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LAFCADIO HEARN IN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES 00 Prelims LH:Layout 1 12/2/07 12:46 Page ii

Lafcadio Hearn, 1895 00 Prelims LH:Layout 1 12/2/07 12:46 Page iii

Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives

Edited by

Sukehiro Hirakawa UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

GLOBAL ORIENTAL 00 Prelims LH:Layout 1 12/2/07 12:46 Page iv

LAFCADIO HEARN IN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES Edited by Sukehiro Hirakawa

First published in 2007 by GLOBAL ORIENTAL LTD PO Box 219 Folkestone Kent CT20 2WP UK

www.globaloriental.co.uk

ISBN 978-1-905246-26-7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library

The Publishers wish to thank Otemae University for their generous support in the making of this book

Set in Bembo 11 on 12pt by Mark Heslington, Scarborough, North Yorkshire Printed and bound in England by Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham, Wilts 00 Prelims LH:Layout 1 12/2/07 12:46 Page v

Contents

Preface vii 1. Lafcadio Hearn, a Reappraisal 1 SUKEHIRO HIRAKAWA 2. What Does His Greek Mother Mean to Hearn, the Japan Interpreter? 16 SUKEHIRO HIRAKAWA 3. Lafcadio’s Nightmares 30 SUKEHIRO HIRAKAWA 4. Hearn and the Sea 41 SUKEHIRO HIRAKAWA 5. Hearn, Interpreter of the Animistic World of the Japanese 55 SUKEHIRO HIRAKAWA 6. Return to Japan or Return to the West? – Hearn’s ‘A Conservative’ 62 SUKEHIRO HIRAKAWA 7. Half a Century after Byron – What Did Greece Mean to the Writer Hearn? 77 SUKEHIRO HIRAKAWA 8. Hearn As an American Writer 93 JOHN CLUBBE

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9. Image of ‘the Creole Mother’ in Hearn’s Youma 103 YOKO MAKINO 10. From Folklore to Literature – Hearn and Japanese Legends of Tree Spirits 112 YOKO MAKINO 11. Hearn and ‘Orpheus’ – His Art of Retelling Stories of Old Japan 120 YOKO MAKINO 12. Lafcadio Hearn and Yanagita Kunio: Who Initiated Folklore Studies in Japan? 129 YOKO MAKINO 13. Insect-music: Hearn’s Orphean Song 139 HITOMI NABAE 14. Hearn’s Romantic Representation of Shinto, the Way of Japanese Gods 152 MASARU TODA 15. Two Springs: Hearn’s and Kyōka’s Other Worlds 159 CODY POULTON 16. ‘Weird Beauty’: Angela Carter and Lafcadio Hearn in Japan 169 SUSAN FISHER 17. Hearn and the Muse 178 TED GOOSSEN 18. ‘The Real Birthday of New Japan’ – Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘After the War’ 185 PETER MCIVOR 19. The Image of the Mother in the Work of Hearn 194 GEORGE HUGHES 20. Hearn: Travel-writing and Controversy 205 GEORGE HUGHES 21. Robert Nichols and Lafcadio Hearn: Cultural Politics and English Professors at the University of Tokyo 217 GEORGE HUGHES 22. The Enduring Value of Lafcadio Hearn’s Tokyo Lectures 227 JOAN BLYTHE Bibliography 237 Notes 241 List of Contributors 275 Index 277

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rom some seventy-odd papers that were presented at eight Finternational conferences on Lafcadio Hearn held in Athens (1998), Tokyo (2000), Martinique (2001 and 2002) and in four cities of Japan (2004), I have selected twenty-two essays for this volume. The title chosen Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives was originally the title of the symposium held at the Komaba campus of Tokyo University in September 2004, commemorating the centenary of Hearn’s death. Hearn, alias Koizumi Yakumo, died in Tokyo on 26 September 1904 at the age of fifty-four. This volume constitutes the second of the series of our Hearn studies, the first being Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 1997), which I edited mainly from the papers presented at the first Hearn International Symposium held in Matsue City in 1990, commemorating the centenary of Hearn’s arrival in Japan. As I have written in the opening chapter of the present volume, ‘Lafcadio Hearn, a Reappraisal’, I am greatly intrigued by the widening gaps that exist between negative depreciations of Lafcadio Hearn in the United States and positive appreciations of Koizumi Yakumo in Japan. I would like to call the reader’s attention to this significant difference as a symptom of much greater

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misapprehensions between the Western world and Japan. I have always been fascinated by problems of gaps in mutual perceptions, which often aggravate the love-hate relationship between the two parties concerned, and I for one have taken up the case of Hearn, not only as a topic in the narrow framework of a history of literature but also as a kind of study in intercultural relations. It is worth some attention if only for its interest to students of the morbid anatomy of cultural intercourse. Lafcadio Hearn is, indeed, a very controversial figure of great interest. Favourable or unfavourable reactions of some of his simple-minded readers, both Japanese and Western, show clearly what sorts of cross-cultural misconceptions or cross-Pacific misunderstandings surround Hearn and his Japanese topics. Let me explain here what I mean by ‘cross-Pacific misunderstanding’, by referring to some specific cases. We are gradually becoming conscious of the presence of nations and races other than our own which have different political, religious and cultural traditions. That means, we are living in a global society composed of peoples of various views and perceptions. Regarding the narcissism of the Japanese readers who are agreeably flattered by Hearn’s beautiful descriptions of the Japanese of the Meiji era, no detailed explanation is necessary. Hearn responds to the need to see and to feel an artistically and psychologically satisfying past. The problem is whether Hearn’s Meiji Japan is real or imaginary. Was Hearn entirely mistaken in his observations? In order to understand better the renewed interest in Hearn1 and his observations of Japan, let us examine first of all what was once denigrated by the American propaganda before, during and after the Pacific War. First, Hearn had ‘gone native’ by legally marrying Koizumi Setsuko and obtaining Japanese citizenship. He was ridiculed by some Anglo-Saxons already during his lifetime. It has become a custom for Western biographers of Hearn to talk of his disillusionment with Japan towards the end of his life,2 although it was not substantiated by any evidence. Second, the interest that Hearn showed in the ghostly world of the Japanese was taken as a sign of his ‘morbidity’.3 Personally, however, I most appreciate Hearn’s sympathetic penetration into the religious world of the common people of Japan. Hearn’s concern for the animistic world of the Japanese took two forms of expression, one literary and another scholarly. Today,

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Hearn is best known among Japanese as the author of Kwaidan, or weird stories. This is the literary side of his interest in the ghostly world of the Japanese. When the same interest was put into scholarly shape, it became Lafcadio Hearn: Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation. The topics which were dear to Hearn and dear to some of us Japanese, are more or less related to the animistic beliefs of natural Shinto. More than Buddhist legends they are sources of Hearn’s inspiration for his ghost stories.Shinto,Japan’s native religion,which Hearn tried to understand sympathetically,was,however,considered by many Christian missionaries as the arch-enemy because it seemed to hinder their efforts to evangelize the ‘benighted’ nation.4 Traditional beliefs and practices of the Japanese, which Hearn described lyrically,were often categorically rejected as‘feudalistic’by missionary-minded Americans and their Japanese counterparts.5 Some cross-cultural misunderstandings inevitably followed from those American missionary interpretations of Japan’s native religion. They were sometimes vitiated by the bitter experiences of the Second World War. It is undeniable that religion, as often happens in countries where there is a particular religion, has been used politically by the militarists during times of war. Shinto, therefore, was understood as the backbone of Japanese ultra-nationalism, and after Japan’s defeat it became almost a taboo for Japanese intellectuals to talk of it openly in positive terms. Under the American occupation the inhibition was so strongly instilled that when Saeki Shōichi arrived for the first time in the United States in 1950, the young Japanese scholar of American literature, hesitated to fill in the entry ‘religion’ at the airport. This son of a Shinto priest family finally wrote ‘Shinto.’ Saeki was still afraid of being denied entrance to the USA.6 For those Westerners who often tried to judge the acts of Imperial Japan through their more familiar cases and examples of the German Third Reich, it was natural that they should depreciate Shinto, which, according to Basil Hall Chamberlain, was newly invented in order to serve the interests of the Japanese nation at large. The dean of Western Japanologists of the first half of the twentieth century went so far as to describe it as follows in a paper delivered at the Rationalist Press Association of London in 1912: ‘Shinto, a primitive nature cult, which had fallen into discredit, was taken out of its cupboard and dusted.’ He explained then how Shinto was connected with the Emperor cult. With the coming of

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the Second World War the Shinto mythologies were understood by Westerners as the Japanese counterpart of Germanic mythologies that supported the idea of the superiority of the Aryan race. However, is natural Shinto such a dreadful faith that it should be expelled from history textbooks for Japanese schoolchildren? And how about the ancestor worship of the Japanese which has something to do with the Japanese notion of the ghostly world of the dead? Should this religious practice be dismissed as a kind of superstition? Hearn was a rare Westerner who was able to intuit subtleties of the Japanese world of the dead. He could sympathize with Japanese ghosts. Appreciations and depreciations concerning Lafcadio Hearn seem to be reflections not simply of differences of views concerning the writer Hearn himself, but of more deeply- rooted differences of perceptions concerning Japanese religious culture itself. We addressed these and other intriguing problems during the international symposia. As the organizer of the conferences I have the pleasure of presenting the selected twenty-two essays in this volume. Do you really agree with those who denigrate Hearn? Do you really think that any of the well-known Western Japanologists of today would outlive Hearn on account of their writings? Are you sure that Hearn’s name will be forgotten after another century?

SUKEHIRO HIRAKAWA Tokyo, November 2006

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Lafcadio Hearn, a Reappraisal Sukehiro Hirakawa

ne of the pressing problems in this unifying age of Oglobalization is the relationship between us and others: how to build mutually profitable and equitable relationships between us and those who belong to cultural spheres other than our own. There was a time in the Occident when few people doubted the superiority of Western European civilization, and at that time people in the West did not take their relationships with others particularly seriously – especially with colonized coloured peoples. Europeans were self-sufficient and consequently one-sided towards non-Europeans. When some tourist-writers began to travel abroad, new horizons were opened before their eyes, and things non- European appeared very much ‘exotic’ for those avid European artists looking for fresh new impressions. Those observers were generally self-centred and tended to measure others according to their own laws, values and aesthetics. Writers of exoticism like Pierre Loti wrote their own sensations wherever they went. That is, they saw others through their own ethnocentric eyes and felt and judged them mainly by their own standards. It is true that their writings were fresh eye-openers for readers living in Europe and America at that time. A new literary genre called ‘romans géographiques’ was created in the latter half of the nineteenth

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century, when a round-the-world trip was made possible for globetrotters thanks to the invention of steamers and trains. Did that constitute, however, a real dialogue between cultures? In the past, European artists who had been to Africa and Asia were classified categorically as travellers to exotic regions. However, already in the 1880s and 90s Lafcadio Hearn, and a little later, Victor Segalen, recognized dignity and values in peoples such as Creoles, Japanese, Maoris and Chinese.1 If today these rare European writers once again attract our attention, it is because they offer us answers to one of the impending questions of our time, which is according to Todorov’s words: ‘les rapports entre nous et autres’.2 Hearn and Segalen succeeded not only in finding inspiration in exotic materials but also in not falling into the trap of euro-centrism: these writers, who might be called civilized nomads, not having committed too many sins of ethnocentric exoticism, are now called in French exotes,3 and because of the exceptionally astute conception of esthétique du divers, Victor Segalen (1878–1919) has been reevaluated in a spectacular way in the French-speaking world.4 Does this reappraisal of a French exote foreshadow that of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), another exote? It is true that Hearn has been recently reassessed in Japan,5 but will he also be resurrected in the English-speaking world at large? If Segalen has been rehabilitated as a European writer who was able to see through the eyes of others, then how about Hearn, who tried to study not only the life and thought of the Orient but also tried to study those of the Occident from the Oriental point of view? According to Muriel Détrie, who wrote the article ‘Victor Segalen et Lafcadio Hearn, deux exotes en Extrême-Orient’, Hearn, too, is a born traveller, who feels all the flavour of diversity in these worlds of wonderful diversities.6 Indeed, Hearn fits the definition of an exote better than Segalen himself. However,according to a letter sent me by an American colleague, in the United States the level of interest in Hearn is high only among antiquarian booksellers. At first sight it seems, therefore, utterly useless for a Japanese scholar like me to try to reappraise such an antiquated American author. However, it is precisely the contrasting levels of interest in this writer in America and in Japan that give us, comparative literature scholars, an unexpected occasion to make meaningful comparisons both literary and cultural. One of the most conspicuous differences between American perceptions of Japan and Japanese perceptions of America in the field of literature is the enduring popularity of the American writer

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Hearn among ordinary people of Japan and, since the Second World War, the low esteem of Hearn among American academics. American Japan scholars generally do not appreciate Hearn’s interpretation of Japan very much. This is especially the case with those who learned the Japanese language during World War II as language officers and later became Japan specialists. Historians of American literature, even if they mention Hearn’s works dealing with Louisiana such as Chita, rarely mention his works dealing with Japan. Furthermore, most Japanese scholars of American literature do not talk highly of Hearn either, as they tend to passively follow American appreciations of American writers. Then, how about opinions of comparative literature scholars? Some of them take an interest in writers not belonging to a nationally defined frame of literary history. Born in 1850 on the Greek island of Leucadia, brought up in Dublin, educated in England and France, Hearn emmigrated to the United States in 1869, where he became known as a journalist first in Cincinnati and later in New Orleans. After having spent two years in the French West Indies, about which Hearn wrote sketches and a novel of ethnographical type, Youma, he came to Japan in 1890, where he married the daughter of an impoverished samurai and died as a Japanese citizen in 1904, having published a book about Japan and the Japanese almost every year during his fourteen- year stay in four cities of Japan: Matsue (1890–91), Kumamoto (1891–94), Kobe (1894–96) and Tokyo (1896–1904). However, he always wrote in English for American readers. It is, therefore, rather difficult to treat this writer within a single framework of a national literature, either Japanese or American. However, for those who are interested in intercultural relations between the Western world and Japan, Hearn is an extremely interesting case. I, for one, am interested in the modernization of Japan under the impact of Western civilization. I, therefore, have addressed in my studies the experiences in Europe or America of many individual Japanese. I have addressed many Westerners’ experiences in Japan, too. I wrote a chapter entitled ‘Japan’s turn to the West’ in the Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 5, The Nineteenth Century, edited by Marius Jansen. While writing, I was convinced that few foreigners had caught the psychology of the Japanese of the Meiji era as accurately as Hearn. I cited in that chapter Hearn’s story entitled ‘A Conservative’, which deals with the phenomenon of the Westernized intellectuals returning to native traditions. By

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the way, this story was highly evaluated for its political insight by the Austrian literary critic Hugo von Hofmannsthal. I am not sure if Hofmannsthal is a really well known name to American members of the Modern Language Association. Gradually, therefore, I have paid attention to Lafcadio Hearn, alias Koizumi Yakumo, who is not always treated properly either in the literary history of the United States or in the history of Japanese literature. I am afraid many Westerners think that Hearn is only a minor writer, who has been out of fashion for more than eight decades and that it is of little use to try to rediscover Lafcadio Hearn even in this era of post- colonialism. What is curious about Hearn’s case is that not only ordinary Japanese readers but also many Japanese writers are highly appreciative of Hearn’s writings. Among the latter are Natsume Sōseki, Nagai Kafū, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Satō Haruo and Mishima Yukio. In the case of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) it is quite understandable that he was very conscious of Hearn: Sōseki taught in the 1890s at the same governmental college in Kumamoto where Hearn had taught several years earlier. Sōseki subsequently replaced Hearn as the first Japanese professor of English literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1903, where Hearn had taught for seven years. Hearn’s reputation as a professor of English and American literature was extremely high. In the history of more than one hundred and twenty years of Tokyo University no Westerner has enjoyed such high esteem as Hearn. His lectures were so much appreciated by Japanese students that when it was announced that Hearn was going to be replaced by the then little known Sōseki, students went on a strike. Students, therefore, were very inimical towards the newly returned from England Professor Sōseki when on 19 April 1903 he began to give lectures which were to be published later under the title of Bungakuron or Theory of Literature. Sōseki’s analytical approach seemed too scientific to be really attractive. At that time Sōseki apparently read many of Hearn’s books and Sōseki’s occasional comments show his high appreciation of his predecessor as a writer. Annoyed by acrimonious comparisons so often repeated in favour of Hearn, Sōseki quit the prestigious professorship of Tokyo University four years later in order to devote himself entirely to creative writing. By the way, in 1908, Sōseki wrote three small pieces as variations on the same themes on which Hearn had written before. Presumably Sōseki’s ‘Bunchō’, ‘Daiichiya’ and ‘Daisanya’ were written as a kind of reclaiming of Sōseki as a

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literary artist. While writing them, Sōseki probably had in mind Hearn’s ‘Kusa-Hibari’, ‘The Story of O-Tei’ and ‘The Legend of Mochida-no-ura’. It is indeed interesting to imagine that when Sōseki’s students like Morita Sōhei named their literary coterie magazine Kusahibari after Hearn’s essay title, Sōseki, the mentor of these students, conscious of their admiration for Hearn, reacted by writing ‘Bunchō’, a rival piece that has many common characteristics with ‘Kusa-Hibari’. How about Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), on whom not only Seidensticker but also Stephen Snyder wrote a very stimulating book.7 American appreciation of Kafū, apparently, is not low. Kafū, too, seemed very fond of Hearn and his glimpses of Japan. In Kafū’s diary Dancho¯tei nichijō we often see passages such as ‘all day long I read Hearn.’ On 29 March 1935 Kafū read Hearn’s ghost stories Kwaidan in French translation, and found his description of mosquitoes excellent. The main character of Bokut O¯ kidan went so far as to name the two novels written by Hearn, Chita andYouma, as good examples of scene painting. Kafū appreciated Hearn’s description of weather and the seasons elements in these novels. It is understandable that Kafū, who was very fond of Pierre Loti, appreciated Hearn who had closely followed the literary steps of the French word painter of things exotic. According to Henry James it was Hearn who introduced French impressionism into American literature. Kafū, too, as a returnee from the West, saw Japan through the eyes of Pierre Loti. By the way, Okakura Kakuzō (1862–1913) ridiculed that ‘Orientalist’ attitude of some Japanese who smile with the smile of Loti, looking condescendingly at diminutive Japanese women. (Okakura: The Awakening of Asia.The book, written in 1901, was published in 1940). Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), who at the beginning of his literary career translated Gautier through Hearn’s English translation of Clarimonde, shared with Hearn the same tastes for the exotic and the grotesque. Moreover, he discovered through Hearn problems of religious confrontation between the Jesuits and the Japanese, problems which would be probed to a much deeper level by Endō Shūsaku (1923–96). Satō Haruo (1892–1964)’s infatuation with Hearn was far more considerable. He even translated Hearn’s early American articles of the period of the gruesome such as ‘Violent Cremation’ written as early as in 1874 in a Cincinnati newspaper. Mishima Yukio (1925–70), who was known also as a shrewd critic, wrote to Kawabata Yasunari his favourable impressions of Hearn

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before and after the end of the Second World War. Mishima’s fascination with Greece came in part from Hearn’s definition of Japan as the ‘Greece of the Orient’.8 All these names probably do not mean very much to most of Western readers. Some of them might think that Japanese writers have little discernment in matters of Western literature. Some Westerners might think that Japanese writers as well as ordinary Japanese readers like Hearn simply because Hearn stood firmly as an apologist of traditional Japanese values when the country was in an inferior position vis-à-vis the West and when the tide of Westernization was ineluctable in its modernizing process. Let us for the moment leave all these appreciative remarks, and consider instead some of the possible causes of the American depreciation of Lafcadio Hearn. During his lifetime Hearn was very careful about keeping his marital relations unknown to the outside world. In Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) his travel companion appears under the name of an elderly manservant, Manyemon. Hearn was afraid of hurting his American readers’ sensitivities by openly introducing his Japanese wife as his travel companion in the province of Izumo or in Kyūshū. In the 1890s inter-racial marriages were still not very welcome in America. Indeed, Hearn himself had been ostracized when in 1875 he had tried to marry a mulatto woman, named Mattie Foley officially before a black priest, defying the state law that prohibited inter-racial marriage in Ohio. After that unsuccessful marriage Hearn fled to New Orleans in 1877. In Japan, after having lived together with Koizumi Setsuko for two years, Hearn made up his mind to get married legally when in 1893 he knew that Setsuko was pregnant. He then found that under the treaties concluded between the Western powers and Japan at the time of the forced opening of the country in 1858 Japanese nationals were treated unequally. For example, in the case of a European husband’s death all the property left by him should go automatically to his European relatives, and not to his Japanese wife or to his Japanese children. Consequently, Hearn decided to get Japanese citizenship by becoming an adopted son of the Koizumi family for the sake of his wife and children. It should be noted that the decision was taken mainly for financial reasons. Westerners living in foreign settlements, however, were shocked by the news that Hearn had gone native. Basil Hall Chamberlain, the dean of Western residents in Japan, who was so annoyed by the repeated questions concerning Hearn’s nationality addressed to him

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by curious Westerners, added a footnote to his later editions of Things Japanese, explaining that Hearn had been naturalized under the Japanese name of Koizumi Yakumo. Chamberlain, who temporarily lived with a Japanese woman,9 never dreamt of marrying her legally. Instead, the respectable British gentleman had early on recommended Hearn to simply live together with a native girl as it was the Westerners’ custom in the Orient during the nineteenth century.10 Hearn, however, did not want to do to his Japanese wife what his father had done to his ‘Oriental’ wife, Rosa Cassimati. The abrupt separation from his dear Greek mother after violent quarrels of the parents was a traumatic experience for the child Lafcadio. The sad event took place when he was four years old, and the son would never forgive his Anglo-Irish father for the harsh treatment of his mother. That resentment against his Irish father is the reason why he later dropped his Christian name Patrick and called himself Lafcadio Hearn. According to the literary historian Harry Levin, Hearn was a ‘civilized nomad’. However, in spite of his early years spent in tumultuous vagabondage, Hearn in his fourteen-year stay in Japan was an ethical man and a good family father. Chamberlain was abject when he ridiculed his former friend in the article ‘Lafcadio Hearn’ for the posthumous 1939 edition of Things Japanese. Chamberlain wrote: His (Hearn’s) life was a succession of dreams which ended in nightmares. In his ardour he became a naturalized Japanese, taking the name of Koizumi Yakumo. But awaking from his dream he realized he had taken a false step. For the wartime British, it was almost self-evident that a son of a British subject, who had gone native and who had become a naturalized Japanese should end his life in nightmares. In this way began Hearn’s depreciation. Arthur Kunst explains Hearn’s fall in reputation as follows: The great Pacific War with Japan in the 1940s seemed (…) to have obliterated Hearn from the American consciousness, a kind of guilt over a youthful infatuation.11 Throughout the war years there was only one widely read history of English literature that reveals a high regard for Hearn. The exceptional book was by the French Anglicists Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian. Cazamian writes in their History of English Literature as follows:

