan, however, that he found his home and his
greatest inspiration. Through the goodwill of Basil Hall
Chamberlain, Hearn gained a teaching position in the summer of 1890
at the Shimane Prefectural Common Middle School and Normal School
in Matsue, a town in western Japan on the coast of the Sea of
Japan. Most Japanese identify Hearn with Matsue, as it was here
that his image of Japan was molded. Today, The Lafcadio Hearn
Memorial Museum (???????) and Lafcadio Hearn's Old Residence
(??????) are still two of Matsue's most popular tourist
attractions. During his 15-month stay in Matsue, Hearn married
Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a local samurai family, and became a
naturalized Japanese, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo. In late 1891,
Hearn took another teaching position in Kumamoto, Kyushu, at the
Fifth Higher Middle School, where he spent the next three years and
completed his book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). In October
1894 he secured a journalism position with the English-language
Kobe Chronicle, and in 1896, with some assistance from Chamberlain,
he began teaching English literature at Tokyo (Imperial)
University, a post he held until 1903. On September 26, 1904, he
died of heart failure at the age of 54. In the late 19th century
Japan was still largely unknown and exotic to the Western world.
With the introduction of Japanese aesthetics, however, particularly
at the Paris World's Fair in 1900, the West had an insatiable
appetite for exotic Japan, and Hearn became known to the world
through the depth, originality, sincerity, and charm of his
writings. In later years, some critics would accuse Hearn of
exoticizing Japan, but as the man who offered the West some of its
first glimpses into pre-industrial and Meiji Era Japan, his work
still offers valuable insight today. Legacy The Japanese director
Masaki Kobayashi adapted four Hearn tales into his 1965 film,
Kwaidan. Several Hearn stories have been adapted by Ping Chong into
his trademark puppet theatre, including the 1999 Kwaidan and the
2002 OBON: Tales of Moonlight and Rain. Hearn's life and works were
celebrated in The Dream of a Summer Day, a play that toured Ireland
in April and May 2005, which was staged by the Storytellers Theatre
Company and directed by Liam Halligan. It is a detailed
dramatization of Hearn's life, with four of his ghost stories woven
in. Yone Noguchi is quoted as saying about Hearn, "His Greek
temperament and French culture became frost-bitten as a flower in
the North." There is also a cultural center named for Hearn at the
University of Durham. Hearn was a major translator of the short
stories of Guy de Maupassant. In Ian Fleming's You only Live Twice,
James Bond retorts to his nemesis Blofeld's comment of "Have you
ever heard the Japanese expression kirisute gomen?" with "Spare me
the Lafcadio Hearn, Blofeld." [From Wikipedia.]