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On the very eve of Japan’s transformation, Lafcadio Hearn passionately discovers the heroic soul, the exquisite chivalry hidden within the tradition of her smiling courtesy. He himself has brought from the West the last gospel of scientific intellectualism, the philosophy of Spencer; he believes his allegiance keeps faithful to the sovereign principle of evolution, whilst his moral being is allured, captivated by the charm of a land and a race whose physical and mental horizons are essentially unchanged. An artist and psychologist, a delicate stylist, he eagerly drinks in the philtre which satiates the unconscious thirst of his profounder nature. His books are a revelation …12 This favourable appreciation of Hearn stands in sharp contrast to other histories of English and American Literature. Among others the Cambridge History of English Literature, published during the Second World War, went so far as to qualify Hearn’s lectures on English literature atTokyo University as‘completely valueless’,while the same lectures had been extolled by the British critic Edmund Gosse in the 1920s.The poet Edmund Blunden,who taught atTokyo University before and after the Second WorldWar, was shocked by the unfair treatment of Hearn by the narrow-minded writer of the Cambridge History of English Literature,which was slightly amended in later editions. It happens often that the reputation of a writer, of a scholar, or of a Japan specialist fluctuates with the passage of time. In Japan, too, Chamberlain’s negative evaluation was accepted literally after Japan’s defeat. Many of Hearn’s books reprinted in paperback by the Charles Tuttle Company have even today on their book covers such phrases as ‘Hearn’s last years were filled with the bitterness of disillusionment’, a phrase derived from Chamberlain’s statement. There are, however, plenty of written records in Japanese that testify to his domestic happiness in his last years. Hearn produced a book almost every year during his Tokyo period. To those who believe in the superiority of their own civilization, no example fits better than the story that a Westerner who took Japanese citizenship ended his life miserably in Tokyo. It has become a custom for Western biographers of Hearn to talk of his disillusionment with Japan towards the end of their books. It is a pity that none among them is capable of reading the letters written in Japanese by Lafcadio and Setsuko towards the end of his life. Apart from the self-fulfilling prophecy tinted with racial prejudice, there have been among American biographers strong claims on Hearn’s morbidity,13 as the writer who deals with ghostly

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compared with those of Edgar Allan Poe. Such a comparison would be an honour in France, where Baudelaire translated Poe, but not always so in America. When Hearn died in 1904, a scandal broke out. Mattie Foley, the mulatto woman now calling herself Alethea Foley, asked for her share of the inheritance. ‘Claim made by a Negress’ – that was one of the titles of the Cincinnati newspaper, Enquirer – was a sensation. Okakura Kakuzō wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times ‘in defence of Lafcadio Hearn’, saying: Why bring the secrets of the dissecting room to the idle gaze of the public? If ever these things were true, the man whose memory we cherish and love did but share the weakness of your Byron, your Burns, and the host of other fallible geniuses who have enriched our lives and made them nobler. The pathology of genius is a painful study. Is it not better to mourn and bury these shortcomings in silence than to gloat over the carrion of illustrious names? An Eastern proverb says: ‘He who slanders another is one who has no other way of praising himself.’14 Incidentally, a lawyer in defence of Bill Clinton, when the American President was attacked in the midst of his sexual scandal, quoted this letter of Okakura’s. In the United States of America not only presidents but also writers have often been judged from puritanical ethical viewpoints. Their reputations seem to have been made partly on moral grounds. I am wondering if this is not the reason that, compared with France, social positions of writers are not very high in American society. When I was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, I tried to analyse the love-hate relationship between the United States and Japan, using the case of Lafcadio Hearn. I suffered from the absence of intellectual companionship, because American fellows were interested mostly in politics and showed little interest in literature. Finally, a fellow showed up, who told me that he had recently read a book of Japanese literature: it was Shogun by James Clavell. Now let us check Hearn’s literary quality itself, which should be the central topic of our discussion. One of the main topics of the writer Hearn, dealing with either the inhabitants of the French West Indies or the inhabitants of Japan is to describe a local woman who is very different from Western women. In Martinique Hearn immortalizes the da or the slave woman who worked as a nurse for a white family, called Youma. Youma heroically perished together

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with a white daughter entrusted to her care, in the midst of the revolution of 1848. In Japan Hearn idealizes the geisha who sacrificed her life for the real happiness of the man who loved her. The story is entitled in this case also by the heroine’s name ‘Kimiko’, which is a very touching story of both love and grief. The girl was obliged to leave school, when the reconstructive changes came following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, by which many families of rank were reduced to poverty. By weaving alone the mother and the girl and an infant sister could not earn enough to live. When the mother became too weak and ill to work at the loom, the girl said: ‘Mother, I know there is but one thing now to do. Let me be sold to the dancing- girls.’ She remembered that in other days, when banquets were given in her father’s house, a free geisha named Kimika had often caressed her. She went straight to the house of Kimika, and thus became a geisha; Kimika renamed her Kimiko, and kept the pledge to maintain the mother and the child-sister. Kimiko later became famous. Nevertheless she allowed no one to imagine himself a special favourite, and refused to make any contracts for perpetual affection. To any protests on the subject she answered that she knew her place. But one day, the startling news was abroad that Kimiko had at last shown a very soft heart. She had actually said goodbye to Kimika, and had gone away with somebody able to give her not only pretty dresses but also social position and to silence gossip about her unsavoury past,– somebody willing to die for her.Kimika said that a fool had tried to kill himself because of Kimiko, and that Kimiko had taken pity on him, and nursed him back to foolishness. This kind of story about geisha is widespread; for example, Mutsu Munemitsu, often considered the best foreign minister of Japan during the Meiji era, married a geisha. In my lifetime Hayashi Kentarō, president of Tokyo University during the students’ turmoil in the early 1970s, married a geisha, when his wife passed away. I have to say, however, that as geisha are a very exciting topic for male fantasies, there are many titillating stories, fictional as well as non- fictional. Westerners tend to have images of Japan that have much less to do with the reality of the observed than with the needs and fantasies of the observer. That must be the reason why there has been a literary tradition in the West that deals with Japanese geisha. I am afraid that Hearn’s ‘Kimiko’, too, belongs to that tradition. However, what is curious is that ‘Kimiko’ is exceptionally highly appreciated also by some Japanese readers, as an authentic

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expression of the Japanese heart.15 As is explained by the author himself in the preface, the title of the book Kokoro means ‘heart’. The story ends this way. The parents of the young man were wealthy and titled people and accepted a geisha as their daughter- in-law. They were not displeased with Kimiko, because of her sympathy for their boy. Before going away Kimiko attended the wedding of her young sister. After that Kimiko contrived three times to put off her own wedding-day. She finally explained her reasons very gently but very firmly: It is time that I should say what I have long delayed saying. For the sake of the mother and of my little sister, I have lived in hell. All that is past; but the scorch of the fire is upon me, and there is no power that can take it away. It is not for such as I to enter into an honoured family, – or to bear you a son. Never shall I be your wife to become your shame (…). Some true sweet lady will be chosen for you, to become the mother of your children. Kimiko disappeared, and was never to be seen again. What Kimiko had foretold came true: for time dries all tears and there was found for the lover of Kimiko a very sweet person for a wife, who gave him a son. And other years passed; and there was happiness in the fairy-home where Kimiko had once been. Then comes the climax of the story: There came to that home one morning, as if seeking alms, a travelling nun; and the child, hearing her Buddhist cry of ‘Ha—ï! ha—ï! ‘ ran to the gate. And presently a house-servant, bringing out the customary gift of rice, wondered to see the nun caressing the child, and whispering to him. Then the little one cried to the servant, ‘Let me give!’ – and the nun pleaded from under the veiling shadow of her great straw hat: ‘Honourably allow the child to give me.’ So the boy put the rice into the mendicant’s bowl. Then she thanked him, and asked:- ‘Now will you say again for me the little word which I prayed you to tell your honoured father?’ And the child lisped:- ‘Father, one whom you will never see again in this world, says that her heart is glad because she has seen your son.’ The nun laughed softly, and caressed him again, and passed away swiftly; and the servant wondered more than ever, while the child ran to tell his father the words of the mendicant. But the father’s eyes dimmed as he heard the words, and he wept over his boy. For he, and only he, knew who had been at the gate – and the sacrificial meaning of all that had been hidden. The husband did not try to look for her any more. He knows that ‘the space between sun and sun is less than the space between

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himself and the woman who loved him’, and he imagines her last days when the voice of the Great Teacher will welcome her to the Western Paradise. The story is moving, and there are readers touched by this Buddhistic ending. Incidentally, young Theodor Adorno was so engrossed in‘Kimiko’that he tried to adapt it for a play.16 I, however, feel a kind of ‘poésie exagérée’, a kind of romantic exaggeration, in this story. Is this not a variation on the same theme of sacrifice of a girl of demi-monde as La Dame aux Camélias (1848) by Alexandre Dumas fils? During the 1880s Hearn was the best translator of French literature in the United States. He translated about forty stories by Maupassant. In one of them entitled ‘En Voyage’17 – both in the French original and also in Hearn’s translation – we can recognize the ‘poésie exagérée’, the word that Hearn translated as ‘romantic exaggeration’. It is a story about the mute love between a Russian countess and a revolutionary who owed his life to her. She had saved him in a train at a frontier station, lending him the coat and the passport of her servant. After that the young man followed her like her shadow with the devotion of a rescued animal. As a solitary dying person, she felt happy just at being loved in that strange way. And for all that she persistently refused to receive him, to learn his name, or to speak to him, and she died from consumption in Menton. This sense of limit to human relations imposed by the will of persons concerned gives a story ‘poésie exagérée’, the romantic exaggeration that some people appreciate and some other people depreciate. I am wondering if Hearn did not apply the same romantic exaggeration to enhance the character of Kimiko. About a century ago, while lecturing to students at Tokyo University, Hearn said: Yet after all, the greatest of critics is the public – not the public for a day or a generation, but the public of centuries, the consensus of a national opinion or of human opinion about a book that has been subjected to the awful test of time. Reputations are made not by critics, but by the accumulation of human opinion through hundreds of years. (‘On Reading’ in Life and Literature) Subjected to this awful test of time, which part of Hearn’s writings will remain? If the test of a good book is whether we want to read it only once or more than once, Hearn’s Kwaidan or ghost stories must be a good book, as their Japanese translations have been reprinted many times. Moreover, there is a coincidence between a

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Japanese appreciation of Hearn and an American one. Among American literary critics Malcom Cowley (1898–1989) wrote a very incisive critical appreciation in 1949 when a Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn was published by Citadel. He begins his introduction18 this way: It was a surprising experience to reread his work volume after volume. Some of it seemed as mannered and frilled as the fashions of sixty years ago, and not always the best fashions; at times it might have been copied from Paris models by an earnest but awkward provincial dressmaker. Perhaps I was expecting all of it to have this end-of-the-century air, this charm of the faded and half-forgotten; what surprised me was that so much of it remained new and genuine. Unlike many authors with broader talents he had the métier, the vocation for writing, the conscience that kept him working over each passage until it had the exact color of what he needed to say; and in most cases the colors have proved fast. Many books written by his famous contemporaries are becoming difficult to read. One can’t help seeing that Howells followed the conventions of his day, that Frank Norris was full of romantic bad taste; but Lafcadio Hearn at his best was independent of fashion and was writing for our time as much as his own. Hearn had a householder’s knowledge of Japanese life, a cultural anthropologist’s knowledge of religious customs, and something more than that, a sympathetic understanding of Japanese legends. His wife Setsuko helped him, by reading old books for him and retelling the stories. Hearn put the best of them into English, with the freedom of a story-teller working from oral sources. He sometimes described his work as a translation, but it was more than that. Let us make a comparison as to the quality of ghost stories. Among Western Orientalists I very much respect Arthur Waley (1889–1966) for his genial understanding and for his exquisite style of English translation. Among many books he translated either from Japanese or Chinese Waley himself valued Yuan Mei19 very much, probably because there are so many personal comments of his own freely written in the book. I too appreciate very much Waley’s translation of the eighteenth-century Qing poet’s poems in this book. They are remarkable poems not only in the original Chinese but also in English. However, when I read in my classroom Yuan Mei’s ghost stories translated into English by Waley, my Japanese students were not at all impressed. The contrast was surprisingly great, as Japanese girls were very much impressed with Hearn’s

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ghost stories. I would not say that the result in Waley’s translation was folklore for the laboratory, whereas Hearn’s version was literature. The great difference between the two interpreters seems to lie in that, while Waley was an agnostic who did not believe in supernatural beings, Hearn believed in ghostly and fairy things. The abandoned child Hearn had been brought up in Dublin. In a letter sent to William Butler Yeats in 1901 Hearn said: ‘I had a Connaught nurse who told me fairy-tales and ghost-stories. So I ought to love Irish Things, and do.’ It is not by coincidence that Hearn and Yeats showed a sympathetic understanding of the world of the Japanese ghosts.20 Their Celtic background, as is later suggested also by Raphaël Confiant, helped them to enter the world of the dead. To conclude his introduction Malcom Cowley writes as follows: Long before coming to Japan he had shown an instinct for finding in legends the permanent archetypes of human experience – that is the secret of their power to move us – and he later proved that he knew which tales to choose and which details to emphasize, in exactly the right English. And after collecting many pieces of Hearn’s work into a volume, Cowley thinks ‘it will be apparent that his folk tales are the most valuable part of it and that he is the writer in our language who can best be compared with Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm’. Cowley is right, as it is Hearn’s folk tales such as Kwaidan that are most appreciated by Japanese readers. This reception of Hearn’s ghost stories in Japan has little to do with the so-called Japanese narcissism or cultural nationalism. In this connection what is interesting about Hearn is his increasing popularity in Martinique. The Creole writer Raphaël Confiant, who had been awarded the Prix Novembre for his novel written in French Eau de Café, wrote a foreword to Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies,21 saying: Hearn had succeeded in penetrating one of the most jealously guarded secrets of our quimboiseurs (witch-doctors): that the secret spirits of the countless thousands of Caribs and Africans who perished under European colonization are still protecting us, the Creole people. These spirits don’t live in the skies like Christian ones, but remain asleep during the day in the high branches of sacred trees such as the fromager (cotton-silk tree). Only once the last rays of the sun begin to glimmer, do they start roaming in the darkness that rapidly engulfs men, houses, animals and fields. Lafcadio Hearn had the intuition of their presence.

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In this way, before coming to Japan, Hearn had already discovered in French West Indies the charm of folk tales told in Creole dialect, many of which he inserted in his novel Youma. It is interesting to note that in Martinique just as in Japan Hearn wrote down ghost stories, listening carefully to what illiterate inhabitants told him. He gathered them from the mouths of old maids or venerable story-tellers. Now the stories have become a part of the cultural heritage of the island, being retranslated into French. Hearn was free from the prejudices of Christian missionaries, and that was precisely the reason why Hearn was able to listen carefully to so- called superstitious tales of local inhabitants. He was a rare Westerner who understood sympathetically the mentality of the inhabitants of the French West Indies as well as the common people of Japan. Hearn succeeded in creating, in the minds of the readers, both foreigners as well as Japanese, a vivid impression of living in Japan – not simply as an observer but as one taking part in the daily existence of the common people, and thinking with their thoughts. It is not easy for outsiders to understand the Japanese native religion Shinto, while it is easy for them to condemn it as the spiritual force that backed the wartime Japanese nationalism. The driving force of Japanese Studies in North America was composed of children of missionaries brought up in Japan, who were inevitably unsympathetic towards Shinto, that the missionaries often consider the greatest obstacle for their propagation of Christianity. Hearn, who was interested in folkways, in ghost stories, entered easily into the animistic world of the Martinique people. In Japan, too, he applied the same methods of approach. That partly explains the reason of his success in Japan. Together with the French poet Paul Claudel,22 Hearn was a rare Westerner who was able to penetrate the world of the Japanese dead. In a sense it will be almost a pity for foreign Japanologists of later generations and in another sense it will be almost a glory for Hearn, if we still have to repeat the words pronounced by Okakura Kakuzō a century ago: ‘Of all foreign authors Hearn has reached nearest the heart of our people.’

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What Does His Greek Mother Mean to Hearn, the Japan Interpreter? Sukehiro Hirakawa

ne of the curious ties, that connects Greece and Japan which Ois not well known to the Greek people, is the interpretation of Japanese society attempted by the American writer Patrick Lafcadio Hearn,1 who was born on the Greek island of Lefcas in 1850. Hearn explained Japan to Western readers by using many Greek parallels and antecedents. Why did Hearn try to interpret Japan by referring to Greek examples? Why did he tie these two countries together? It seems Hearn used Greece for comparison mainly for two reasons. One is objectively recognized historical similarity, that is, the Japanese native religion, Shinto, being polytheistic, has many points in common with the ancient religion of classical Greece. Japan, therefore, could be interpreted as ‘the Greece of the Orient’, an idea propagated by Hearn which later caught the attention of the writer Mishima Yukio2 in his younger days. The other reason is more personal and derives from Lafcadio Hearn’s life-long yearning for his early separated mother who was Greek. His father, Charles Bush Hearn, was an Anglo-Irish, young medical officer serving in the British occupation force stationed in the Ionian Islands, and this son was born of a Greek mother, Rosa

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Cassimati, native of Kythera (Cerigo) and living in Lefcas, hence Hearn’s first name Patrick after the patron saint of Ireland and middle name Lafcadio, as the island of Lefcas was called in English Lefcadia. I said that the link between Greece and Japan formed by Lafcadio Hearn is ‘curious’, because Hearn’s life seems to lend itself to exaggeration and parody. For example, in The Detroit Times column entitled ‘Believe It or Not’ of 18 August 1933 Hearn’s life was summed up as follows: Lafcadio Hearn, distinguished author, was born in the Ionian Islands of a Greek mother and Irish father. He was raised in Wales, worked in the United States and West Indies, married a Japanese – became a naturalized Japanese and a Buddhist, and changed his name to Yakumo Koizumi! Hearn’s life has often been called unbelievable, and unbelievable things happen in our own lives. When I was a student immediately after the Second World War, Japan was so impoverished that I did not expect to be able to go abroad. I wished, however, that I could visit Europe at least once. That dream came true when I was awarded a scholarship from the French government in 1954. Still, I did not believe that I, once having spent the scholarship, would be able to return to Europe again. In fact, before the Second World War only a small number of Japanese scholars and writers could visit the West, and that was generally their unique experience of it in their whole lives. I myself thought that I could go to Europe only once in my lifetime. In the 1950s there was no such thing as cheap air travel, and it took thirty-four days for me to make the voyage from Yokohama to Marseille. However, thanks to Hearn’s rising reputation and thanks to his worldwide peregrinations, I, who had studied Hearn a little, have been invited to give lectures on Hearn in many countries of the world, where Hearn spent a fraction of his life. Thanks especially to his Graeco-Irish origin, I once had the pleasure of being invited to Dublin to give a lecture about the very important Irish background3 of the boy Patrick Lafcadio Hearn. Now I have the pleasure of talking here in Athens about Lafcadio’s extremely important Greek references in his attempts at interpreting Japan. It is true that Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born in Greece but was brought up in Ireland from the age of two. It is true that birth counts for a lot, but upbringing far more. According to a well- known Japanese proverb, uji yori sodachi, that means, upbringing is

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more important than birth. However, in the case of Lafcadio Hearn, everything good in him came from his Greek mother, Rosa Cassimati. I can safely tell you so, because Hearn himself wrote so to his brother in 1890.4 Hearn in his American years had dropped his first Christian name Patrick. He wished to cut off all associations with his detested Anglo-Irish father, who, by sending his mother Rosa back to Greece, destroyed Lafcadio’s paradise at the tender age of four, and who by remarrying, abandoned the child at the age of five. In short, his father, Charles Bush Hearn, was deemed by Lafcadio to be the origin of all the miseries he had to endure in his teens, twenties and thirties. The more miserable Lafcadio’s actual life was, the more beautiful his early childhood seemed to be. Here is a recollection of his childhood on the Ionian island, where Lafcadio monopolized his mother’s loving attention, his father being already away with his regiment in the Caribbean islands: I have memory of a place and a magical time in which the Sun and the Moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before I cannot tell. But I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to the world, – almost as it seems to become above the masts of a steamer steaming into equatorial summer. The sea was alive, and used to talk, – and the Wind made me cry out for joy when it touched me . . . Also in that place the clouds were wonderful, and of colors for which there are no names at all, – colors that used to make me hungry and thirsty. I remember, too, that the days were ever so much longer than these days, – and that every day there were new wonders and new pleasures for me. And all that country and time were softly ruled by One who thought only of ways to make me happy. Sometimes I would refuse to be made happy, and that always caused her pain, although she was divine; – and I remember that I tried very hard to be sorry. When day was done, and there fell the great hush of the light before moonrise, she would tell me stories that made me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I have never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And when the pleasure became too great, she would sing a weird little song which always brought sleep. At last there came a parting day; and she wept . . . This memory is inserted in a story entitled ‘The Dream of a Summer Day’.5 According to Hearn’s letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain dated March 1895 (vol. XIV, p. 329), ‘my child-tongue was Italian. I spoke Romaic and Italian by turns’, and he added, ‘In New Orleans I hired a teacher to teach me – thinking memory would come back again. But it didn’t come at all, and I quarrelled

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with the teacher, who looked exactly like a murderer and never smiled. So I know not Italian.’6 As Hearn’s mother, Rosa Cassimati, later got remarried to Giovanni Cavallini, a Greek of apparently Italian descent, Lafcadio’s assertion that his child-tongue was Italian should not be dismissed lightly as Hearn’s romanticized fancy. The fact that he was brought up in a multi-lingual milieu made him extremely sensitive to nuances of languages. He understood marvellously well the sentiments with which daily conversations were conducted by Creoles in the French West Indies or by Japanese of various classes in provincial towns. In this regard, Hearn was far more accurate7 than other writers of so-called exoticism such as Pierre Loti. His linguistic background, therefore, is worth more attention. Either through modern Greek or Italian, Rosa told Lafcadio stories, and that early childhood experience was in many ways decisive. When Hearn later wrote in his novel Youma about the influence a da, Creole nurse, would exercise over white children, it was his own mother’s story-telling that the writer must have had in mind. According to Hearn, ‘every da was a story-teller. Her recitals first developed in the white child entrusted to her care the power of fancy – Africanizing it, perhaps, to a degree that after-education could not totally remove – creating a love of the droll and extraordinary. One did not weary of hearing these stories often repeated; – for they were told with an art impossible to describe.’8 We may say that thanks to his mother’s story-telling the future story-teller Lafcadio Hearn was born. There was a sort of formative chain reaction. Throughout his life Hearn looked for someone who would tell him stories. In Dublin it was an Irish maid. In Cincinnati it was Mattie Foley, a black girl, who ‘possessed naturally a wonderful wealth of verbal description, a more than ordinarily vivid memory, and a gift of conversation’9 and in Japan it was Koizumi Setsuko. Many of his retold stories written in English such as Kwaidan retranslated into Japanese attract present-day Japanese readers, because Hearn’s ghost stories are artistically more perfect than their Japanese originals. We can presume from this that Hearn’s Greek mother Rosa, though illiterate or probably so because of the illiterate Youma of his novel, could tell him stories every evening that made him tingle from head to foot with pleasure. And we can presume also that the physical experience remained within Lafcadio long after Rosa was obliged to go back to Greece, leaving the child in Dublin. This

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seems to be the enduring imprint his Greek mother had left upon Lafcadio. After the traumatic experience of the unexpected separation, Lafcadio’s inner life could be summarized as à la recherche de la mère perdue. In pursuit of his lost mother, Hearn unconsciously wrote many stories similar to Edgar Allan Poe’s stories such as ‘Ligeia’ and ‘Eleonora’ in which is described a strangely strong desire to meet again the loved one, even if she is dead. From the early retold stories of Hearn’s New Orleans days such as ‘The Fountain Maiden’,10 ‘The Story of Ming-Y’11 until the later and posthumous pieces such as ‘The Story of O-Tei’,12 ‘The Story of Ito¯ Norisuké’, Hearn repeatedly expresses his yearning for the eternal feminine. It reflects his secret wish to see again his dear One early departed from this side of the world. Psychologically speaking, the mother Rosa’s meaning to the writer Hearn is most deeply reflected in this kind of literary creation. When we analyse Hearn’s retold stories, comparing them with their original stories, we can clearly detect Hearn’s inner feeling in the parts that did not exist in the original texts. In these additional parts lies the secret of his art. It reveals Hearn’s hidden yearning. It is understandable that someone with such a strong yearning for his Greek mother adored Greek civilization and tried to understand Japan, the country of his adoption, through Hellenistic antecedents. But were there not any sentimental fallacies in Hearn’s lifelong journey from Greece to Japan? Let us examine the validity of Lafcadio’s self-claimed Greek connection. What I am going to discuss, therefore, is first, how his Greek perspective helped Hearn to understand or misunderstand Japan,13 second, what Hearn unconsciously meant by the word ‘Greek’,14 and third, what his mother of the Greek Orthodox religion really meant to Lafcadio, apart from the mother-child close ties mentioned earlier. A problem with Hearn is that he did not know the language of his motherland, Greece. Although he insisted that everything good in him came from his maternal side, we cannot take his words for granted, as he could not speak or read either vernacular or classical Greek. It is true that Hearn, who had studied Greek a little in Ushaw College, quoted some Greek words in Greek letters in his first novel Chita,15 but I am afraid that was rather an ornamental use and his knowledge of classical Greek was very poor. In the proverbial sense of ‘inunderstandable’, Greek was Greek to him. It is true that Hearn very much liked things Greek since his

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childhood. His favourite book was Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes or Greek Fairy Tales. He liked it as a child and liked it also as an adult.16 The teacher Hearn gave copies of Kingsley’s book to the best of his Japanese students. Hearn very often referred to Greek mythology and literary works not only in his writings but also in his lectures:17 his favourite comparison of Japanese womanhood was with Alcestis, and in his Kumamoto days Hearn dictated to college students the story of Admetus and Alcestis in order to check Japanese students’ reactions, whose ethics have been shaped by a totally different social experience.18 We know from the catalogue of the Hearn library that he had a considerable number of books, in both English and French related to the Greek classics or Greek mythology, but no books in the Greek language.19 That was curious for someone like Hearn who extolled so highly the ancient Greek civilization. While Hearn was teaching English literature at Tokyo University, he had as a colleague Raphael von Koeber (1848–1923) – a German professor of philosophy who was extremely well versed in Greek and who mocked Hearn, probably because Hearn lacked expert knowledge of the classical Greek language.20 Hearn, however, could not help comparing Japan with Greece, since the time he read Basil Hall Chamberlain’s Translations of the Kojiki or Records of Ancient Matters.21 The book vividly describes Japan’s mythological times. Hearn had read it in New York before coming to Japan in 1890 and read it again while he was teaching at Matsue, ‘the chief city of the province of the gods’. In the Greece of the last century no one believed any more in mythological gods, while in Japan, the ancient beliefs still survived, and the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu-o¯mikami, was worshipped every morning. One of the most beautiful passages in Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan is the scene of the morning Shinto worship when there rises to Hearn’s ear a sound of clapping hands.22 That discovery was thrilling for Hearn. He was very much attracted by folkloristic details. For example, in Japan the month of October was called, according to the lunar calendar, the month when there are no gods, kan-na-zuki, the gods are absent because at that time all Shinto gods are supposed to assemble in that province of Izumo where Hearn went to teach. Indeed, the month of October in the Izumo province is called the month when there are gods, kami-ari-zuki. In his first book on Japan, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, written about that province of gods and the islands of Oki, there already appeared interesting comparative references to Greece.23

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However, nowhere was the comparison of Japan with Greece more conspicuous than in the last of his thirteen books concerning Japan. The book entitled Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation was published in 1904, the year of his death. In the introductory chapter ‘Strangeness and Charm’ we encounter emphatic phrases such as these, which favourably compare Japan with Greece: (The Japanese civilization is) a civilization that can be termed imperfect only by those who would also term imperfect the Greek civilization of three thousand years ago.24 And about his experience of living in the world of Japanese culture, not simply as an observer but as one taking part in the daily existence of the common people, and thinking with their thoughts, Hearn wrote as follows. He was confident that he was at least partially successful in feeling just as the common people of Japan used to feel at the beginning of twentieth century: Some of us, at least, have often wished that it were possible to live for a season in the beautiful vanished world of Greek culture. Inspired by our first acquaintance with the charm of Greek art and thought, this wish comes to us even before we are capable of imagining the true conditions of the antique civilization. If the wish could be realized, we should certainly find it impossible to accommodate ourselves to those conditions, – not so much because of the difficulty of learning the environment, as because of the much greater difficulty of feeling just as people used to feel some thirty centuries ago.25 Why did Hearn insistently compare Japan with Greece? Like many thinkers of the nineteenth century,Hearn stuck to the idea of the linear evolution of history, and firmly believed in the law of religious development.26 Hearn imagined that history progresses on a single pathway. For him to enter into the world of nineteenth- century Japan was an experience similar to living in Greece of the tenth century BC.Hearn summarized his own experience as follows: Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into Fairyland, – into a world that is not, and never could be your own. You have been transported out of your own century – over spaces enormous of perished time – into an era forgotten, into a vanished age.27 Hearn’s comparison of Japan with Greece derived partly from his sentimental attachment to his mother Rosa, but mostly from his reading of Fustel de Coulanges’ book La Cité Antique. On 10 June

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1893 Hearn wrote to Chamberlain about the impressions he had obtained from reading the French historian’s book:28 there were so many ‘curious parallels’ between the two civilizations. Many Japanese scholars, especially jurists, of the pre-Second World War generations, too, were impressed by the similarities.29 I quote here one of most successful passages from Hearn’s book, Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation. This comparative observation is from Chapter III ‘The Ancient Cult’, and the earliest records of Japan here referred to is Kojiki compiled in 712: No more than the primitive ancestor-worshippers of Aryan race did the early Japanese think of their dead as ascending to some extra-mundane region of light and bliss, or as descending into some realm of torment. They thought of their dead as still inhab- iting this world, or at least as maintaining with it a constant communication. Their earliest sacred records do, indeed, make mention of an underworld, where mysterious Thunder-gods and evil goblins dwelt in corruption;30 but this vague world of the dead communicated with the world of the living; and the spirit there, though in some sort attached to its decaying envelope, could still receive upon earth the homage and the offerings of men. Before the advent of Buddhism, there was no idea of a heaven or a hell. The ghosts of the departed were thought of as constant presences, needing propitiation, and able in some way to share the pleasures and the pains of the living. They required food and drink and light; and in return for these, they could confer benefits. Their bodies had melted into earth; but their spirit-power still lingered in the upper world, thrilled its substance, moved in its winds and waters. By death they had acquired mysterious force; – they had become ‘superior ones’, Kami, gods. That is to say, gods in the oldest Greek and Roman sense. Be it observed that there were no moral distinctions, East or West, in this deification. ‘All the dead become gods’, wrote the great Shinto¯ commentator, Hirata. So likewise, in the thought of the early Greeks and even of the later Romans, all the dead became gods. M. de Coulanges31 observes, in La Cité Antique: – ‘This kind of apoth- eosis was not the privilege of the great alone: no distinction was made . . . It was not even necessary to have been a virtuous man: the wicked man became a god as well as the good man, – only that in this after-existence, he retained the evil inclinations of his former life.’ Such also was the case in Shinto¯ belief: the good man became a beneficent divinity, the bad man an evil deity, but all alike became Kami. ‘And since there are bad as well as good gods,’ wrote Motowori, ‘it is necessary to propitiate them with offerings of agreeable food, playing the harp, blowing the flute, singing and

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dancing and whatever is likely to put them in a good humour.’ .. . Cicero admonished his readers to render to all dii-manes the rightful worship: ‘They are men,’ he declared, ‘who have departed from this life; – consider them divine beings . . .’ In Shinto¯, as in old Greek belief, to die was to enter into the possession of superhuman power, – to become capable of confer- ring benefit or of inflicting misfortune by supernatural means.... But yesterday, such or such a man was a common toiler, a person of no importance; – today, being dead, he becomes a divine power, and his children pray to him for the prosperity of their undertak- ings. Thus also we find the personages of Greek tragedy, such as Alcestis, suddenly transformed into divinities by death, and addressed in the language of worship or prayer. But, in despite of their supernatural power, the dead are still dependent upon the living for happiness. Though viewless, save in dreams, they need earthly nourishment and homage, – food and drink, and the reverence of their descendants. Each ghost must rely for such comfort upon its living kindred; – only through the devotion of that kindred can it ever find repose. Each ghost must have shelter, – a fitting tomb; – each must have offerings. While honourably shel- tered and properly nourished the spirit is pleased, and will aid in maintaining the good-fortune of its propitiators. But if refused the sepulchral home, the funeral rites, the offerings of food and fire and drink, the spirit will suffer from hunger and cold and thirst, and, becoming angered, will act malevolently and contrive misfortune for those by whom it has been neglected . . . Such were the ideas of the old Greeks regarding the dead; and such were the ideas of the old Japanese.32 Hearn’s Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation was apparently modelled after Fustel de Coulanges’ La Cité Antique. Hearn’s approach was so remarkably similar that Marc Logé, the French translator of Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation, called it in the preface La Cité Extrême- Orientale. The parallels there are striking. If the first chapters dealing with religion are ‘antiques croyances’, ‘le culte des morts’, ‘le feu sacré’, ‘la religion domestique’, ‘la famille’ for La Cité Antique, they are, by comparison, ‘the ancient cult’, ‘the religion of the home’, ‘the Japanese family’, ‘the communal cult’, ‘developments of Shinto¯’ for Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation. It was obvious that Hearn believed in the general law of religious development. Hearn thought that what had taken place in the ancient Mediterranean world was now repeating itself in nineteenth-century Japan. The ancient society, as depicted by Fustel de Coulanges, was the Mediterranean society before it was Christianized, or before pagan

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gods were expelled. The life there with its ancient cult and the religion of the home was very similar to the traditional rural life in Japan with the so-called eight million deities, yao yorozu no kami. We must add one more interesting remark: the life as depicted by the French historian was also similar to Irish rural life, which in Hearn’s childhood days still retained many Celtic pre-Christian traditions. The fundamental difference between classical scholars such as Raphael von Koeber and Lafcadio Hearn is their understanding of the word ‘Greek’. While bookish classicists understood by the word ‘Greek’ what they learned from the classics, Hearn meant by the same word ‘Greek’ what is pre-Christian, something animistic and ghostly, which is so well depicted in La Cité Antique33 and which Hearn himself had felt in his childhood. Hearn, however, owing to his dislike of his Irish father, did not want to admit any Irish influence whatsoever. In spite of his rather weak knowledge of classical Greece, Hearn was easily able to empathize with the ‘Greek’ world as it was described by Fustel de Coulanges, because la cité antique was a world full of ghosts, and that world haunted by the spirits of the dead was in many ways so similar to the Celtic world, with which Hearn had been familiar. Egyptians today cannot be called direct descendants of the Egyptians who built pyramids several thousand years ago, because they are linguistically and culturally very different. The language the ancient Egyptians spoke and wrote was not the Arabic present-day Egyptians speak and write. In the case of Greek people, however, the Greek alphabet they use today is practically the same that Greek philosophers and dramatists used more than two thousand years ago. There seems to be a remarkable continuity since the time of Socrates and Plato. However, Greeks today are different from ancient Greeks in one important respect, and the difference is religion. Lafcadio Hearn believed that he was entitled to talk about the ancient Greek civilization as someone who was familiar with it, because his mother was Greek. Hearn did not hesitate to compare Japan with ancient Greece, and his comparisons proved to be successful to a certain degree. However, in Japan today Lafcadio Hearn alias Koizumi Yakumo is not so much appreciated as the author of Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation. It is probably because his sociological interpretations are not always based on historical facts of Japan: the book is a result of analogical approach based on the premise of a linear evolution of mankind. There are, therefore, elements of forced generalizations

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and distortions in this attempt. Hearn generally is more successful in the details that he himself had observed. Compared with Hearn the story-teller, Hearn the scholar seems to be less perfect. Hearn today is more widely read by the Japanese as the author of Kwaidan or ghost stories. Japanese readers are more or less attracted by Hearn’s nostalgic yearning for the eternal feminine. That nostalgia permeates his stories and studies of strange things. Then where does this sentiment of yearning, this desire to be tenderly taken care of, the desire of so-called ‘amae’ come from? Amae is a man’s inner wish to be babied, as there is no equivalent word in English, this psycho-analytical concept of amae proposed by Dr Takeo Doi has been translated into English as the psychology of dependence.34 It is true that in his last years Hearn was very much dependent on his wife Setsuko. In 1910, Setsuko’s reminiscences about her husband were translated into English by Yone Noguchi in his book Lafcadio Hearn in Japan. A book review appeared in the November issue of The Academy, a London journal, which calls Lafcadio ‘this wonderful grown-up child of hers’. Setsuko was eighteen years younger than her husband. Still, it was she who took care of Lafcadio in his daily life. At the age of five the child Patrick Lafcadio Hearn lost his dear one who tenderly took care of him. In his autobiographical fragment called ‘My Guardian Angel’ Hearn recollected his lonely nights in Dublin as follows: . . . To the wall of the room in which I slept there was suspended a Greek icon – a miniature painting in oil of the Virgin and Child, warmly coloured, and protected by a casing of fine metal that left exposed only the olive-brown faces and hands and feet of the figures. But I fancied that the brown Virgin represented my mother – whom I had almost completely forgotten – and the large-eyed Child, myself.35 This is a touching memory of Hearn’s childhood. The child was looking for a mother’s love. As it was denied, he fancied that the brown Virgin represented his mother Rosa, whom he had almost forgotten. The child, however, remembered that his mother’s facial complexion was very dark. He said so later in a letter to his brother James. The motherless child, therefore, longed for that tender relationship existing between the Virgin and the Child, and that longing was something fundamental throughout Lafcadio Hearn’s life. As a child, he sought his mother in that image; he harboured a secret desire to be babied: the ideal mother-child relationship was

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represented, therefore, in the Greek icon. If Hearn felt extremely lonely in the United States, one reason must be that there is no Mary cult in that essentially Protestant country. In the world of the Greek Orthodox Church as well as that of the Catholic Church, the presence of the Virgin Mary is strongly felt, while it is not so in the world of Protestants. Since the opening of Japan in 1868 the West has sent to Japan many Christian missionaries. The most numerous were Protestant missionaries coming from North America. Hearn was very critical of their attitude, as they slighted the indigenous religion, either by overzealous proselytizing or through ignorance. Their missionary prejudice distorted the image of Shinto. In the introductory chapter of Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation Hearn wrote as follows: Hitherto the subject of Japanese religion has been written of chiefly by the sworn enemies of that religion: by others it has been almost entirely ignored. Yet while it continues to be ignored and misrepresented, no real knowledge of Japan is possible. Any true comprehension of social conditions requires more than a superficial acquaintance with religious conditions. Even the industrial history of a people cannot be understood without some knowledge of those religious traditions and customs which regulate industrial life during the earlier stages of its development . . . And surely there can never be any just estimate made of Japanese literature, until a study of that literature shall have been made by some scholar, not only able to understand Japanese beliefs, but able also to sympathize with them to at least the same extent that our great humanists can sympathize with the religion of Euripides, of Pindar, and of Theocritus.36 This is a most reasonable argument. North American Japanese studies, conducted mainly by Protestant missionaries or by their children raised in the American schools or Canadian academy in Japan,37 the so-called miskids, have had a fatal flaw in common: there is little sympathetic understanding of Japanese native religious traditions. Hearn adds in the introductory chapter of Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation: Let us ask ourselves how much of English or French or German or Italian literature could be fully understood without the slightest knowledge of the ancient and modern religions of the Occident. I do not refer to distinctly religious creators, – to poets like Milton or Dante, – but only to the fact that even one of Shakespeare’s plays must remain incomprehensible to a person knowing nothing either of Christian beliefs or of the beliefs which preceded them.38

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Among the Christian missionaries who came over to Japan in the latter half of the nineteenth century the one who showed an exceptionally deep understanding of Japanese religious beliefs was Ioan Kasatkin, known as Nikolai (1836–1912).39 Although Protestant denominations with their many missionaries were not successful in propagating Christian faith in Japan except among intellectuals,40 the Russian Orthodox Church with the single- handed bishop Nikolai was surprisingly successful among the common people of Japan. The conversion was partly due to the personality of Nikolai himself and partly due to the warm congenial nature of the less individualistic religion. The Virgin Mary cult, for example, caught the heart of the Japanese people. Among one of the earliest Japanese converts to Russian Orthodox Christianity was the author Tanizaki Junichiro¯’s grandfather, and Junichiro¯’s recollection of his grandfather tells us eloquently what this religion meant to a Japanese merchant.41 Nikolai’s influence, which continued even during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, declined after his death and especially after the Russian Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Lafcadio Hearn was labelled atheist, because missionaries considered him the archenemy of Christianity. In my opinion, Hearn was religious by nature and sympathetic towards Shinto and Buddhism, although he thought himself to be agnostic in the sense that he disbelieved in a personal God, in an immortal soul, and in any continuation of personality after death. When he talked about Greece, it was always the Greece of pagan gods that he referred to. However, if, because of his maternal parentage, Lafcadio had wished to celebrate Greece, it should have been the Greece of his mother’s belief. In this regard, Lafcadio was mistaken. It is true that during the nineteenth century it was more fashionable to talk about classical Greece than Greece of the Orthodox Church. Hearn, however, forgot his true roots when he did not mean by the word ‘Greece’ the country of his mother’s religion. As I said earlier, even as a man Hearn unconsciously sought his mother, and finally found her in his Japanese wife Setsuko. If Hearn felt more at home in the Koizumi family, it was because human relationships within that family, especially mother-child relationships, were more akin to Hearn’s original experience of childhood. Conversely speaking, Hearn’s popularity as a storyteller among the Japanese comes partly from that sentiment of mother- longing, which, as I have noted above, is called amae in Japanese.

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Although the mother-child relationship seems to be biologically the same everywhere, it actually varies according to the role model dictated by cultural or religious surroundings. In the case of Rosa and Lafcadio, the role model was the Virgin Mary: the tender mother-child relationship represented in a Greek icon. The fact that Lafcadio continued to fancy that the miniature painting in oil of the brown Virgin represented his mother is in this sense very suggestive. Some intellectuals would criticize the pre-modern, less individualistic characteristics of the Greek Orthodox religion. Others might despise the excessively close bond derived from it that inhibits the liberation of family members. However, precisely because old religious traditions of the Orthodox Church had the characteristics and values that Protestantism lacked and that were more familiar to the common people of Japan, Nikolai was successful in Meiji Japan. If so, is it not the same with Lafcadio Hearn? Has his success in Japan something to do with his early childhood experience? In an essay entitled ‘Revery’ Hearn writes: The light of the mother’s smile will survive our sun; the thrill of her kiss will last beyond the thrilling of stars; the sweetness of her lullaby will endure in the cradle-songs of worlds yet unevolved. Is this not a faith in the Virgin Mary reshaped by an evolutionist? Throughout his wandering life, Hearn never became nihilistic. Lafcadio never had a grudge against his mother, for having forsaken him. Despite all miseries, he could still hold on to sound fundamental values: Lafcadio had a sound gyroscope built into himself. That basic trust in life was given early by his Greek mother Rosa.

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Lafcadio’s Nightmares Sukehiro Hirakawa

idening gaps between positive appreciations of Koizumi WYakumo in Japan and negative depreciations of Lafcadio Hearn by American Japan interpreters are very intriguing. To check the origins of these gaps we will address not only the writer Hearn per se, but also consider what these gaps mean. If the Japanese still admire Hearn, does it really reflect an ineradicable narcissism of the Japanese or does it mean a revival of Japanese cultural nationalism? Or if the mainstream of American Japan scholars dismisses Hearn unilaterally as a dubious interpreter of the Japanese mind, then how do we explain the exceptionally high appreciations of Hearn given by an eminent Austrian literary critic Hugo von Hofmannsthal or by the leading French Japanologue Bernard Frank? In this age of globalization the existence of peripheral cultures and local religions are being more or less threatened by the move towards worldwide industrialization and Westernization. It is natural that someone like Hearn who had fled from the mainstream of the Western Christian civilization and who was sympathetically interested in marginalized cultures should attract the attention of some Orientals. I am of the opinion that ‘he who would study impartially the life and thought of the Orient must

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also study those of the Occident from the Oriental point of view.’1 This is what Hearn said, and this attitude of Hearn’s is fundamentally sound. In any case, in order to bridge the widening gaps, bifocal approaches will be necessary. I am sure new vistas will be opened up by the participation of many scholars of many different cultural backgrounds. Before discussing Lafcadio’s and his wife Setsuko’s nightmares, let me begin by vindicating my alma mater from some erroneous accusations. More than a century ago Tokyo University was criticized harshly by the French newspaper L’Aurore when the Faculty of Letters did not renew the contract of Hearn after almost seven years’ service. Charles-Louis Garnier wrote an article entitled ‘Ingratitude Nationale’, or the national ingratitude of Japan towards Hearn. In the 25 August 1903 issue of the French paper, Tokyo University was accused of having obliged Hearn to resign, by reducing his well-paid salary as a Western professor to a normal salary of a Japanese professor, when Hearn acquired Japanese citizenship. Garnier’s article, which has been reproduced in many of Hearn’s Western biographies, is not correct.2 Hearn, whose citizenship was already Japanese in 1896, received from the start a monthly salary of 400 yen, a sum three times as much as the average Japanese professor. From April 1903, with the same amount of money, Tokyo University could actually employ two Japanese lecturers plus a British lecturer instead of Hearn. Tokyo University was criticized by its Japanese students, too, for ‘dismissing’ Hearn at short notice. Hearn was so widely admired by the students that they went on strike in protest. In the history of Japanese higher education, among all foreign teachers Hearn has always been regarded as one of the best so that almost all professors who succeeded him suffered from comparison. Hearn talked from his own experiences as a writer3 which must have been a reason why the students were captivated by his lectures. George Hughes gives a detailed explanation on the subject of foreign teachers in Japan in Chapter 21 of this book. However, I would like to say some words in defence of the young Japanese scholar who replaced Hearn. The first Japanese to teach English Literature at the University felt a considerable sense of inferiority, and resigned the post a few years later. He then devoted himself to creative writing. That Japanese scholar was none other than Natsume Sōseki, who is considered the greatest of modern Japanese writers. Thus, in hindsight, the university authorities’

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choice of Sōseki was probably not so bad as was spoken of at that time. What is little known is the fact that Sōseki wrote the best of his essays ‘Bunchō’, having Hearn’s ‘Kusahibari’ in mind.4 For Sōseki, Hearn was a rival not only as a professor of English Literature but also as a writer. Now let us proceed to my central theme: how to reassess Hearn. Hearn lived in the age of Western expansion: it was the age of colonization and modernization. In the French West Indies Hearn, however, was not interested in those Westernizing movements. In Martinique he was attracted by the ‘ghostly’ world of the black inhabitants. As a folklorist Hearn succeeded in collecting ghost stories told in Creole. Hearn applied these methods of participant observation not only in Martinique but also in Izumo, the province of Shinto gods. The first book Hearn wrote in this Asian country is entitled Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. It is a collection of travel writings, but is also full of ethnologic observations. If the familiar side of Meiji Japan to Westerners was the Westernization of an East Asian country, Hearn was interested in unfamiliar ‘ghostly’ aspects of Japan. Hearn thus became the Western discoverer of the Japanese native religion, Shinto, and Hearn believed in the vitality of this religious tradition. In this regard Hearn was exceptionally perspicacious among Western Japan interpreters coming to Japan in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As for Hearn and his works it was Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) who gave an authoritative judgement in the sixth edition of his Things Japanese, published in 1936. Both Chamberlain and Hearn were born in 1850; Chamberlain came to Japan as early as 1873 and translated the oldest mythological and historical records of the Japanese, Kojiki in 1882. When Hearn arrived in Japan in 1890, they began to correspond. Chamberlain admired Hearn’s ‘scientific accuracy of detail married to tender and exquisite style’.5 In the letter dated 19 January 1893 Chamberlain, congratulating Hearn on their friendship, wrote in French: ‘les beaux esprits se rencontrent’. Utsukushiki chisei wa ai- kaisuru. During Hearn’s lifetime and even after his death Chamberlain continued to praise Hearn’s books on Japan. Here are Chamberlain’s words: In reading these profoundly original essays, we feel the truth of Richard Wagner’s saying that ‘Alles Verständniss kommt uns nur durch die Liebe’. Lafcadio Hearn understands contemporary Japan

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better, and makes us understand it better, than any other writer, because he loves it better.6 Chamberlain emphatically says that all understanding comes to us only through love. Chamberlain, however, reversed his opinion. In the last edition of Things Japanese, deleting these enthusiastic phrases, the octogenarian Chamberlain adds the following remarks: (. . .) During the first few years (of Hearn’s stay in Japan) his enthusiasm was at fever pitch; he had found the Land of the Gods, and his ‘Glimpses of the Unfamiliar Japan’ glorified the Japan which he imagined he saw. Chamberlain suggests that Hearn romanticized Japan and that he could not see Japanese reality. According to Chamberlain, ‘in his ardour he (Hearn) became a naturalized Japanese, taking the name of Koizumi Yakumo. But awaking from his dream he realized that he had taken a false step.’ Chamberlain sums up Hearn’s life as follows: His life was a succession of dreams which ended in nightmares. Chamberlain’s statement was generally accepted, as Chamberlain was and still is very much honoured as a great Japan scholar.7 Hearn’s fame as a Japan interpreter began to fall with the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s. Since then Hearn has been practically ostracized by the majority of American and British Japan scholars. But did Hearn’s life really end in nightmares? The reason for the widespread acceptance of Chamberlain’s view, however, was more psychological than real, as there is no factual evidence endorsing Hearn’s life ending in nightmares. To those Westerners who believe in the superiority of their own civilization, no example fits their notion better than the story of a Westerner who took Japanese citizenship and ended his life miserably in Tokyo. It has become a custom for Western biographers of Hearn to talk of his frustration with Japan, and for publishers to print on the back cover of many Hearn’s paperbacks that ‘his last years were filled with bitterness of disillusionment’.8 Surely it is possible to admire Chamberlain and Hearn for different reasons, and the topic, ‘Who was the better interpreter of Japanese mind, Chamberlain or Hearn?’ will always be of great interest. Even if the majority of American and British Japan

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scholars side with Chamberlain, respecting him as the British founder of Japanese Studies, many Japanese have doubts about Chamberlain’s intellectual integrity. Were Hearn’s last years so unhappy as was suggested? Hearn’s life was minutely described by Koizumi Setsuko in her Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn.9 In Tokyo, apart from teaching, Hearn was busily engaged in writing. Setsuko helped him, by reading old weird tales for him and telling ghost stories. In the preface to Kwaidan Hearn mentioned the sources of his weird tales. It gives us the impression that his work is essentially translation; he, however, recreated, reshaped and recoloured the original stories. His retold stories are works of art, ‘with the freedom of a story-teller working from oral sources’.10 The part Setsuko played in Hearn’s retelling of folk tales is well known through her Reminiscences, which according to James Kirkup, is the very best book on Hearn. Here is what Setsuko tells us of their collaboration: Hearn was extremely fond of Japanese ghost stories. He said they reminded him of the legends he had heard in Ireland when he was young.11 He used to say: ‘Books of ghost stories are my treasures.’ On quiet evenings, (.. .) I would lower the wick of the lamp and begin telling him ghost stories. He would sometimes interrupt to ask explanations, and his breath was always hushed as if by fear or excitement. I often thought that he looked like a frightened little boy as he sat there in the dusk listening spellbound to my tales. At such times, our house seemed to be haunted by the spirits in the stories, and we would keep looking over our shoulders into the darkened corners of the room, as if expecting to see there the ghosts and demons in the faint lamplight (. . .) When I told him these old tales, I always gave a short outline of the plot, and he would write it down and then re-write it from his own imagination but always keeping to the spirit of the original. Of course, I also helped him by giving him many small details. He would become so excited when I came to the climax of a story! His face would grow pale, and he would lean towards me with burning eyes (. . .) To an outsider, we must have seemed quite mad. This is how he wrote stories like (. . .)‘Hoïchi’ in Kwaidan. He created that story from the very brief outline I gave him. (.. .) He became totally absorbed in that tale of Mimi-nashi-Hoïchi, entering into the character so intimately that he actually felt he was a blind man.

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It is true that ghosts and goblins appeared in the couple’s dreams, and they gave them terrifying nightmares. It happened that Setsuko woke up sweating and screaming in the middle of the night. As Setsuko did not speak English, the conversation between husband and wife was always conducted in Japanese, and Hearn’s understanding of the subtle nuances of the Japanese language is really remarkable. Recently some feminists have accused Hearn of not having openly acknowledged his wife’s help, which was truly valuable. It should be kept in mind, however, that a century ago there were still many Western readers who did not like the idea of inter-racial marriage. That must be the reason why Hearn’s travelling companion was often described in his books as a Japanese manservant named Manyemon. In the summer 1891, Hearn together with Setsuko went from Matsue in the direction of Tottori. The travel essay ‘By the Japanese Sea’ was born from that journey. It was in an inn at Hamamura that Setsuko told Hearn a ghost story. According to Hearn’s son Koizumi Kazuo, it was for the first time Hearn heard Japanese weird tales from Setsuko. After having listened to her, he exclaimed, ‘Anata wa watashi no tetsudai dekiru jin desu.’ (You are the person who can help me!) That kwaidan, that made Hearn jump for joy, is ‘The Story of the Futon of Tottori’. In ‘By the Japanese Sea’ it was fictionalized as a story told by a middle-aged woman, who came to wait upon Hearn in the inn. Hearn, however, married Setsuko legally in 1896, not wishing to repeat his Irish father’s misconduct towards an Oriental woman. Under the unequal treaties concluded between the Western powers and Japan at the time of the forced opening of the country, it was stipulated that the entire inheritance of a Westerner was to go not to his Japanese wife or children but to his Western relatives after his death. Having discovered this, he made up his mind to become a Japanese, assuming the new name of Koizumi Yakumo. The decision was taken mainly for the financial considerations affecting his beloved family.12 Hearn’s apprehension was not groundless. After his death Mattie Foley, the coloured woman with whom Hearn had lived in Cincinnati, claimed her share of the inheritance, and that news was sensationally reported in the United States. Home was what Hearn cherished deeply. When he was told of

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the death of homeless brothers in a winter’s night, he was moved. Here is the gist of ‘The Story of the Futon of Tottori’: In a Japanese-style inn an itinerant merchant went to sleep. The bed consisted of a futon which was laid on the floor mats. The guest, having slept but a very short while, was aroused by the sound of voices in his room – voices of children, always asking each other the same question: ‘Ani-San samukarō?’ (Elder brother, you are probably cold?) ‘Omae samukarō?’ (No, you are probably cold?) The guest thought that some children must have wandered into his apartment by mistake, in the dark, as in these old Japanese inns there were only papered screened doors between rooms. He uttered some gentle rebuke. For a moment only there was silence; then a sweet, thin, plaintive voice queried, close to his ear, ‘Ani- San samukarō?’ , and another sweet voice replied lovingly, ‘Omae samukarō?’ The guest rekindled the candle and looked around the room. There was no one. Wondering, he lay down again, leaving the light still burning; and immediately the voices spoke again, complainingly, close to his pillow. For the first time, he felt a chill creep over him. Again and again he heard the voices, and each time he became more afraid. For he knew that the voices were in the futon! It was the bed covering that cried out thus. He aroused the landlord and told him what had happened. The host was annoyed, saying that the guest had had bad dreams, because he had drunk too much sake. Nevertheless, the guest insisted upon paying at once that which he owed, and sought lodging elsewhere. Next evening at a late hour, the landlord was aroused by another guest with the same story. He had not taken alcohol. The landlord went up to the empty room to examine the futon for himself. And while there, he heard the voices, and he found that the guests had only told the truth. It was only one covering which cried out. At break of day he went to the dealer in second-hand wares, where he had purchased furniture and futon for his newly opened inn. The innkeeper found that the futon had belonged to a poor family, and had been bought from the landlord of a little house in which the family had lived.The final part of the story is as follows: The rent of the little house was only sixty sen a month, but even this was a great deal for the poor folks to pay. The father could earn only two or three yen a month, and the mother was ill and could

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not work; and there were two children, – a boy of six years and a boy of eight. And they were strangers in Tottori. One winter’s day the father sickened; and after a week of suffering he died, and was buried. Then the long-sick mother followed him, and the children were left alone. They knew no one whom they could ask for aid; and in order to live they began to sell what there was to sell. There was not much: the clothes of the dead father and mother, and most of their own; some quilts of cotton, and a few poor household utensils . . . Every day they sold something, until there was nothing left but one futon. And a day came when they had nothing to eat; and the rent was not paid. The season of greatest cold had arrived; and the snow had drifted too high that day for them to wander far from the little house. So they could only lie down under their one futon, and shiver together, and comfort each other in their own childish way, – ‘Ani-San samukarō?’ ‘Omae samukarō?’ They had no fire; and the darkness came; and the icy wind screamed into the little house. They were afraid of the wind, but they were more afraid of the house-owner, who roused them roughly to demand his rent . . . And finding there was none to pay him, he turned the children into the snow, and took their futon away from them, and locked up the house. They had but one thin blue kimono each, for all their other clothes had been sold to buy food; and they had nowhere to go. There was a temple of Kwannon not far away, but the snow was too high for them to reach it. So when the landlord was gone, they crept back behind the house. There the drowsiness of cold fell upon them, and they slept, embracing each other to keep warm. And while they slept, the gods covered them with a new futon – ghostly white and very beautiful. And they did not feel cold any more. For many days they slept there; then somebody found them, and a bed was made for them in the hakaba of the Temple of Kwannon-of-the-Thousand-Arms. And the innkeeper, having heard these things, gave the futon to the priests of the temple, and asked them to pray for the little souls. And the futon ceased thereafter to speak. The story of the futon which cried out seems a typical ghost story. The same strange thing had happened repeatedly to the first guest and the second guest: the repetition of this kind is a

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technique often used in a ghost story like ‘Mujina’. The concluding part which we have just read seems, however, to be more of Hearn’s pen. Overly rigorous scholars, who try to find fault with Hearn, may criticize him, saying that Hearn should have written down word for word what his Japanese informant told him, without adding anything of his own. However, if Hearn had followed strictly the rules of present-day ethnologic science, no publisher of the time would have accepted his manuscripts. Moreover, what Hearn aimed to do was to use folkloristic material for his artistic creation. Malcom Cowley (1898–1989) was an exceptional American critic who recognized this point in his introduction to Hearn’s Selected Writings: (. . .) Now that so much of his work in many fields has been collected into one volume, I think it will be apparent that his folk tales are the most valuable part of it and that he is the writer in our language who can best be compared with Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.13 This is an extremely high evaluation of the writer Hearn. Of more than fifty ghost stories retold by Hearn, the original Japanese texts of more than thirty stories have so far been identified.14 By comparing the original texts with Hearn’s retold stories, we see Hearn’s artistry in the differences. He knew which tales to choose and which details to emphasize, in exactly the right English. In the case of ‘The Story of the Futon of Tottori’ according to Koizumi Kazuo, his mother Setsuko had heard that story from her ex-husband Tameji (né Maeda), who was a man of Tottori.15 As we have not been able to identify the original Tottori tale, we cannot make a textual comparison between the original legend of the futon and Hearn’s retold story. Failing that, we may compare the ending of ‘The Story of the Futon of Tottori’ with the ending of one of Andersen’s fairy tales in order to appreciate the literary qualities of the two writers. Andersen’s ‘The Little Match Girl’ ends this way: It was late on a bitterly cold New Year’s Eve. The snow was falling. She did not dare go home, for she had not sold any matches and had not earned a single penny. Her father would beat her, besides it was almost as cold at home as it was here. Then she saw successively visions conjured up before her eyes, every time she struck a match: a big stove with a splendid fire blazing in it. Just as

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she was stretching out her feet to warm them, the match went out, and the stove vanished. Then she struck another match and saw in a room a roast goose stuffed with apples and prunes, and what was even better, the goose hopped from the dish with the carving knife sticking in his back. It came right up to the poor girl, and then – the match went out, and there was nothing to be seen but the black wall. She lit another match. This time she was sitting under a Christmas tree. All the Christmas candles rose higher and higher, till she saw that they were only the twinkling stars. One of them fell and made a bright streak of light across the sky: ‘Someone is dying,’ thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only person who had ever been kind to her, used to say, ‘When a star falls, a soul is going up to God.’ Now she struck another match against the wall, and this time it was her grandmother who appeared in the circle of flame. She saw her quite clearly and distinctly, looking so gentle and happy. ‘Grandmother!’ cried the little creature. ‘Oh, do take me with you. I know you will vanish when the match goes out (. . .) She hastily struck a whole bundle of matches. The light of the matches made it as bright as day. Grandmother had never looked so beautiful. She lifted the little girl up in her arms, and they soared in a halo of light and joy, far above the earth, where there was no more cold, no hunger, and no pain – for they were with God. In the cold morning light the poor little girl sat there, in the corner between the houses, with rosy cheeks and a smile on her face – dead. Frozen to death on the last night of the old year. New Year’s Day broke on the little body still sitting with the ends of the burnt-out matches in her hand.16 Do you not recognize some similarities in the endings of the two stories?17 If we get similar impressions, is it merely a coincidence? Hearn admired Andersen. In Matsue he gave a copy of Andersen’s Stories for Household to Yokogi Tomisaburō, who was the first of the fourth-year students. Those of you who have read ‘From the Diary of an English Teacher’ know who Yokogi was. It was the boy who, having fatally fallen ill, went to see the school, borne upon the back of his servant, before he died.18 In his lecture at Tokyo University Hearn referred to Andersen many times and said: Or, to take one more example out of a possible hundred, consider the stories of Hans Andersen. He conceived the notion that moral truths and social philosophy could be better taught through little

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fairy-tales and child stories than in almost any other way; and with the help of hundreds of old-fashioned tales, he made a new series of wonderful stories that have become a part of every library. It is true that the main part of the story that a futon speaks plaintively in the middle of the night is weird. Final impressions given by the Tottori story, however, are not of the kind generally given by Japanese ghost stories, in the sense that they are not spooky. After listening to ‘The Story of the Futon of Tottori’ to the end, I feel something that is different from ghastly after-sensations which I usually get from stories of horror. I feel for the little children of Tottori the same pity that I feel for the little match girl. Hearn, who must have had ‘The Story of a Match Girl’ in mind, retold the Japanese legend, by adding the tender final scene, reminiscent of the final scene of the little match girl. In Andersen’s case, the girl, while seeing beautiful visions, entered with her grandmother upon the glories of the New Year. And she was found frozen to death. In Hearn’s case, the brothers, embracing each other to keep warm, slept, and the gods covered them with a new futon white and very beautiful snow, and they were found frozen to death. Hearn changed the Christian background of Andersen’s final scene into a Buddhist scene by preparing a bed for them in the cemetery of the Temple of Kwannon, deity of maternal mercy. Cowley writes that Hearn ‘had the métier, the vocation for writing, the conscience that kept him working over each passage until it had the exact color of what he needed to say’.19 The most valuable part of Hearn’s writing is his folk tales, a work he accomplished together with his Japanese wife. In 1990, at the Matsue Conference, the late Professor Kajitani, congratulating Hearn on being united with Setsuko soon after his arrival in that city, summed up Hearn’s fourteen years’ life in Japan with the words, ‘All’s well, that begins well.’ Theirs was indeed a happy union. In this chapter I have made an attempt at interpreting the first folk tale that Setsuko told her husband and that Hearn wrote down in English. It is true that there are many nightmarish stories in Hearn’s Kwaidan, but I am sure that his years in Japan spent in a warm conjugal relationship were far from nightmares.

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Hearn and the Sea Sukehiro Hirakawa

Un homme cultivé se sent partout chez lui. – Gœthe Un homme qui se baigne se sent partout chez lui – Un sage d’Orient

n one of his first essays in Japan written in the port city of IYokohama, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn made a poignant description of a child of mixed parentage, whose forsaken Japanese mother is coming to ask him alms for her girl: All at once I become aware of a child standing before me, a very young girl who looks up wonderingly at my face; so light her approach that the joy of the birds and whispering of the leaves quite drowned the soft sound of her feet. Her ragged garb is Japanese; but her gaze, her loose fair hair, are not of Nippon only; the ghost of another race – perhaps my own – watches me through her flower-blue eyes. A strange playground surely is this for thee, my child; I wonder if all these shapes about thee do not seem very weird, very strange, to that little soul of thine. But no; ‘t is only I who seem strange to thee; thou hast forgotten the Other Birth, and thy father’s world. Half-caste, and poor, and pretty, in this foreign port!1 Hearn adds a remark almost involuntarily that she would be better off with the dead, as the gentle Jizō would care for her, and

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hide her in his great sleeves, and play shadowy play with her. Hearn’s sympathetic interest in Jizō is already clearly seen in this sketch made not long after his arrival in Japan in 1890.Jizō, indeed, will become Hearn’s preferred folkloric divinity throughout his fourteen-year stay in Japan. The gentle Jizō, merciful caretaker of children, seems to Hearn to be the representative symbol of Japanese religious culture.The preference was his instinctive reaction on his arrival in Japan. In those initial days of his stay Hearn could not have known of the peculiar transformation in nature of the original Kshitigarbha that occurred in Japan under the influence of indigenous folkloric cult of the guardian of the road, dōsojin.Although few Japanese know it even today, the Bosatsu (Bodhisattva) originally called Kshitigarbha was and is not particularly a caretaker of children neither in India, the country of origin of Buddhism, nor in China, the country through which Buddhism had come to Japan. Jizō Bosatsu, as he is loved and venerated as the guardian of children, is a specifically Japanese religious phenomenon.We are surprised by Hearn’s instinctive preference for this particularly indigenized Buddhist divinity,2 and we are also moved by what this intuitive preference means.It suggests the state of Hearn’s psyche.Hearn felt relief arriving in this country where Jizō is gently worshipped.The touching passage quoted above suggests to us in an indirect way what kind of miseries Hearn himself had experienced as a half- caste in Dublin. He must have suffered terribly as a child forsaken both by his Irish father and his Greek mother. It should be added, too,that,in spring 1890,Hearn did not know yet that in a few years’ time he himself would become father of ai-no-ko,children of inter- racial parentage. The circumstances of the unilaterally imposed separation of Hearn’s parents are now more or less known, and it would be superfluous to repeat them here. Anyway, the unexpected disappearance of his dear mother at the tender age of four was a traumatic experience and left many deep scars and enduring marks not only on him but also on his writings. The passage in ‘The Dream of a Summer Day’ which I have quoted in Chapter 2 (p. 18) is without doubt the memory of his paradisical childhood spent with his Greek mother. It is the more beautiful and the more unforgettable as her disappearance is the more unexpected. The question which I am going to raise in this chapter is how was it possible for the orphaned child Hearn to survive the crisis of that separation and regain confidence in life.

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Although much has been said about Hearn’s traumatic experience as a child severed inconsolably from his mother, I am certain that what psychiatrists call ‘basic trust’ had already been formed by his living closely together with his mother for the first four years of his life. The memory of a maternal paradise is an eternal source of consolation, even if it is lost forever. It is true that Hearn had suffered much misery, but it is also true that he had never shown a nihilistic attitude towards life. However, apart from the soundness of this basic trust in life, were there not any other practical means by which the child Hearn could recover from the psychological shock? How was it possible for him to get over the loss of his mother? Since the publication of Concerning Lafcadio Hearn by George Gould in 1908 much has been written about Hearn’s‘morbidity’in North America, but in Japan he has been considered a very good teacher and a very good father of the Koizumi family.Is it because of traditional politeness towards a teacher that the Japanese have embellished Hearn’s image? Or is it because of deep-rooted Protestant prejudices that some Americans have shunned Lafcadio Hearn because he had gone native? I would like to explain the crucial point of his salvation, using PapaYakumo-o omou, written in 1931 by Koizumi Kazuo (known as Father and I,Memories of Lafcadio Hearn),3 and Hearn’s first novel, Chita, in which I believe Hearn’s childhood experiences are indirectly reflected. Lafcadio Hearn was not a ‘sissy’. He was manly in an unorthodox way. As a penniless immigrant from England, he came to the United States at the age of nineteen in 1869. Hearn suffered many hardships but found employment in a newspaper office in Cincinnati and finally succeeded in earning his living by writing. His articles for newspapers in Cincinnati and later in New Orleans made him known as a good sensational reporter. However, instead of settling down in tolerable comfort in the United States, he chose to go to Martinique in 1887 and then to Japan in 1890. He was called a ‘civilized nomad’, but it seemed that, while peregrinating, he had a sort of gyroscope within himself that enabled him to lead a fairly stable life wherever he went. In Japan, for example, even though Hearn was alone in his adopted Japanese family, in the sense that he had no chance to use his mother tongue, he still continued a life as a writer in the English language. That was indeed an exceptional feat for someone living far away from his countrymen.

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It is also true that he suffered from a persecution complex, brought up as he was in miserable adversities, and distrustful of others, he always had many complaints: Hearn was indeed a highly sensitive person. Did he, then, really lack a sense of reality? Hearn still seemed a master of the situation under circumstances which are unendurable for ordinary Westerners. Hearn continued to live by his pen.He swam in many rough seas in the world and had never drowned, and this is not just an allegorical expression on my part. It was by learning how to swim in the sea that he received consolation as a child and was able to regain his confidence in life and become less fearful of the outer world. I would like to explain his art of living from this perspective.That is, the child Hearn was saved by learning how to swim, and, when he became a father, he tried to transmit this secret of survival to his children of mixed parentage by teaching them how to swim in the sea. Let us examine where Hearn first learned to swim. The memory of the first two years spent on the Greek island of Leucadia was as beautiful as a dream, and we are not sure if the child had ever bathed in the Ionian Sea before moving to Dublin. It was probably either at Tramore, County Waterford, Ireland, or near Bangor, North Wales, that Hearn learned to swim around the summer 1857 or 58. One of Hearn’s biographers, O.W. Frost, writes as follows in Young Hearn: The happiest times of these years were spent in North Wales. In the vicinity of Bangor beneath the farther hills, barren and bluish, and below the nearer hills, some spotted with woods and others covered with fields and marked by hedges, Patrick (Lafcadio Hearn) played on beaches and learned to swim in the green shore water.4 After having lived in the United States for fifteen years, Hearn felt financially more at ease, and in 1884 he took a long vacation, going from New Orleans to Grande Isle, off the coast of Louisiana, to pass a summer, which is minutely described in Chita published in 1889: Southwest, across the pass, gleams beautiful Grande Isle: primitively a wilderness of palmetto latanier; – then drained, diked, and cultivated by Spanish sugar-planters; and now familiar chiefly as a bathing-resort. Since the war the ocean reclaimed its own; – the cane-fields have degenerated into sandy plains, over which tramways wind to the smooth beach; – the plantation residences have been converted into rustic hotels, and the negro-quarters

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remodelled into villages of cozy cottages for the reception of guests. But with its imposing groves of oak, its golden wealth of orange-trees, its odorous lanes of oleander, its broad grazing- meadows yellow-starred with wild chamomile, Grande Isle remains the prettiest island of the Gulf.5 Hearn the word-painter tends by his artistic prose to beautify the scene. A more realistic description of the same locality is found in Hearn’s letter written in 1884 to Page Baker, editor of the Times Democrat. Let us quote some paragraphs: DEAR PAGE, – I wish you were here; for I am sure that the enjoyment would do you a great deal of good. I had not been in sea-water for fifteen years, and you can scarcely imagine how I rejoice in it – in fact I don’t like to get out of it at all. I suppose you have not been at Grand Isle – or at least not been here for so long that you have forgotten what it looks like. It makes a curious impression on me: the old plantation cabins, standing in rows like village-streets, and neatly remodelled for more cultivated inhabitants, have a delightfully rural aspect under their shadowing trees; and there is a veritable country calm by day and night. Grande Isle has suggestions in it of several old country fishing villages I remember, but it is even still more charmingly provincial. The hotel proper, where the tables are laid – formerly, I fancy, a sugar-house or something of that sort – reminds one of nothing so much as one of those big English or Western barn-buildings prepared for a holiday festival or a wedding-party feast. The only distinctively American feature is the inevitable Southern gallery with white wooden pillars. An absolutely ancient purity of morals appears to prevail here: – no one thinks of bolts or locks or keys, everything is left open and nothing is ever touched. Nobody has ever been robbed on the island . . . Still I would not like to leave one thousand golden dinars on the beach or in the middle of the village. I am still a little suspicious – having been so long a dweller in wicked cities.6 Based partially on experiences of this kind,Hearn wrote his first novel Chita,which is rich in descriptions of life by the sea.Here he depicts the relations between the sea and the orphaned girl Chita. She was miraculously saved from the hurricane that completely devastates the Last Island and is adopted by a Hispanic fisher couple living on Grande Isle.They named her Conchita, but she is more commonly known by the diminutive, Chita.The sea is something terrifying for Chita because in it perished her parents; but the sea is also something beneficial because it is life itself:

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. . . She began to learn the life of the coast. With her acquisition of another tongue, there came to her also the understanding of many things relating the world of the sea . . . tremendous sunsets, scuddings and bridgings of cloud, – sharpening and darkening of the sea – line, – and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, out of a still transparent sky, – and halos about the moon . . . And . . . she learned the fables and the sayings of the sea, – the proverbs about its deafness, its avarice, its treachery, its terrific power, – especially one that haunted her for all the time thereafter: Si quieres aprender a orar, entra en el mar (If thou wouldst learn to pray, go to the sea) . . . She saw the quivering pinkness of waters curled by the breath of the morning – under the deepening of the dawn – like a far fluttering and scattering of rose-leaves of fire;– Saw Sea shift color, – ‘change sheets,’ – when the viewless Wizard of the Wind breathed upon its face, and made it green; – . . . Then they (waves) all appeared to move in order, – according to one law or impulse; – each had its own voice, yet all sang one and the same everlasting song. Vaguely, as she watched them and listened to them, there came to her the idea of a unity of will in their motion, a unity of menace in their utterance – the idea of one monstrous and complex life! The sea lived: it could crawl backward and forward; it could speak! – it only feigned deafness and sightlessness for some malevolent end . . .7 Feliu, the Hispanic fisher, seeing his adopted daughter more and more terrified by the Wicked Sea, suggested a heroic remedy: ‘Chita must learn to swim.’ Each morning, at sunrise he took Chita into the water. As she felt confidence in Feliu, she was not panicked. His teaching was not gentle, however. She screamed piteously before her first ducking at his hands. Here is Hearn’s description: He would carry her out, perched upon his shoulder, until the water rose to his own neck; and there he would throw her from him, and let her struggle to reach him again as best she could. The first few mornings she had to be pulled out almost at once; but after that Feliu showed her less mercy, and helped her only when he saw she was really in danger. He attempted no other instruction until she had learned that in order to save herself from being half choked by the salt water, she must not scream; and by the time she became habituated to these austere experiences, she had already learned by instinct alone how to keep herself afloat for awhile, how to paddle a little with her hands. Then he commenced to train her

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to use them, – to lift them well out and throw them forward as if reaching, to dip them as the blade of an oar is dipped at an angle, without loud splashing; – and he showed her also how to use her feet. She learned rapidly and astonishingly well. In less than two months Feliu felt really proud at the progress made by his tiny pupil: it was a delight to watch her lifting her slender arms above the water in swift, easy curves, with the same fine grace that marked all her other natural motions. Later on he taught her not to fear the sea even when it growled a little, – how to ride a swell, how to face a breaker, how to dive. She only needed practice thereafter.8 This practice in swimming is a story of a child’s self-help and independence. Surprisingly, in Chita there is an element of the Bildungsroman! Hearn writes about the meaning of swimming in the following passage: With the first thrill of delight at finding herself able to glide over the water unassisted, the child’s superstitious terror of the sea passed away . . . The sea appeared to her as something that had become tame for her sake, something that loved her in a huge rough way; a tremendous playmate, whom she no longer feared to see come bounding and barking to lick her feet. And, little by little, she also learned the wonderful healing and caressing power of the monster, whose cool embrace at once dispelled all drowsiness, feverishness, weariness . . . Her delicate constitution changed; – the soft, pale flesh became firm and brown, the meager limbs, rounded into robust symmetry, the thin cheeks grew peachy with richer life; for the strength of the sea had entered into her; the sharp breath of the sea had renewed and brightened her young blood . . .9 The Japanese critic Sembokuya Koichi wrote a book entitled Jinsei no kyōshi Rafukadio Hān (Lafcadio Hearn, Teacher of Life).10 The title is indicative of Hearn’s spiritual orientation as perceived by many Japanese. His Tokyo University students seemed to recognize in Hearn not only a self-educated man but also a teacher of life who encourages them to sich bilden. This educational tendency of Hearn comes of course from his having regained self-confidence through his own efforts, and one of them certainly was his having learned early to swim. It was thanks to swimming Chita could overcome not only the fear of the sea but also the loss of her parents. There must be a repercussion here of Hearn’s own experience as an orphan. In Japan,Hearn found a home,which was something he had not expected to find in the United States. In the process of achieving

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domestic happiness the sea also played a role. In the Chinese ideogram which means sea another ideogram meaning mother is contained.The word is pronounced as umi in Japanese (or hai or kai according to the Chinese or Sino-Japanese pronunciation);the sea, therefore,has a maternal element to East Asians,as it sometimes has in English literature. It is almost the same in French: the word mer which means sea has the same pronunciation as mère, meaning mother. Symbolically Hearn in the opening page of Chita quotes the following poem byVictor Hugo: Je suis la vaste mêlée, – Reptile, étant l’onde; ailée, Étant le vent, – Force et fuite, haine et vie, Houle immense, poursuivie Et poursuivant.11 Just as Hugo, Hearn must have felt this maternal embrace while swimming in the sea. The reptilian wave has two contradictory faces: force and flight, hatred and life. Hearn is fascinated by the sea. I am wondering if Hearn would have really stayed in Japan had he not had the chance to swim in the Izumo sea in 1891. Setsuko writes as follows in her Omoide no ki. When they went to Kaka no Kukedo off the Shimane coast, Hearn liked swimming so much. He was glad showing me different ways of swimming, going sometimes before the boat and sometimes behind.12 To the dismay of those accompanying Hearn, he almost dared to jump in and swim in a cave near that of the children’s ghosts. They admonished him not to act against the sacred taboo, telling him frightful things. Hearn, in turn, told them of scary experiences he had had in the French West Indies. On one occasion he was swimming side by side with a Martinique boy, when suddenly he disappeared, and ‘at the same time a big tail of a shark appeared before me’.13 Setsuko also remembers in detail their summer holiday passed on the seashore of Inasa near the Great Shinto Shrine of Izumo: During the summer vacation of 1891 Hearn together with Mr Nishida Sentarō visited the Great Shinto Shrine of Kitzuki. As I received next day a letter asking me to join them, I went to the inn. Both of them had been to the sea, leaving the money in their socks. Silver coins and banknotes spilt out of them.14

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Hearn, still very much on his guard at Grande Isle, was now less suspicious in this inn of Izumo province. He stayed at Inasa for two weeks, and went from there to Hinomisaki. Hearn came back to the Inasa beach five years later in 1896, also for swimming. According to Setsuko’s reminiscences, what Hearn liked are in order of preference ‘west, evening glow, summer, sea, swimming’, and the places he liked were ‘Martinique, Matsue, Mionoseki, Hinomisaki and Yaidzu’.15 From 1897 until 1904, the year of his death at the age of fifty- four, Hearn passed his summer vacation at Yaidzu, off Shizuoka. At that time the trip took seven hours by train from Tokyo. There were, however, two exceptions: he did not go there in 1898 and 1903. In summer 1898 the Koizumi family spent instead three weeks at the Azumaya inn in Kugenuma, a seaside resort near Kamakura. Mitchell McDonald and Amenomori Nobushige came to join them. The eldest son Kazuo reports: One day, Mr. McDonald and Mr. Amenomori came from Yokohama, and these two, one Western and one Eastern man of solid, square frame, swam with father. Mr. Amenomori’s crawl à la japonaise was remarkably fine and quite different from Mr. Tamura’s 16 dog paddle swimming. Mr. McDonald was a trained Navy man and was a strong swimmer with a considerable speed, but neither of the two could float as easily as father.17 While the sea at Kugenuma is shallow, at Yaidzu, forty or fifty feet from the shore, the water suddenly becomes deep. The beach is covered with large pebbles, and unless one goes in quite far, there is no sand. This out-of-the-way place pleased Hearn. The Hearn family stayed at the fisher Yamaguchi Otokichi’s house, in very warm, low-ceilinged upstairs rooms. The tatami-mats were flea-infested, but Hearn described his contentment impressively in ‘Otokichi’s Daruma’.18 Hearn was almost a Rousseauist and Chita already reflects his educational philosophy. He talks of the Creole girl’s advantages in not having a formal education. What did she gain, by coming from the dusty existence of cities to the open immensity of nature’s freedom? Doubtless she was saved from many of those little bitternesses and restraints and disappointments which all well-bred city children must suffer in the course of their training for the more or less factitious life of society: – obligations to remain very still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb revolt; – the injustice of

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being found troublesome and being sent to bed early for the comfort of her elders; – the cruel necessity of straining her pretty eyes, for many long hours at a time, over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without;. . .19 Hearn was faithful to this pedagogical view written a decade before, and did not let his eldest son Kazuo go to school until the age of ten. (At that time, probably foreseeing his premature death, Hearn changed his educational policy in spring 1904, by letting Kazuo enter the Tokyo Ōkubo elementary school as a fourth grade boy.) What swimming meant to Hearn can be inferred from the great zeal he showed regarding natatorial lessons for his children. He used to say to his son Kazuo: ‘You should know the sea. You should become a friend of the sea.’20 According to Hearn, what is important for beginners is not to swim but to float on one’s back. In the summer of 1900, when Kazuo was six years old, Hearn, like the fisherman Feliu in Chita, was not gentle in his teaching: Father one day said before we went to the sea, ‘Today we’ll make a great adventure. You must do just exactly as I order you or you will die. How is it, will you do as Papa says? Side by side with Papa, you are going to swim to that vessel standing out there at sea. But if you come too near, our feet may clash, so always keep about two metres away, and on the way, though you may be stung by the jellyfish, don’t be scared or kick about or return to the shore. When Papa says stop, no matter when, turn on your back, and rest your arms and legs.21 As they swam, the colour of the water changed, and the water got cold. Noisy girls and boys, taking tubs and boards and raising piercing voices in their enjoyment were seen and heard but they gradually vanished and their voices could not be heard any longer. Out into the sea father and son progressed, neither hurrying nor going slow. On turning and looking at the breakwater, it seemed small and low, like a light-coloured sash. Jōnokoshi beach seemed much narrower than Kazuo thought. Contrary to this, the ship that looked like a toy from the shore began to get larger and and larger that the boy could see the men on board. They finally came near enough to see the crew laughing and said something to them from the ship. Here is a passage from Kazuo’s Father and I, as translated by Yoneko Yanagisawa:

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When quite near, I noticed that this was not aYaidzu boat . . . It was quite strange to see the shadow of the boat on this sea under the hot bright summer sunshine.The colour of the water in the shadow of the boat was very deep blue – sapphire.As we approached nearer, it began to smell fishy.Bronzed faces looked down upon us from the boat.‘It’s wonderful you got here!’‘Sa, come up and rest!’‘You are from where?’‘ForTokyo visitors,you are great swimmers.’‘How old is the child?’‘Eye look to be bad, but he’s brave daddy; fishermen’s children couldn’t come so far.’ All these remarks were uttered in rough language, but they were very sympathetic toward us . . .The captain, an old man, handed down to us, in a big clumsy cup, some hot sugar water.‘Don’t drop it.’ So saying, he handed it to us.The boatmen were fishermen from Enshū.2 When Kazuo swam back and reached shore, father praised him very much, and said, ‘Don’t ever forget the hard struggle of today!’ Here is the record of how they passed a day. As Chita went to sleep and awakened with the wild birds, so the Koizumi children, compared to chicks, got up very early: At Yaidzu, father always got up at five o’clock every morning, and called out, ‘Chicks! Chicks! Wake up, Chicks!’ in a cheerful voice. After swimming about an hour, we returned and brushed our teeth, washed our faces, and then sat down to breakfast. Miso soup, raw eggs, cooked beans, Nara-zuke, Takuan-pickles – any kind of Japanese food we ate. After the rest of thirty or forty minutes, my lesson began: I was made to read out loud an English text and translate it into Japanese. After that we went for a swim or walk. After lunch we rested a little, and then went to the sea again. After three o’clock I was given lessons of English penmanship and dictation.23 Hearn was probably willing to get a Western education to his first-born son, and wished to take him to an English-speaking country sometime in the future. On 1 September 1901, Hearn wrote a letter to his half-sister Minnie Atkinson about the education of Kazuo: I have made a good swimmer of him; but whether I shall be able to make a good scholar of him I don’t know. Perhaps you can tell me something about a nice little country- town in England or Ireland when I could take him – not far from the sea, I keep him in the sea most of the summer here.24 It is undeniable that Hearn wanted his children to know the sea well. How Hearn was enchanted by the sea is touchingly felt from

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the following domestic scene. On his father’s desk in his Tokyo study there were always two or three strangely shaped pebbles of peculiar colours which Hearn had picked up at Yaidzu. Kazuo writes: Father would stop in the midst of his writing and look at these pebbles; he was always reminded of the sea. Sometimes he would pick up one of them and put it to his ear, saying that he could hear the sound of the waves. Once he put a pebble to my ear and asked, ‘Can you hear the whisper of the ocean?’25 Hearn’s love for the sea is genial. Like Byron he delighted in the sea and always came out with a buoyancy of spirits. Here are some letters Hearn wrote in Japanese to his wife living in Tokyo. Setsuko generally came to Yaidzu only towards the end of the summer vacation. It is not always easy for me to translate Hearn’s Japanese letters into English: Little Mama: Today we have not much sunlight. Kazuo played a torpedo in the water. [Hearn means a play of his boy who pulled his legs from under the water while swimming.] He is making progress in swimming every day. We had a long walk yesterday. We bought a little ball and a bell for the cat [whose life Hearn had saved and brought home]. The stonecutter showed me a picture of a face which is supposed for the statue of Jizō. I’ll let him carve the name of Kazuo somewhere on the statue. The Yaidzu people will be delighted [to see the new Jizō]. (July 12, 1901) One day, while walking on the newly made dyke, Hearn and Kazuo found a Buddhist statue of the divinity called ‘Namiyoké Jizō’, meaning ‘Jizō who guards people from the waves’. He had lost his hands and head. Neck and hands had been broken long ago, but the lotus stand was lost during the recent repair of the dyke. That was the reason why Hearn told Otokichi to get the best stonecutter in Yaidzu and have him look the statue over and see what could be done with it. An unexpected objection, however, came from Setsuko, appalled by her husband’s idea. She and his mother-in-law angrily protested from Tokyo, saying that from the olden times a staue of Jizō is said to be made when a child died. What an unlucky idea to carve the name of Kazuo on the statue? Or has Kazuo been carried away by the waves and died? Hearn, totally perplexed at these remonstrances, apologized at once:

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Little Mama: Gomen, gomen! [Forgive me!] I thought it would give you a little joy. The Jizō I wrote you about is not the thing you will find in the graveyards; but it is the Jizō who shall guard and pacify the waves. It is not a bad kind; but you do not like it. I shall not write Kazuo’s name nor my name nor anyone else’s on it. It was only Papa’s foolish thought. However, Jizō Sama cried terribly when he heard of your suspicions. I said to him: ‘You are only a guardian, but I cannot help it, as Mama San doubted your real nature.’ So the Jizō is crying even now. From Papa. Gomen, gomen! The Jizō is shedding stone tears.26 On the margin of the letter Hearn drew a picture of a stone Jizō, shedding stone tears. That summer Kazuo made great progress in swimming: Kazuo swam into a deeper sea first yesterday; he swam five times toward a boat at quite a distance, and came back, swimming. He is growing more strong and clever in swimming every day. He is very black now. (July, 25, 1901) Little Mama: Yesterday we had a real big wave of the height of summer season. Otokichi swam with Kazuo, as he was afraid for Kazuo to go alone. The sea began to groan terribly since noon; and at evening the billows grew bigger, and almost reached the stone wall. It is difficult to swim this morning also, but I expect that the sea will be calmer in the afternoon. (August 1, 1901)

Lafcadio Hearn was a very busy man, writing a book every year during his fourteen-year stay in Japan. Hearn, however, had become a good husband and father, a great teacher, teaching most conscientiously at Tokyo University. Father Hearn indeed had left unforgettable memories in his first-born son. Kazuo lost his father at the age of ten. Still Kazuo’s Father and I, written more than a quarter of a century after Lafcadio Hearn’s death, moves us by the vividness of the child’s impressions. Among Kazuo’s many reminiscences nothing is more impressive than that of the summers spent at Yaidzu, together with his father teaching him how to swim. We are reminded here by what Feliu, foster father of Chita, said:

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The world is like the sea: those who do not know how to swim in it are drowned; – and the sea is like the world, you must learn to swim.27 That was Feliu’s philosophy of life but was also Hearn’s which the father tried hard to teach Kazuo.

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Hearn: Interpreter of the Animistic World of the Japanese Sukehiro Hirakawa

afcadio Hearn was naturalized as a Japanese citizen under the Lname of Koizumi Yakumo. It was in 1896 that Hearn got his Japanese citizenship and at that time not a few Westerners living in Japan talked rather disparagingly of Hearn who ‘had gone native’, and Hearn’s reputation is still very much divided among Western Japan scholars, or Westerners living in Japan. Basil Hall Chamberlain wrote an article ‘Lafcadio Hearn’ for the last edition ofThings Japanese published posthumously in 1936, saying that ‘His (Hearn’s) life was a succession of dreams which ended in nightmares.’ I agree to call Hearn’s life a succession of dreams, however, I am unable to find any evidence to substantiate Chamberlain’s comment that Hearn’s life ‘ended in nightmares’. I have, therefore, some misgivings about this comment given by Chamberlain. However, for the wartime British, it was almost self- evident that a Britisher who had become a naturalized Japanese should end his life in nightmares. In order to situate Lafcadio Hearn among Western Japan interpreters, let us take a look at other towering figures. In Japan among great scholars of the pre-war generations two gigantic

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figures are well known. One is Sir George Sansom: I translated, together with Japanese historians, Sansom’s Western World and Japan, which is still available in paperback edition in this country. It means a high appreciation of the work of the British historian on the part of Japanese readership. Another giant is Arthur Waley, and I have been reading with my students The Tale of Genji both in the Japanese original and in Waley’s translation. Waley, by translating so beautifully The Tale of Genji, discredited Basil Hall Chamberlain, who insinuates in his Things Japanese that Lady Murasaki is as boring as the seventeenth-century French court writer Mademoiselle Scudéry (1607‒1701). Chamberlain, moreover, adds Ernest Satow’s opinion that ‘The Tale of Genji is only of value as marking a stage in the development of the language.’ Waley was a linguistic genius. He was a superb craftsman, and I generally find Waley’s translations of Chinese poetry and Japanese prose really excellent. I even feel some of his mistakes in translation very interesting. Some of his so-called mistakes are, I guess, intentional. Although I believe The Tale of Genji is Waley’s most important work, Waley himself told us that among his translations he liked Yuan Mei best, probably because he added freely his own personal critical observations in that biography of the eighteenth-century Chinese poet. I read this book, too, with my students, who liked very much Waley’s translations of Yuan Mei’s poems, which I compared with the original Chinese poems. However, as for Yuan Mei’s ghost stories, which constitute Chapter 5 of the book, Waley’s translations did not please Japanese students. They apparently prefer Lafcadio Hearn’s ghost stories to Yuan Mei’s. I find this difference in reactions on the part of students very suggestive. As I have explained in Chapter 1 ‘Lafcadio Hearn, a Reappraisal’, Waley’s English renditions of Oriental ghost stories are not so impressive as Hearn’s retold stories, as Waley was an agnostic and did not believe in ghosts, while Hearn did believe in ghosts. It is that belief of Hearn’s that makes his ghost stories really ghostly. Hearn recalls in a biographical sketch entitled ‘My Guardian Angel’ anxieties of his unstable childhood as follows: ‘For the best of possible reasons I then believed in ghosts and goblins – because I saw them, both by day and by night.’I think that this statement is a form of his self-analysis. Hearn himself asked towards the end of his life why he was so attracted by the ghostly world. Anyway, the simple fact that, compared with Hearn’s ghosts, Waley’s ghosts are

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not so impressive was a revelation for me. Then belatedly I became aware how excellent Hearn is as a storyteller of kwaidan or weird tales, and how exceptional Hearn is as an interpreter of the animistic world of the Japanese. Hearn’s popularity in Japan derives mostly from his book Kwaidan published in 1904. As is known, the literary artist Hearn rewrote these ghost stories in English, by carefully listening to Japanese originals told by his Japanese wife Setsuko. Hearn wrote stories, by paying attention to her changing attitudes, by catching changes of tone in her voice. Hearn’s mind’s eye vividly saw the ghostly world of the Japanese through the informant Setsuko. Setsuko was intelligent but uneducated, and so much the better for Hearn, who tried to catch the ghostly world of the common people of Japan. Readers who have read Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn also published by Global Oriental (1997) know that Hearn’s ‘Oshidori’ is based on a story of the eleventh-century anthology Kokonchomonjū. Those who understand both English and Japanese must have remarked how Hearn modified the original. It seems that the literary artist Hearn borrowed the final scene of his story not from the Japanese book, but from Flaubert’s La Legende de St Julien l’Hospitalier which Hearn liked so much that he had brought the French book with him to Japan. Hearn often recolours and reshapes the original Japanese texts in order to make the stories his own. Hearn’s understanding of the Japanese language, both modern and classical, was considerable, if we take into account the fact that his Japanese wife did not speak English at all. The communication between Lafcadio and Setsuko was entirely conducted in Japanese. Setsuko explained in Japanese difficult expressions of the original Japanese stories. The result is that Hearn’s retold stories are in general artistically much better written than most of Japanese originals. Ordinary Japanese readers simply admire Hearn for his impressive ghost stories. The Japanese preference is statistically clear. Among Hearn’s writings it is Kwaidan that has been his best-selling book in Japan. Japanese readers appreciate Hearn’s delicate understanding of the ghostly world of the Japanese. Roger Pulvers wrote an article in The Japan Times, 19 January 2000, claiming that Hearn’s blatant adulation of Japanese uniqueness is irresistible to the Japanese and that the Japanese crowned Hearn with their ultimate laurel and that even today

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Hearn is considered the foreigner who understood the Japanese in the most profound way. I do not like this kind of stereotyped explanation of Hearn’s popularity in Japan. No one reads a work of literature for the satisfaction of one’s nationalistic sentiment. I agree, however, that Hearn understood the animistic world of the Japanese in a very profound way. I should add that Hearn understood not only the animistic world of the Japanese but also that of the inhabitants of the French West Indies. In Martinique, as well as in Japan, Hearn listened carefully to what common people told him in their dialect. By collecting proverbs, local legends, folkloristic tales, traditional songs, Hearn could sympathetically understand the mentality of the coloured inhabitants of the French West Indies. Moreover, Hearn recognized the persistent existence of pre-Christian animistic beliefs, and he understood how superficial French missionaries were, when they pretended that the whole population of Martinique had been completely Christianized. Hearn saw in the French West Indies what missionaries could not perceive because of their missionary prejudice. Coming to Japan, Hearn applied again the same folkloristic methods of approach in Izumo, the province of Shinto gods, and became the first Westerner to recognize the importance of natural Shinto, the Japanese native religion. Hearn was quite exceptional in this regard. Not only leading Japanologists of the Meiji period like Aston, Chamberlain and Satow, but also many Westernized Japanese intellectuals of the time thought that Shinto, which has no set of dogmas, no sacred book, was doomed to disappear in the process of modernization. Christian missionaries later explained the survival of Shinto in the first half of the twentieth century by the fact that it was maintained as a patriotic institution, the so- called State Shinto. I guess there is a partial truth in that explanation, which, however, cannot explain renewed interest in natural Shinto after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War: every New Year’s Day millions of Japanese go to Shinto shrines to pay respect, offering coins and clapping their hands. Their donations alone support Shinto shrines which do not receive any financial subsidy from the State. Hearn, who had recognized the existence of animistic beliefs in Christianized Martinique, believed that Shinto, which existed before the introduction of Buddhism into Japan, must have survived even after the Meiji Restoration. Hearn was very pleased

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indeed when he knew that the Japanese recognize the existence of a soul even in an insect. Hearn uses the expression ‘the infinitesimal soul of him’ for Kusa-Hibari, a tiny insect. In the Japanese animistic religion of Shinto not only animated beings but also trees, rocks, mountains and winds have a spirit or a ghost of their own. Even words have their spirit, and Japanese poetics was based on that notion. I am wondering if English or American people use an English expression such as ‘soul of a tree’. It is, however, natural for the Japanese to use the word ‘jurei’, which means ‘soul of a tree’. In Christian countries expressions such as ‘tree-spirit’ suggests a certain animistic tendency. But it seems not so discernible as in Japan. In former times Druids seem to have had an animistic belief in trees. Does that Celtic tradition still continue to exist in some marginal regions of Europe? On his way to the province of Izumo, Hearn saw Bon-Odori and described it beautifully in his Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. Bon festival is the Festival of the Dead, which, though integrated later into Buddhist rituals, is older than the introduction of Buddhism and is a kind of ancestor worship. Souls of the departed come back during the three days of the Bon, which are the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth of the seventh month by the ancient calendar. Here is a passage from Hearn’s ‘By the Japanese Sea’:1 . . . And on the sixteenth day, after the shōryōbune, which are the Ships of Souls, have been launched, no one dares to enter it: no boats can then be hired; all the fishermen remain at home. For on that day the sea is the highway of the dead, who must pass back over its waters to their mysterious home; and therefore upon that day is it called Hotoke-umi, the Buddha-Flood, – the Tide of the Returning Ghosts. And even upon the night of that sixteenth day, – whether the sea be calm or tumultuous, – all its surface shimmers with faint lights gliding out to the open, – the dim fires of the dead; and there is heard a murmuring of voices, like the murmur of a city far-off, – the indistinguishable speech of souls. Hearn’s penetration into the religious world of the Japanese is remarkable. Hearn tells us also his visit to the village graveyard, and how before one very humble tomb there are offered dainty little Japanese dishes, and a little cup of tea, and also a pair of new chopsticks. Why could Hearn understand so quickly the Bon festival’s Shinto character? Why could he enter into that gathering of Japanese ghosts after a year’s stay in Izumo province?

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Here we are reminded of William Butler Yeats’ connection with Japan. Yeats intuited remarkably well the world of Nō plays, which is no other than a world of ghosts, probably because Yeats was already familiar with Irish fairy tales and ghost stories. If Yeats, who had never been to Japan, was able to empathize with the ghostly world of the Japanese through his reading of the Fenollosa-Pound translation of Nō plays, why would it not be possible for Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, a child of similar Irish background, to sympathize with Japanese ghostly folklore and customs? Both Yeats and Hearn were agnostics of a kind; but this does not mean that both poets were deprived of religious sensitivity. On the contrary, Yeats and Hearn were religious in the sense that in the vacuum left open by their loss of faith in a monotheistic religion there entered furtively a legion of pagan gods, ghosts and goblins. To their mind’s eye began to appear many fairies and spirits. The Japanese world of the dead began to be familiar to Lafcadio’s mind’s eye, as it has many similarities to the Irish world of the dead, with which Lafcadio was familiar in his childhood. It should be remembered here that in Dublin the parentless child was raised and taken care of by servants coming from the countryside, who told him their stories and beliefs not only in English but also in Gaelic, which Hearn could understand. Here is Hearn’s letter sent to Yeats, 24 September 1901, at the end of which Hearn writes:2 . . . But forty-five years ago, I was a horrid little boy (. . .), who lived in Upper Leeson Street, Dublin; and I had a Connaught nurse who told me fairy-tales and ghost-stories. So I ought to love Irish Things, and do. Having this Irish connection of Hearn’s in mind, let us read a very interesting description: . . . A widespread belief was that dead members of the family returned to visit their old home on this night, and that care should be taken to show that their visit was welcome. . . . the Eve is sacred to the memory of the departed. After the floor has been swept and a good fire put down on the hearth, the family retires early, leaving the door unlatched and a bowl of spring water on the table, so that any relative who had died may find a place prepared for him at his own fireside. On that one night in the year the souls of the dead are loosed and have liberty to visit their former homes.

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Many people lit one candle for each dead member of the family when evening prayers were being said . . . Many people made visits to the graveyard where their relatives were buried, to pray for their souls and clean and tidy the graves; some placed lighted candles on the graves while praying. The description seems to be that of the eve of a Japanese Bon festival, but this is not about the Japanese festival of the dead. It is about All Souls Eve, the second of November. The quotation is taken from Kevin Danaher: The Year in Ireland (The Mercier Press, Cork, 1973). It is this similarity of the traditional customs that made Hearn sympathetically understand the animistic world of the Japanese. We know that the dead take a continuing part in the lives of the living not only in Japan of Shinto traditions but also in many areas of rural Ireland. So long as we humans feel a need to believe it, communications between our ancestors and us continue and this belief in East Asia is generally known by the name of ‘ancestor-worship’ which is an important part of Shinto. Lafcadio Hearn seems to have succeeded in explaining it thanks to his astute observations.

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Return to Japan or Return to the West? – Hearn’s ‘A Conservative’ Sukehiro Hirakawa

‘I was taught to follow the West in everything and to cast away all things traditional and old-fashioned. What a fool I was! By faithfully following that dictum, I found myself betrayed . . . Know thyself, know thy Japan first!’ Hagiwara Sakutarō, Retour au Japon

any Japanese writers’ returns to Japan from a real or spiri- Mtual pilgrimage to the West seem to follow a psychological pattern. I would like to discuss this phenomenon by using the American writer Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘A Conservative’,1 as the story poignantly describes a typical case of a modern Japanese intellectual’s return to a Japan of nostalgia from his pilgrimage to an idealized Europe and America. For the Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. V,2 devoted to the nineteenth century, I provided the seventh chapter entitled ‘Japan’s Turn to the West’. After having dealt with Meiji Japan’s Westernization movement, I concluded the chapter with this phenomenon of the Westernized intellectuals returning to native traditions. The phenomenon of the Westernized intellectual returning to native traditions is by no means restricted to Japan but is also

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found in thinkers and leaders in Russia and in other Asian countries. During the Meiji period (1868–1912) the trend towards a ‘return to Japan’ was already evident in the 1890s, when Lafcadio Hearn wrote ‘A Conservative’, a short story that he included in Kokoro (1896). Its plot deals with the intellectual development of a young man in changing historical conditions. Here is my concluding part in that history book: Hearn’s protagonist was a high-ranking samurai born and raised in the castle town of a 300,000-koku domain. Trained in the martial arts and schooled in Confucian and other traditional values, he was disciplined to honour the spirits of forebears and to scorn death. This warrior witnessed the coming of Perry’s Black Ships; soon ‘barbarians’ were employed as teachers within his castle town. After the Meiji Restoration, the protagonist left home to learn English in Yokohama under a foreign missionary. At first he believed that love of country required him to learn about enemy conditions in a detached, cool manner, in keeping with the dictum ‘Know thy enemy’. But before long he was deeply impressed by the over- whelming superiority of Western civilization and decided that because the basis of its power lay in Christianity, he was duty bound as a Japanese patriot to accept this higher religion and encourage all his countrymen to convert. So intense was his conviction that he became a Christian against his parents’ opposition. To discard the faith of his ancestors was cause for more than a moment’s distress: He was disowned by his family, scorned by his friends, deprived of all the benefits accompanying his noble status, and reduced to destitution. Still, the samurai discipline of his youth enabled him to persevere with fortitude despite all the hardships to which he fell victim. As a true patriot and seeker of the truth, he ascertained where his convictions lay and pursued these without fear or regrets. However, Hearn’s protagonist was soon disturbed to discover that the knowledge derived from modern science, which had enabled his missionary-teachers to demonstrate the absurdity of Japan’s ancient beliefs, could also be used to demonstrate absurdi- ties in the Christian faith. The Western missionaries were often surprised and shocked to discover that the more intelligent their Japanese students were, the sooner they tended to leave the church. So it was with this youth, who became an agnostic in religious matters and a liberal in political affairs. Forced to leave Japan for his political radicalism, he went to Korea and then to China, where he earned his living as a teacher for a time before making his way to Europe. There he lived for many years, observing and obtaining knowledge of Western civi-

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lization matched by few Japanese. He lived in many European cities and engaged in various types of work. The West appeared to him a land of giants, far greater than he had ever imagined. On both the material and the intellectual fronts, Western civilization seemed far superior to his own. Yet its power of intellect was too often employed to destroy the weak. With this realization, Hearn’s hero gained two articles of faith: (1) Japan was being forced by necessity, not by choice, to learn Western science and to adopt much from the material culture of its enemies; and (2) nevertheless there was no compelling reason to discard completely the concepts of duty and honour and ideas of right and wrong that had been inherited from the past. The prodigality inherent in Western life taught him to value the strength found in his country’s honourable poverty. He would do his utmost to preserve and protect the best in Japan’s traditions. What was of value and beauty in Japanese civilization – things that could be comprehended and appreciated only after coming into contact with foreign culture – now seemed clear to him. Thus, he had become a man longing to be allowed to go back home, and on the day that he set out for his return to Yokohama, he did so not as a blind xenophobe of bakumatsu times but as ‘a conservative’ who was ‘returning to Japan’. When I wrote this, I did not know that there was a model3 for this ‘conservative’, and I imagined that Hearn’s character portrait could perhaps be considered a composite of the samurai-intellectuals who came to grips with Western civilization in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate and in the early Meiji era. I thought at that time that Hearn, as usual, had composed the story, as a sort of mosaic, by collecting and putting various parts into an artistic whole, and that explanation of mine seemed to work pretty well. Let us look at concrete examples of young intellectuals whose development would partially fit the development of Hearn’s protagonist. Following are some biographical examples of Meiji young men very similar to Hearn’s hero in their typical devel- oping stages. Each of the following examples suits at least a part of the career of Hearn’s protagonist. Although I was mistaken in conjecturing that there could not be one single person who would fit the protagonist’s career in its entirety, I was and still am very much amazed at the truth of what Hearn writes in his ‘A Conservative’. That is the reason why I am going to give here parallel examples of Japanese intellectuals whom I pick out of the whole latter half of nineteenth-century Japan.4

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As for early education as the son of a samurai, an example parallel to that of Hearn’s protagonist can be found in the physi- cian-writer Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), who, like Hearn’s hero, received a samurai education in the small castle town of Tsuwano of 43,000-koku domain. As a child, Ōgai was often taught by his parents in no uncertain terms: ‘You are the son of a samurai, so you must have enough courage to cut open your belly’ (Mōsō). Hearn’s protagonist ‘was enjoined to consider duty the guiding motive of life, self-control the first requisite of conduct, pain and death matters of no consequence in the selfish sense’ (Hearn, 171) and ‘he was early made to know that the little sword in his girdle was neither an ornament nor a plaything’. (Hearn, 173) Following in, or preceding, the same footsteps of our protagonist, the family of Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin, 1862–1913) moved from Fukui to Yokohama and Okakura learned English directly from Westerners, among whom the best teacher was the missionary Samuel Brown. It is true that it was love of country that spurred young samurai like Niishima Jō (Joseph Neesima) or Mori Arinori to learn about enemy conditions in keeping with the dictum of the Chinese strategist Sunzi. But they were overwhelmed by the superiority of Western Christian civilization. ‘And if the superior force of Western civilization really indicated the superior character of Western ethics, was it not the plain duty of every patriot to follow that higher faith, and to strive for the conversion of the whole nation?’ (Hearn, 189). Actually, it was so not only with Niishima but also with many of the early Dōshisha student Christians, not a few of whom came as ‘band’ members from Kumamoto where Hearn was later to teach. Others, like Uchimura Kanzō and Nitobe Inazō, studied under missionaries and accepted Christianity. In the case of Nakamura Masanao (1832–91), the leading Confucian scholar of Japan during the 1860s and 70s, it was out of a sense of patriotic duty that he went as far as London to study on the spot, and after his return home to petition the young Emperor Mutsuhito, known as Meiji Tennō, to embrace Christianity. His petition, written as if by a Westerner, was printed as early as 1872, in the fifth year of Meiji. The Imperial Court of course ignored Nakamura’s petition. Actually, the number of Japanese converted to Christianity never surpassed one per cent of the total population of Japan throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the 1880s some young liberals like Ozaki

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Yukio (Gakudō) and Baba Tatsui brought down upon themselves the wrath of the government by publicly expressing opinions antagonistic to the policy of the hour: they were obliged to leave the country like the protagonist of Hearn’s story. (It is interesting to note that both the Meiji government of Japan and the Chinese government since the time of Deng Xiao-ping let their political dissidents take refuge abroad, the former more openly and the latter more tacitly. Anyway, it is a great step forward in liberalizing the political atmosphere and it reflects the ‘open door’ policy of their governments, which is less harsh by comparison with the preceding ‘closed door’ policy of feudalistic times.) How about the pilgrimage to the West and reactions? Japanese admiration of things Western is well known through, for example, the autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, the diary of Kurimoto Joun or even the official records of the Iwakura mission that was sent abroad. What is interesting is that some Japanese by being exposed to cultures other than their own, began to recognize and reassert their native values. Uchimura Kanzō, the leading member of the early Hokkaido Christian group, wrote of a moment in the United States when his homeland began to appear ‘supremely beautiful’ to him.5 Of course, his idealization of his native country has something to do with his being defensive about Japan and the Japanese in a foreign country, which may be a sign of his sense of insecurity and lack of real confidence in his own country. Love- hate relationships with the West are recognizable not only in Uchimura’s diary but also in letters and diaries recorded during many Japanese writers and artists’ stay in Europe. Conspicuous examples are the ambivalent reactions of Natsume Sōseki6 or Takamura Kōtarō.7 Many early converts, however, subsequently repudiated Christianity. In fact, although this is a little-studied area in modern Japanese thought, the great majority of Japanese thinkers seem to have ‘returned’ to Japan in some sense, Christian converts and non-Christians alike. ‘China activists’ like Miyazaki Tōten and journalists such as Tokutomi Sohō were both Christians for a time. Although both Western and Japanese intellectual historians do not take up the cases and problems of re-conversion of Meiji youths from Christianity and Shōwa youths from communism, the number of ‘turncoats’ is much greater than that of those who remain in their faith of Western origin, which young Japanese, either in their youthful politico-religious ardour or through

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intensive ideological brain-washing, had embraced. With a hint of sarcastic irony, Hearn remarks that ‘he (the average missionary) is therefore astonished and shocked to discover that the more intelligent his pupil, the briefer the term of that pupil’s Christianity’. (Hearn, 191) Faced with this phenomenon, we are puzzled and must ask what their conversion really means before we ask what their re-conversion is. The proportion of Christians or more precisely ex-Christians, however, is quite high especially among Meiji poets and novelists. It is interesting to note that Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), the most celebrated product of the Christian mission school Meiji Gakuin (now Meiji Gakuin University), not only lost faith in Christianity but wrote a monumental novel Yoakemae (Before Dawn) in his later years, describing in objective terms his father, a Shinto fanatic, who died insane, and against whom the boy Tōson had revolted. The middle-aged Tōson’s return from France to Japan is apparently the source of his very creative inspiration. Among non-Christian intellectuals who formed the mainstream of Meiji thought, Shiga Shigetaka and the periodical Nihon oyobi Nihonjin (Japan and the Japanese) bring to mind the intellectual who returned to Japan bent on discovering its true ‘national essence’. However, no story is more comparable to Hearn’s than Mori Ōgai’s ‘Mōsō’ (Delusion), autobiographical reminiscences about his return to Japan from the Germany of the late 1880s, written more than two decades later in the last year of Meiji, 1912. There are many corresponding sentences and ideas between Hearn and Ōgai, although Ōgai’s tone is much cooler and his protagonist more detached.8 Finally, Hearn’s piece, in that it fore- shadows a floodtide of weltschmerz stemming from an observation of the darker aspects of Western civilization, has something in common with Natsume Sōseki’s later critique of modern Western civilization. I have made reference to all these parallel examples, as Hearn’s short story contains many aspects of thought and action that match those of Japanese intellectuals not only of the Meiji period but also of Taishō and early Shōwa periods. Among the latter I would like to mention two names: the scholar Abe Jirō (1883–1959) and the poet Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942), since both of them wrote about their own ‘return to Japan’. Abe’s ‘Nihon to shitashiku natta hanashi’ (How I became friendly with Japan again) and his other essays9 dealing objectively with prob-

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lems of the relationship between Japanese culture and foreign culture are very revealing, as Abe, German philosophy professor at the imperial university of Tōhoku, frankly analyses his own psychological pilgrimage to the West and his homecoming. Abe is today remembered more for his studies in Japanese cultural history than for his studies in Western philosophy. Hagiwara’s vituperation of those Japanese intellectuals who are slavishly enamoured with the West is also worth noting, because of the poet’s penetrating psychological remarks. I should add that his essay Nihon eno kaiki’ (Return to Japan)10 was partly inspired by his reading of Lafcadio Hearn. By the way, Hagiwara had the French words ‘Retour au Japon’ printed on the cover of his book. The fact that many Japanese readers of Hearn (among others Takeyama Michio11) have been moved by the story ‘A Conservative’ testifies to the authenticity of its contents, especially author Hearn’s intimate understanding of the Japanese psyche. Some people may say that stated conversely, later Japanese intellectuals, for all the surface brilliance and diversity of their variegated philosophical spectrum, have much in common with Hearn’s hero on a deeper level of feeling. In these respects, ‘A Conservative’ is surely a precursor of many modern Japanese intellectuals. I should add, however, that the story moved not only Japanese readers of later generations but other readers as well. The eminent European literary critic Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote as follows the night he heard the news of Hearn’s death in 1904. His article entitled ‘Lafcadio Hearn’12 is surely worth quoting. According to the Austrian critic, ‘“A Conservative” cannot be called a novel, but is a political insight. Condensed like a work of art and told like a series of anecdotes, the story is a product of journalism of the highest order, most substantial and serious.’ What I have stated up to this point is a continuation or an elaboration along the lines of what I had already written in the Cambridge History of Japan. Five years later, in 1985, I came upon the model for Hearn’s story. In 1896 when Hearn published Kokoro, in which ‘A Conservative’ is included, the author dedicated the book ‘To My Friend Aménomori Nobushigé, Poet, Scholar, and Patriot.’ That forgotten Japanese, the first half of whose life was retraced or recreated by Hearn, was the model.13 What I am going to do here, however, is not to recount in detail the process by which that forgotten intellectual was dug

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out, but to clarify first the difference between what is written in Hearn’s fictional story and Amenomori’s real life, and secondly Hearn’s own desire to return to the West as reflected in the fictional and interpretative parts of the story. By so doing, I hope I can re-examine the typical nature of Hearn’s protagonist’s returning home as well as the validity of my argument in the Cambridge History book. The clue to who the model was is a photograph preserved in the Rutgers University’s library, New Jersey. Rutgers University, which had welcomed Japanese students from Fukui domain even before the Meiji Restoration in 1868, sent several of its graduates, mostly missionaries, as teachers to Japan immediately after the Meiji Restoration. Among them the best known is William Elliot Griffis (1843–1928), author of the Mikado’s Empire. In his collection kept in the library there is that picture, on the back of which is written in Griffis’s hand the following note which summarizes Amenomori’s life and his return to Japan: Lafcadio Hearn’s dearest friend, interpreter, helper, biographer, to whom Mr. Hearn dedicated one of his books and wrote of as ‘An Oriental Conservative’. Mr. Amenomori visited Europe and came home intensely Japanese than ever. Originally, a pupil of W. E. Griffis at Fukui, in 1871. Quaffed Occidental civilization and rejected it. Notable contribution to the Atlantic Monthly, during the Russian War.14 These succinct terms catch the essential traits of Amenomori as described in ‘A Conservative’. According to recent findings, Amenomori Nobushige was a man of considerable parts. Born in 1858 as the second son of the samurai Matsubara Yoshishige of Fukui domain, the boy Nobushige studied Chinese classics at the Meishinkan domanal academy. In 1871 Griffis was invited by the Fukui domain to teach science and chemistry, using English, at the school. In the following year Nobushige as well as Griffis left Fukui, the latter being invited to teach at Tokyo University. However, when Wycoff arrived from the United States to replace Griffis, the fourteen-year-old Nobushige, studying now at the open port of Yokohama, was sent back from Yokohama to Fukui to serve as Wycoff’s interpreter. According to Wycoff, among all his students Nobushige had by far the best command of English. In the meantime, the boy Nobushige was adopted by the Amenomori family of 600-koku standing. In 1874 when Wycoff left Fukui for Niigata,

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Amenomori Nobushige went back again to Yokohama to reenter Samuel Brown’s private school. In October of that year the young samurai resolved to proclaim himself a Christian, despite family opposition. It was decided that Nobushige be disinherited from the Amenomori family and his younger brother become the family head. In 1877, through an arrangement of various denominations, ten Christian students of Brown’s school were sent to Tokyo to enter the Tokyo Itchi Shingakkō, later known as Meiji Gakuin, where they, however, were dissatisfied with the poor quality of their American missionary teachers. After half a year all of them graduated from that theological school and were engaged in evangelical activities. Some of Amenomori’s classmates, such as Uemura Masahisa, are remembered today as representative Christian leaders of the Meiji era. For several years Amenomori, too, was very active in evangelical work. We do not know exactly when Amenomori’s ‘lapse’ occurred. The only thing we know is that it caused great scandal. He quit religious work and began to devote himself to land reclamation in order to help impoverished samurai families, and he failed in the enterprise. The most curious thing about this reconversion of Amenomori is that Uemura excepted, other Japanese Christians like Ibuka Kajinosuke, the so- called founding father of Meiji Gakuin, tried to erase the name and memory of the most brilliant comrade from the membership list of its alumni association. This inimical attitude of Meiji Gakuin authorities towards the ‘turncoat’ reminds us of the identical attitude of the Japanese communist party authorities towards ideological turncoats. We do not know the exact wherabouts of Amenomori between 1881 and 1888. He stayed abroad, in Korea, in Europe and in America, and while he was in London, he was befriended by Sasaki Takayuki’s son. The father Sasaki was instrumental in founding the nationalist association Meiji-kai. That association began its activities in the 21st year of Meiji (1888), and Amenomori, who had come home intensely Japanese, accepted the editorship of its monthly Meijikai-sōshi: He, therefore, became an early intellectual leader of the ‘return to Japan’ movement: his purpose was to strive with all his might for the conservation of all that was best in the old way of life and to fearlessly oppose further introduction of anything not essential to national self-preserva- tion, or helpful to national self-development. What Hearn writes in ‘A Conservative’ practically corresponds to Amenomori’s real

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career. Hearn himself must have read Amenomori’s autobiographical records written in English, and must have elaborated on what Amenomori had already written, when he wrote ‘A Conservative’. According to Amenomori, it took two years for Hearn to finish the story15. What is interesting about Amenomori’s autobiographical writings is that initially while Amenomori was actively engaged in evangelical work, he was asked by American missionaries to write about his experiences – a sort of ‘How I Became a Christian’ – as the missionaries probably wished to use the Japanese convert’s records for propaganda purposes. It turned out, however, that when Amenomori handed them over to Hearn more than ten years later, they had become records of a Japanese conservative. Hearn must have appreciated them all the more for what the middle-aged Amenomori had added about his later peregrinations, both spiritual and material. When he wrote ‘A Conservative’, Hearn depended so much on Amenomori’s records, he was a bit afraid that Amenomori might be displeased at the extent of his borrowings. Amenomori, however, was most favourably struck by the forceful pen of his friend. It is true that in tracing the hero’s upbringing, Hearn follows factually Amenomori’s personal history. However, in one of the most important passages Hearn’s description is unexpectedly beautiful and original. It is the final section of the story, where Mt Fuji is wonderfully described, when the hero on board a returning ship to Japan sees its majestic summit flushing pink like some wondrous phantom lotus-bud in the glow of the coming day. Here the English prose is not Amenomori’s, but entirely Hearn’s. We know this, because Hearn had already recorded his first sight of Fuji at dawn in 1890 when he arrived at Yokohama, a time when he had not yet become acquainted with Amenomori. Their correspondence began when Hearn was teaching in Kumamoto, where he missed intellectual companionship. The final section of the story ‘A Conservative’ is, therefore, an elaboration of Hearn’s earlier travel sketch, ‘Winter Journey to Japan’, which had appeared in Harper’s Magazine in the October issue of 1890. We are amazed at the perfecting of Hearn’s literary style that had taken place within the short space of five or six years: in ‘Winter Journey to Japan’ of 1890, Hearn described only the external aspect of the scenery, while in ‘A Conservative’ of 1896 the same author succeeds in catching the spiritual meaning of the same scene:

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what Fuji means to the returning Japanese. And our last question, then, is: why is it possible for Hearn to understand so clearly and express so beautifully the psychology of a hero coming back to his home country? Its answer seems to lie in Hearn’s own state of mind. It has often been said in Hearn biographies that his experience in Japan was a curve, veering from early infatuation to disillusioned realism. I think that Hearn’s curve is almost identical with the curves of many Japanese writers’ and painters’ experience in the West, identical in nature but different in direction. While teaching at Kumamoto Government College Hearn began to discover what the West means to him. Hearn’s return to the West seems to have been motivated both by a natural physiological reaction and also by some specific elements: first, his infatuation with Japan was over after a year’s stay in Matsue. In that chief city of ‘the province of the gods’ Hearn was surprisingly extrovert and was surrounded by Japanese of goodwill, among them a friend like Nishida Sentarō. Moreover, it was there that he met Koizumi Setsuko and for the first time in his life he enjoyed the sweetness of someone who has ‘home’. In Kumamoto Hearn continued to enjoy his family life; he suffered, however, from the lack of friends. Let us check Hearn’s reactions in the years 1892 to 1895, when he wrote ‘A Conservative’. First, the number of lengthy letters he wrote from Kumamoto to his Western friends both in Japan and in America eloquently testifies to his loneliness. To be alone in a foreign country makes one homesick. In a letter to Ellwood Hendrick of November 1892, Hearn complained, ‘Oh! – you talk of being without intellectual companionship! O ye Eight Hundred Myriads of Gods! what would you do if you were me. Lo! the illusion is gone! Japan in Kyūshū is like Europe; – except I have no friend.’16 Kyūshū is as bad as Europe, although after the initial disillusion, Hearn later became a little more reconciled to Kumamoto.17 Hearn in his mid-forties realized there was a limit, and that he could not become wholly a Japanese. Physically, it was impossible for a Caucasian like Hearn to change external physical aspects. Linguistically, it was more difficult for Hearn to become a Japanese than to become a Martiniquais. In a letter to Hendrick of January 1892, ‘Work progresses; but the barrier of language is a serious one. My project to study Buddhism must be indefinitely

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delayed on that account.’18 Probably to compensate for his slow progress in Japanese, Hearn at that time tried to teach Setsuko English by a fast memory-system,19 which failed. In that year Hearn gave up his decision to conform himself entirely to Japanese habits: instead of living exclusively on Japanese food,20 he began to eat Western meals and gained weight. Psychologically speaking, the following year 1893 was comparatively benign: because of the anticipation of his child’s birth, Hearn was more at home. Although Hearn became a naturalized Japanese in 1896 because of financial considerations for his family, he still intended to bring up his eldest son as a Westerner, and daily taught him English. Hearn’s identity as a writer remained always Western. When he writes in English ‘we’, it always means ‘we, Westerners’. He wrote almost uniquely for his Western readers. In his lifetime Hearn had never dreamt that he would later enjoy such popularity among the Japanese because of his writings. In that sense during his whole life he was firmly linked with the West through his vehicle of expression, English. His numerous letters to Tokyo-based Englishman and Japan scholar Basil Hall Chamberlain are full of discussions about works of Western literature, English, French, Russian and even Spanish. Unlike in his Matsue days, Hearn did not invite the company of Japanese colleagues or students at Kumamoto, so he had much spare time to read extensively in Western literature, and in the course of this he rediscovered the beauty of it. The lure of the West was beginning to be irresistible. That must be the reason why Hearn gave up his post at the Government College in Kumamoto and went to the open port of Kōbe to be a journalist for an English paper, ‘writing one article a day for one hundred yen a month’.21 Although Hearn had complained in Kumamoto that ‘sympathy and friendship are almost impossible for any foreigner to obtain – because of the amazing difference in the psychology of the two races’,22 in Kōbe he was not happy either. In a letter to Hendrick, January 1895, he wrote: Kōbe is a nice little place. The effect on me is not pleasant, however. I have become too accustomed to the interior. The sight of foreign women – the sound of their voices – jars upon me harshly after long living among purely natural women with soundless steps and softer speech. (I fear the foreign women here, too, are nearly all of the savagely bourgeoise style – affected English and

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affected American ways prevail.) Carpets – dirty shoes – absurd fashions – wickedly expensive living – airs – vanities – gossip: how much sweeter the Japanese life on the soft mats – with its ever dearer courtesy and pretty, pure simplicity.23 Through his fourteen-year stay in Japan Hearn’s psychological state was probably worst in his Kōbe days. He was obliged to give up his new job as an editorialist, because of eye trouble: Hearn was afraid of going blind. He showed signs of mental instability: one day he praised Japan and the next day he loathed it. In the same month, January 1895, he told Chamberlain that Japan would show its ugly side to foreigners after the imminent victory over China.24 But also, to the same person almost at the same period, he wrote as follows: I’m not expecting any sympathy – but thought you might like to know about the effect on me of a half-return to Western life. How much I could hate all that we call civilization I never knew before. How ugly it is I never could have conceived without a long sojourn in old Japan – the only civilized country that existed since antiquity.25 In February 1895 Hearn confided to Chamberlain that his opinions about the Japanese had changed since the time of his first book on Japan: As for changing my conclusions – well, I have had to change a good many. The tone of Glimpses is true in being the feeling of a place and time. Since then I’ve seen how thoroughly detestable Japanese can be, and that revelation assisted in illuminating things.26 Hearn himself knew how quickly his love-hate pendulum swung between Japan and Europe. In March 1895 he wrote to Chamberlain: I had a sensation the other day, though, which I want to talk to you about. I felt as if I hated Japan unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there came two women to the house, to sell ballads. One took her samisen and sang; and people crowded into a tiny yard to hear. Never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty, all the pain and the sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that voice; and the old first love of Japan and of things Japanese came back, and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting.27

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This letter suggests how the small piece ‘A Street Singer’ was written. The touching story is included in Kokoro together with ‘A Conservative’. The problem with some Hearn scholars lies in their interpretation of Hearn’s hypersensitive reactions which swung day by day from one direction to another. If only his positive pronouncements about Japan are arbitrarily selected from his writings, as has been done by many simple-minded Hearn enthusiasts, it is easy to give readers the impression that Hearn is a great admirer of Japan. However, if only his negative pronouncements about Japan are picked out from his letters, as has been done by those who try to devalue Hearn’s writings, it is easy to give readers the impression that what Hearn writes so beautifully about Japan in his books is not true, that Hearn is a dubious Japan interpreter and that his success was bogus. For example, Yuzo Ota28 concludes that Hearn’s enthusiasm for Japan did not last, by quoting passages from his letters in which Hearn himself denies the value of what he had written before: Hearn declares, for example, ‘I find I described horrible places as gardens of paradise, and horrid people as angels and divinities.’ Ota insists that Hearn himself is dissatisfied with his first book on Japan, by quoting passages like this: When I want to feel properly humble, I read Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan – about half a page; – then I howl, and wonder how I could ever have written so badly, – and find that I am really only a very twenty-fifth-rate workman and that I ought to be kicked.29 According to Ota, Hearn’s own dissatisfaction with the book is not simply a matter of poor workmanship but is the denial of his own rosy picture of Japan and the Japanese.30 If one has a preconceived conviction that what Hearn writes about Japan is bogus, as many passages as wished can be collected to sustain that thesis. However, it should not be forgotten that artists often come to deny the value of their own earlier works. What is interesting about Hearn is his love-hate relationship with Japan. His psychology of return to the West is, like many Japanese writers’ psychology of return to Japan, very ambivalent. Hearn’s rare insight into the complexities of a Japanese conservative derives from his own experiences in the reverse direction. Hearn who had quaffed Japanese civilization suffered from a syndrome of the same nature, and that must be the reason Hearn could empathize so well with Amenomori returning to Japan. It

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is not always right and fair to unilaterally pick out negative opinions about Japan written hastily by the impulsive Hearn in his personal letters, just as it is not always wise to sympathize with those unthinking Japanese intellectuals who vocally and one- sidedly insist on Asian values. As Mori Ōgai explains in his ‘Mōsō’ and ‘Nanoriso’,31 there are two kinds of ‘return to Japan’ movement: one is to pander to the conservative opinions of Japanese traditionalists, and this is purely a reactionary movement; the other is to counteract the slavish Westernization fever which just blindly imitates what comes from the West without taking into consideration what is traditionally Japanese, and this is a healthy reaction. To be able to distinguish the latter attitude from the former is not always easy. Japan’s truly great interpreters must be those who catch the delicate nuances of this subtle difference.

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Half a Century after Byron: What Did Greece Mean to the Writer Hearn? Sukehiro Hirakawa

he merit of studying a wandering poet like Byron who spent Talmost the third of his life abroad is that we scholars, too, have opportunities to travel abroad, tracing his footsteps through many beautiful spots: England, Scotland, Portugal, Spain, Malta, Greece, Turkey, Waterloo, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and finally Greece again.1 At the beginning of the nineteenth century travelling was difficult and expensive, and the English public knew very little about the southern countries of Europe. We can understand the first success of Childe Harold as being partly due to the subject. I am afraid, however, that so long as studies are limited to Byron only, Western scholars of Western literature have no justification whatsoever to request a travel grant to Japan. In this regard at least someone like me has an advantage over my Western counterparts: according to the chairperson’s cordial introduction my specialty is Lafcadio Hearn, and to study a globe-trotter like Hearn has a greater merit. Hearn was born of a Greek mother in 1850 in Lefcadia, not far from Missolonghi: I was in fact invited by the university of Athens to celebrate the Graeco-Japanese connection symbolically embodied by Hearn who ended his life in Tokyo in

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1904. His father was Anglo-Irish, and the child was raised in Dublin. In Dublin Writers Museum, opened towards the end of the twentieth century, Hearn’s picture finds itself among eminent writers of Anglo-Irish literature. Symposia were held in Dublin and in Tokyo in order to celebrate Hearn’s connections not only with Japan but also with John Millington Synge, a relative of Hearn’s through marriage, and especially with William Butler Yeats. These are, so to speak, ghostly connections, as both Hearn and Yeats were attracted by ghostly folklore, and also by ghostly plays of spirits of Ireland and Japan. After having spent seventeen years in Cincinnati and New Orleans, Hearn went to the French West Indies. He was the first European to collect folktales told in Creole, and found there the ghostly world of the natives. Hearn the ethnologist was interested in the pre-Christian animistic beliefs of the black inhabitants. There have been three international conferences in Martinique, and many scholars visited the island famous as a resort place in the Caribbean Sea. Finally, Hearn came to Japan in 1890 and went to Matsue, the chief city of the province of gods. He became the best interpreter of Japan to the Western world at the turn of the century, and also became the first well known European teacher to give lectures on English and American Literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo. It was Hearn who first gave lectures on Byron, which are reproduced from Japanese students’ notebooks in his posthumously edited Interpretations of Literature (1915). This last Byronian connection, although very tenuous, must be the reason why the organizer of the conference had the quaint idea to invite an ignorant and unqualified man like me to give you a talk not so much about Byron but about Lafcadio Hearn. I imagine it is mainly in order to justify your pilgrimage to Japan to your financial sponsors that I am asked to give you a talk today: the less Lafcadio Hearn is known to you, the more I have to say about this misunderstood interpreter of Japan to this distinguished audience who has gathered in this ancient capital of the Mikado’s empire. Let me begin the talk from the viewpoint of tourism, which is, in fact, an important part of our life, and let us check writers’ widening range of travel-writing. In the 1780s, that is, in the time of Goethe, to go as far south as Venice, Rome and Sicily was something quite extraordinary for a transalpine European. For Goethe Sicily served as a substitute for Greece: Sicily was Magna Grecia. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was not

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possible for an ordinary Englishman to travel as far as Turkey and Greece. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, although it seemed somewhat difficult for poor English hooligans, it was comparatively easy for decent European soccer fans to travel to South Korea or Japan. Nowadays, you can easily overcome the geographical or financial distances, but it is another thing to cross the cultural border between the Western world and Japan. To overcome cultural differences and national prejudices is a very difficult thing even for comparative literature scholars. There are many linguistic and other value-related barriers. Let us consider the various fortunes of writers by referring to prejudices that vitiate them.You know the case of Byron quite well, the decline and fall of his fame,and also his revival.How about,then, the fortunes of other great poets?When I was a student half a century ago there were three great poets in the Western world, or in the world at large: Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe. I was told that German romantics, Friedrich Schlegel among others, contributed greatly in establishing that canon.2 Among the three I have some misgivings about the future of Dante’s fame,though I am an admirer of Dante and myself a Japanese translator of the Divina Commedia. Dante’s sadistically cruel treatment of Mahomet will not be tolerated in the future. Muslim readers of the Inferno or any reader who has good common sense will be shocked by the self-righteous attitude of the so-called il sommo poeta cristiano.In Dante’s view Mahomet was a mere sectarian who had taken up Christianity and perverted its meaning. In Canto XXVIII Mahomet, rent asunder from the chin downwards, is said to display the vileness and corruption of his doctrines,and this is precisely the subject of the fresco of the Bologna cathedral, which Muslim radicals tried to blow up the other day. Forty years ago when I studied in Italy,Italian professors talked freely about this impressive passage. I myself very much admired Dante’s pen of fire. Nowadays, when Italian professors know that there are students from Muslim countries in their class, they tend to skip the passage in question.The self-centred Christian poet will not be the greatest poet outside the Christian world. How about Goethe, who did so much to help propagate Byron’s fame in Europe? In Japan, too, some stanzas of Manfred were translated into Japanese by Mori Ōgai (1862–1921), not directly from English, but from Heine’s German translation. It was in 1889 and it was probably the first and still the best translation of Byron in Japan. It begins this way in German and in Japanese:

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Ich muss die Ampel wieder füllen, dennoch Brennt sie so lange nicht, als ich muss wachen. Mein Schlaf – wenn ich auch schlaf – ist doch kein Schlaf; Nur ein fortdauernd Brüten in Gedanken, Die ich nicht bannen kann. Tomoshibi-ni abura-oba ima hitotabi soeten Saredo ware inuru-made tamotan-tomo omowazu Ware nemuru towa iedo makotono nemuri narazu Fukaki omoi no tameniwa taezu kurushimerarete 3 Mune-wa tokei no gotoku himanaku uchisawagitsu This is the translation of ‘The lamp must be replenish’d, but even then/ It will not burn so long as I must watch;’ It is said that Byron was a European phenomenon, and it is interesting to note that in Japan also Byron’s name appears together with Heine. A Japanese romantic was described as having a poetry book of Byron or of Heine on his right hand: ‘Migite-ni Bairon, Haine no shi.’ This famous line of a popular song suggests the linguistic channel through which Byron was introduced to Japan. Since the collapse of Nazi Germany the prestige of the German language and culture, once very high among academics, has also dropped in Japan; likewise Goethe’s fortune in and outside Germany has declined sharply. Thanks to the globalization of the English language, and thanks of course to other poetical merits of the genius, Shakespeare remains the greatest of the poets. We, however, should remember that political elements more than poetical elements sometimes play an important role in the history of literature. My topic, appreciation and depreciation of Lafcadio Hearn, has something to do with this. Now let us check the evaluations concerning Lord Byron. Byron scholars have gathered here in order to study the poet’s writings and doings, and it is generally thought that there is a consensual opinion that what Byron did in Greece in his final years was ‘generous, heroic, and truly noble’.4 A typical appreciation of Byron in Japan towards the end of the nineteenth century tells us moreover as follows: . . . after the death of his friend Shelley, (Byron) suddenly gave up writing poetry, and went to Greece to place his fortune and all his abilities at the disposal of the Greeks in order to help them obtain their liberty. He worked for them arduously, faithfully, and unselfishly, and died for the cause which he had espoused. Whatever may have been the faults of his life, his death was 5 unquestionably the death of a hero.

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The lecture was given by Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, one of the first professors of English Literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo. As I said, Hearn was born of an Anglo-Irish father, a surgeon and officer in one of Queen Victoria’s regiments and of a Greek girl on the island of Lefcadia in 1850. It is understandable that Hearn was sympathetic towards Byron for what he had done for his mother country. Frankly speaking, in Japan Byron’s poems are not widely read either in English, or in Japanese translation. In our country Byron’s name is remembered first and foremost in connection with the regained independence of Greece in 1829. However, not everyone is pleased with the liberation of Greece. The Turks have expressed their wish to join the European Union. The Greek opposition, however, has stalled their wish, and West European countries’ sympathy has generally been on the side of the Greeks since the time of Byron. In this respect Byron is still influential. I know a Turkish professor who was very much worried about the excessive patriotism of the Greeks and the excessive sympathy of Western Europeans towards Greece generated by the myth of Byron’s heroic death. West Europeans generally make little distinction between their idealized Greece of ancient civilization with the modern Greece of the Orthodox Eastern Church. Byron of course made little distinction, when he sang: The isles of Greece! The isles of Greece Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose, Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, except their sun, is set. As for the irrational Greek antagonism towards Turks I myself felt it on the occasion of the recent Lafcadio Hearn conference held in Athens. Half a century ago when I went to Greece for the first time, I always drank Turkish coffee; nowadays it is called Greek coffee, although the taste of strong coffee is the same. The Greeks changed the name. They do not like the name of ‘Turkish coffee’ for their daily drink. To change a name, by making an issue of its so-called hostile character, is a childish expression of xenophobia. Turkish antagonism towards Greece or vice versa is historically understandable. Then, was the liberation of Greece with the help of the British forces welcomed by all the Greek inhabitants? I have some misgivings about it, too. Let us make comparisons: was the Japanese liberation of South East Asia in 1942 welcomed by all the

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populations? By the majority of the native population, yes; but not by overseas Chinese or not at all by the white population. Was the American liberation of Japan in 1945 welcomed by all the Japanese people? Liberation often is a euphemism for occupation, and the Japanese of the Okinawan islands are even today not always happy, as the American military forces continue to stay there. It was the same with the Greeks of the Ionian isles. They did not always like the British forces being stationed there. When Rosa Antonia Cassimati, the future mother of Lafcadio Hearn, went out with a member of the British army, her people did not like it, and the child was begotten by accident, or almost. The father, Charles Bush Hearn, was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin. It is said that the father was attacked by the mother’s brother, badly stabbed, and left for dead. He recovered, and eloped with the mother when the regiment was ordered away to another island.6 The story told by Hearn may have been an exaggeration, but it was clear that the British were not always welcome, and Charles Bush Hearn’s treatment of Rosa Cassimati in later years amply justified the apprehensions that her relatives entertained towards the mismatched couple. So we cannot always accept a self-complacent evaluation concerning liberation. Hearn spent two happy years with his mother on the Ionian island of Lefcadia, his father having been transferred to somewhere in the Caribbean together with his regiment. Here is a memory of the earthly paradise, one of the Greece isles sung by Byron.7 By the way, Lefcadia is the mountainous island where Sappho is said to have thrown herself into the sea: I have memory of a place and a magical time in which the Sun and the Moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before I cannot tell. But I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to the world, – . . . The sea was alive, and used to talk, – and the Wind made me cry out for joy 8 when it touched me. Then the boy came to Dublin. His childhood was very sad, as his father sent his mother back to Greece: to the husband, Charles Bush Hearn, Rosa became more of a burden. She did not know how to behave herself in the new unfamiliar and closed environment of Dublin. The parting day came, when Lafcadio was four years old. His father secured an annulment of the marriage based on a dubious technicality: Rosa had not signed the contract of marriage. She could not, as she could not write, like most of the Greek

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women of the time. After the remarriage of his disloyal father Lafcadio Hearn was taken care of by a great-aunt and a Connaught nurse. The child was educated in Dublin, Ushaw in Northern England and partly in France. After his aged guardian was financially ruined, Hearn spent miserable days in London, then emigrated to the United States at the age of nineteen. He suffered enormously and he resented his father who was the cause of so many of his spiritual and material miseries. He finally dropped his first name Patrick. That is why he is known by his middle name Lafcadio, reminiscent of the Greek island of his birth, Lefcadia. In a letter to his brother James, Lafcadio Hearn later insisted that what was good in him came only from his mother’s side. Hearn harboured a strong antipathy towards what his Anglo- Irish father represented. He rebelled against the Establishment, against the Western Christian civilization, against industrialization. During his twenty-year stay in the United States he made a name for himself as a journalist, by being interested in minorities, he dared marry Mattie Foley, a mulatto woman, defying the state law of Ohio that forbade inter-racial marriages. Hearn in the meantime became known as a translator of modern French literature. It was Hearn who first introduced Pierre Loti and literary impressionism to Americans. Hearn went to Martinique in 1887. He wrote a novel entitled Youma after the name of a black nurse and the travel essays called Two Years in the French West Indies. Because of the success of this reportage, Harper’s Weekly sent him next to Japan in 1890, when the Canadian Pacific Railway connecting the East Coast with the West Coast was opened. Together with Canadian Pacific steamers it made a round-the-world trip in eighty days possible for everyone who was rich. Like Byron, who had never returned from his exile to England, Hearn, too, had never returned to the Western world, probably for financial and familial reasons. He married a Japanese, became a naturalized Japanese and changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo. Hearn as a writer, however, continued to write in English mainly for American readers. He stayed in Japan until his death at the age of fifty-four in 1904. During his fourteen-year stay in Japan he published thirteen books on Japan. If you have time, I strongly recommend you to visit Matsue. Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan will serve you as the best guidebook of the province of Izumo, where the native religion Shinto is still conspicuously active. As for the literary quality of

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Hearn Malcom Cowley says ‘It was a surprising experience to reread his work volume after volume’ in his introduction to the recently republished Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn:9 He says among others: (Hearn) had the métier, the vocation for writing, the conscience that kept him working over each passage until it had the exact color of what he needed to say; and in most cases the colors have proved fast . . . Lafcadio Hearn at his best was independent of fashion and was writing for our time as much as his own. One of his best books in this field is Kwaidan or Weird Tales. Hearn was a man of many parts. He was a folklorist, writer, teacher and critic. I have to tell you something about his lectures on Byron. Hearn spent almost one-third of his life outside the Western world. You have already seen from his wandering career and from his rebellious attitude towards British society and its religion the underlying reasons of Hearn’s sympathy towards Byron, who denied his faith and his country. Hearn says in his lecture: ‘Byron forced people to think in a new way. He made them ask themselves whether it was really enough to be simply good in this world, and whether what we have been accustomed to call evil and wicked might not have not only a reason for being, but a certain infernal beauty of its own.’10 Hearn was under the influence of Herbert Spencer. Hearn, as a believer in the law of evolution, recognized ‘another law than the law of pure morality – the law of struggle, the law of battle, and the splendour of strength even in a bad or cruel cause’.11 Hearn liked Byron’s Satanic spirit to a certain degree. What is more interesting in Hearn’s lecture on Byron, however, is his explanation concerning the cause of Byron’s downfall as a poet. Let me quote a passage from his lecture on Byron: Since I began lectures on the subject of literature, I have always tried to bring forward one fact relating to the creation of all great work in poetry or prose; and that one fact is the absolute necessity of patient self-control. Literature means hard work, no matter how much genius is behind it. And the literature means the self-control necessary for hard work. I am not speaking here merely of moral self-control. There may be cases in which there is no right conduct in life, and nevertheless splendid conduct in work. But there is no escaping the general truth that moral and intellectual self-control go together; for the man who can not conquer himself in one direction is apt to find it very difficult to control himself in another. Now Byron is a striking example of this truth. The reason

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that his work is no longer read or valued, except by the young, is that it is nearly all done without patience, without self-control, and therefore without good taste or the true spirit of art. For all art requires the pain of sustained effort; and sustained effort in the 12 highest sense was not possible to Byron. What Hearn tells us here might sound banal. What Hearn says, however, comes from his own experience as a writer. That must be the reason why Hearn was enthusiastically welcomed by Japanese students and that must also be the reason why Edmund Gosse was struck, confessing that . . . these lectures are marked by an almost naïve simplicity. We seem to be returning to the infancy of criticism, where everything is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. But this does not detract from their merit, which depends on their freshness, their artless enthusiasm, and also on the vigour with which impressions independently made on the enthusiasm of the lecturer are passed on to his audi- 13 ence . . . Some of you may ask why I am talking about a minor writer like Hearn. Malcom Cowley’s opinion is a little different. He concludes his introduction in this way: [Hearn] learned the legends from various sources; some of his students collected them and his wife helped more effectively, by reading old books for him and retelling the stories in their private language. Hearn put the best of them into English, with the freedom of a story-teller working from oral sources. He described his work as translation, but it was more than that, as became apparent when similar tales were merely translated by others. The result in their case was folklore for the laboratory, preserved in formaldehyde, whereas Hearn’s version was literature. Long before coming to Japan he had shown an instinct for finding in legends the permanent archetypes of human experience – that is the secret of their power to move us – and he later proved that he knew which tales to choose and which details to emphasize, in exactly the right English. Now that so much of his work in many fields has been collected into one volume, I think it will be apparent that his folk tales are the most valuable part of it and that he is the writer in our language who can best be compared with Hans Christian 14 Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. The volume in question is Hearn’s Selected Writings. In the world of English and American literature Cowley’s high evaluation is an exception. However, in the German-speaking countries Hugo von

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Hofmannsthal’s high appreciation of Hearn is well respected. Among histories of English literature, the only one that gives a favourable appreciation to Hearn is L’Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. It was the eminent French scholars Legouis and Cazamian that wrote the history of English Literature. Hearn’s popularity in the French-speaking world was known by a curious fact: André Gide named one of the characters of his novel Les Caves du Vatican (1914) Lafcadio. Gide, as you know, was an Anglicist. You see the reason why I have picked up Hearn in this meeting: one of the most interesting cross-cultural misunderstandings relating to English literature is the widening gap between negative depreciation of Hearn in the English-speaking world and positive appreciation of Koizumi Yakumo in Japan. The poet Edmund Blunden who taught in Japan before and after the Second WorldWar, wrote the article ‘Lafcadio Hearn,Teacher’15 in 1959.In1924, when he became one of the English successors to Lafcadio Hearn atTokyo Imperial University,Hearn had been in his grave for twenty years.‘But his spirit was still to be felt in and round the University – so much so, that I occasionally had the sense of being incapable of doing anything effectual, however long I might live, in comparison with this old master.’These feelings of Blunden’s were frank and well said. Blunden, recollecting ‘the remarkable assemblage of numerous critical pieces and lectures by Hearn amounting more or less to a history of English literature’, protests the one-sided evaluation given by the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. In it ‘Hearn’s critical writings are flung out as “completely valueless”.’ In 1976, when I wrote my first essay on Hearn,Saeki Shōichi,one of the most knowledgeable literary critics, approached me in a meeting of professors and showed me with an ironic smile the passage of the most authoritative Cambridge History of English Literature that denies categorically the value of Hearn’s writings: ‘Lafcadio Hearn is much less important (than Laurence Oliphant). He was a literary “impressionist” and recorded in various volumes, especially Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), his impressions of a country of which he became a citizen,and in which he married a native wife, but of which his knowledge remained superficial. His volumes of lectures and essays in criticism are completely valueless.’I showed him back the date of its publication. It was 1941, that is, at the height of Anglo-Japanesehostilities. If in teaching English literature, Edmund Charles Blunden – who was later named to the poetry chair at Oxford – felt incapable

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of competing with Hearn, it must have been more so with other Western Japan scholars, who seemed, to the eyes of the Japanese, incapable of doing anything really authentic and genuine in comparison with this old master. Western Japan scholars of course do not admit this kind of unfavourable comparison with Hearn. However, Francis King, who does not belong to that academic profession, comments in his introduction to Hearn’s new Penguin anthology, Writings from Japan16 as follows: ‘Hearn has always been regarded as preeminent among foreign observers of Japan by the Japanese themselves.’ George Hughes, now teaching at the University of Tokyo, asks himself: ‘Reading Lafcadio Hearn: Is it still possible?’ Western Japanologists have for some time made the English writings of Western visitors an important focus of study and research. Such figures as B. H. Chamberlain, Isabella Bird, Ernest Satow and E. F. Fenollosa have become the subject of many admiring essays and monographs. Why then is Lafcadio Hearn so often excluded from this company of commentators? Why are his writings treated so frequently with contempt in the West – when they continue to attract readers in Japan? Is it because of lingering anti-Japanese prejudice? We must find another reason for it, says Hughes. Yes, there are or there have been plenty of reasons to denigrate Hearn alias Koizumi Yakumo. The first of the reasons is that Lafcadio Hearn ‘went native’. He not only married Koizumi Setsuko, daughter of a samurai, but also became a Japanese citizen. Towards the end of the nineteenth century there were Asians who tried to obtain European citizenship, but there were very few Europeans, especially white men, who wished to become citizens of a non-Western country. As Hearn’s case was so conspicuously exceptional, Basil Hall Chamberlain added a footnote to the item ‘Books on Japan’ of his Things Japanese (Third edition 1898): Mr. Hearn’s nationality having been sometimes questioned, we may mention that, a year or two ago, he became a Japanese, assuming the new name of Koizumi Yakumo. Up till that time he had been a British subject, having been born in Corfu [sic]. Before settling in Japan in 1890, he had resided for many years in the United States, where his works have always been published. By the way B. H. Chamberlain (1850–1935), who was called ‘the dean of Western Japanologists residing in Japan,’ highly recommended Hearn’s books on Japan in the above article:

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Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, together with his succeeding volumes entitled Out of the East and Kokoro. Never perhaps was scientific accuracy of detail married to such tender and exquisite brilliancy of style. In reading these profoundly original essays, we feel the truth of Richard Wagner’s saying that ‘Alles Verständniss kommt uns nur durch die Liebe.’ Lafcadio Hearn understands Japan better, and makes us understand it better than any other writer, because he loves it better. Japanese life, manners, thoughts, aspirations, the student class, the singing-girls, the politi- cians, the delightful country-folk of secluded hamlets who still bow down before ancestral gods, Japan’s attitude during the war, Buddhist funeral services chanted by priestly choirs in vestments gold-embroidered, not men only but ghosts and folk-lore fancies, the scenery of remote islands which Hearn alone among Europeans has ever trod, – not a single thing Japanese, in short, except perhaps the humorous side of native life, but these wonderful books shed on it the blended light of poetry and truth. Our only quarrel is with some of Lafcadio Hearn’s judgments: – in righting the Japanese, he seems to us continually to wrong his own race. The objectionable character in his stories is too apt to be a European. However, Europe is well able to take care of herself; and if this be the price demanded for so great a gift to literature and ethnologic science, we at least will pay it uncomplainingly. Chamberlain, however, made a complete change in his view in the last edition of his Things Japanese (1936). In the meantime, the relations between Great Britain and Japan had deteriorated. Hearn had been dead more than thirty years. It was impossible for Hearn to change, but was possible for Chamberlain to change his view of his former friend. During the First World War Houston Chamberlain, Basil Hall Chamberlain’s younger brother, who had married Richard Wagner’s daughter, Eva, became a German citizen and made from Bayreuth violent anti-British propaganda. Houston Chamberlain was called a ‘renegade’ by the British press, and Basil Hall Chamberlain was extremely annoyed by the situation. From that time on he began to take a strong dislike to the former British subject who had become a naturalized Japanese. In the newly added article ‘Lafcadio Hearn’ the aged scholar made many acrimonious remarks, insinuating that Hearn ended his life miserably in Tokyo. In reality, Lafcadio and Setsuko worked closely together towards the end of his writing career. The most valuable part of Hearn’s writings was produced in that time through their conjugal cooperation. For most Westerners residing in Japan, to live with a Japanese women was almost fashionable, but to marry her was out of the

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question. Lafcadio Hearn himself came to Japan, partly attracted by his reading of Madame Chrysanthème. Hearn, too, initially lived with a Japanese divorced woman of the impoverished Koizumi family. However, he refused to become another Loti: he found Loti’s treatment of Japanese women disgusting. Hearn called Loti blasé in a letter to Chamberlain. In August 1891 when Hearn asked Chamberlain about the possibility of a marriage with a Japanese, the advice given was not to marry her legally. Chamberlain instead recommended that Hearn live together with a Japanese girl, as it was the custom of the day. A picture taken by Percival Lowell testified that Chamberlain himself had his Japanese girl. 17 However, Hearn, who had detested his British father because of his mistreatment of Lafcadio’s Greek mother, did not want to repeat a misconduct of the same nature towards an Oriental woman, especially when she became the mother of his son. He wrote to Ellwood Hendrick in November 1893: . . . Last night my child was born – a very strong boy, with large black eyes . . . The new experience brought to me for a moment, with extraordinary force, the knowledge of how sacred and terrible a thing maternity is, and how even religion cannot hedge it about sufficiently with protection. Then I thought with astonishment of the possibility that men could be cruel to women who bore their children; and the world seemed very dark for a moment. Hearn had his cruel father in mind, when he wrote this letter. Hearn, therefore, married Koizumi Setsuko legally. I should add one more explanation about Hearn’s assuming the Japanese name. At that time of the unequal treaties between Western powers and Japan, to become a naturalized Japanese was the only means by which a Westerner could leave his inheritance to his Japanese family members without any legal problems with his Western relatives. Despite this precaution there was a lawsuit after his death. Mattie Foley, the mulatto woman now calling herself Alethea Foley, asked for her share of the inheritance. ‘Claim made by a Negress’ – that was one of the titles of the Cincinnati newspaper, Enquirer –was a sensation. In the United States biographies for and against Hearn were successively published in the 1910s and 1920s. Oscar Lewis’s book entitled Hearn and His Biographers (1930)18 attests how Hearn had become a controversial figure after his premature death in 1904. Hearn’s ‘morbidity’ became an object of attack. Hearn’s self-exile, his sexual preferences, his taste for the gruesome, his interest in

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insects, his dealings with ghostly topics, everything was mobilized to stigmatize Hearn. It is true that Hearn liked ghostly topics throughout his life. (By the way, commenting on Byron’s ‘The Siege of Corinth,’ Hearn skilfully analyses Byron’s merit in the description, made with very simple words, of a ghost, and commenting on Byron’s ‘Darkness’, Hearn insists that ‘the emotion of fear was one to which literary art had a perfect right to appeal.19) Among the Western Japan specialists Hearn was the first to discover ghostly Japan of Shinto traditions.His understanding of the world of the Japanese dead is exceptional. I generally agree with Western readers’criticisms that Hearn’s early writings are sometimes over-sweet. However, as to Hearn’s religious sensitivity towards Japanese native religion, I cannot help admiring it. Many Japanese readers indeed appreciate the soulful atmosphere of his writings. Unfortunately for Japan and her religion, the mainstream of North American Japan scholars was composed of missionaries and their children.Hearn writes in his Japan,anAttempt at Interpretation (1904): Hitherto the subject of Japanese religion has been written of chiefly by the sworn enemy of that religion: by others it has been 20 almost entirely ignored. Moreover, Hearn provokingly writes in the preface to his Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) his conviction ‘that Japan had nothing whatever to gain by conversion to Christianity, either morally or otherwise, but very much to lose’. In this context it was natural that the name of Hearn often became anathema in missionary families. Hearn did not frequent Westerners residing in Japan who kept a Japanese mistress or those who whispered behind his back: ‘Hearn went native.’ He did not like either those Westerners who look at things Japanese with missionary prejudice. The second reason was the war. The Pacific War with Japan obliterated Hearn from the American and British consciousness, a kind of guilt over a youthful infatuation. The misleading notion of Hearn as a spokesman for Japan left Hearn without literary defences when Japan and things Japanese became the enemy. During the Second World War a ship was going to be named ‘Lafcadio Hearn’. Then came so many letters of protest that the American Navy Department announced that the ship would be named after an American patriot. To change a name of a ship, by making an issue of its so-called hostile character, is a childish expression of xenophobia. Hearn had been dead for forty years.

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Hearn in his last years tried to compare Japan with Greece. The idea derived partly from his sentimental attachment to his mother Rosa, but mostly from his reading of the French historian Fustel de Coulanges’ book La Cité Antique. Like many thinkers of the nineteenth century, Hearn stuck to the idea of the linear evolution of history. For him to enter into the world of nineteenth-century Japan was an experience similar to living in Greece of the tenth century BC. The ancient society, as depicted by the French historian, was the Mediterranean society before it was Christianized, or before pagan gods were expelled. The life there with its ancient cult and the religion of the home was very similar to the traditional rural life in Japan with the so-called eight million deities. We must add one more remark: the life as depicted by Fustel de Coulanges was also similar to Irish rural life, which in Hearn’s childhood days still retained many Celtic pre-Christian traditions. When Lafcadio Hearn talked about Greece, it was always the Greece of pagan gods that he referred to. However, if, because of his maternal parentage, Lafcadio had had any occasion to talk about Greece, it should have been the Greece of his mother’s religion. As I have explained in the chapter dealing with the meaning of Lafcadio’s mother for him, in the case of Rosa and Lafcadio, the role model was given by the Virgin Mary: the tender mother-child relationship represented in a Greek icon. The fact that after the separation from his mother the child Lafcadio continued to fancy that the miniature painting in oil of the brown Virgin, hung above his bed, represented his mother is in this sense very suggestive. Throughout his life Hearn unconsciously sought his mother who takes care of him and who tells him stories. The Connaught nurse told him many Irish ghost stories. Mattie Foley told him legendary stories of the blacks. Youma, the Creole nurse, was described as follows: Every da was a storyteller. Her recitals first developed in the white child intrusted to her care the power of fancy – Africanizing it, perhaps to a degree that after-education could not totally remove – creating a love of the droll and the extraordinary. One did not weary of hearing these stories often repeated; – for they were told 21 with an art impossible to describe; And Hearn finally found his early separated mother in his Japanese wife Setsuko. When he called her ‘kawai manman’, using the Japanized Creole expression ‘doudoux manman’. If Hearn felt more at home in the Koizumi family, it was because human

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relationships within that family, especially the mother-child relationship, were more akin to Hearn’s original experience of childhood. Conversely speaking, the story-teller behind Hearn’s popularity among the Japanese comes partly from that sentiment of mother-longing, which is called amae in Japanese. Hearn, who had revolted against his Anglo-Irish father, conquered himself, when he became the father of the Koizumi family. When Hearn said, while lecturing on Byron, that ‘moral and intellectual self-control go together’, he was talking indirectly about himself. When he said that Byron’s work is nearly all done without patience, without self-control, and therefore without the true spirit of art, Hearn in a way confessed his own credo as a literary artist. Malcom Cowley recognized Hearn’s pain of sustained effort and he compared Hearn with the Brothers Grimm and Andersen, the latter Hearn read through Mrs E. V. Lucas’s translation. In the chapter dealing with Lafcadio’s nightmares, while reading the fairy story of futon, did not you feel something of ‘The Little Match Girl’? The final part of the story of the two parentless children is surely more than a simple translation from the Japanese folktale: ‘There the drowsiness of cold fell upon them, and they slept, embracing each other to keep warm. And while they slept, the gods covered them with a new futon – ghostly white and very beautiful.’ Hearn’s parentless childhood was sad. However, compared with Byron,22 Hearn was perhaps more fortunate, having a memory of infantile paradise. Throughout his wandering life, Hearn never became cruel or nihilistic. Lafcadio never had a grudge against his mother, for having forsaken him. Despite all miseries, he could still hold on to sound fundamental values: Lafcadio had a stabilizing gyroscope built into himself. That basic trust in life was given early by his Greek mother Rosa. Hearn later went native, because he sided with his ‘Oriental’ mother. That was what Greece really meant to Lafcadio Hearn.

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earn’s literary fame has arisen because he is the author of Hlastingly significant books on Japan; but it is best to remember him as an important writer at every stage of his career. Works from all periods have distinct merits. Hearn, to his great credit, has a foot in half-a-dozen cultures in as many lands. In nationality Hearn was overall of no country unreservedly but, at his best, he appeals to citizens of all countries. When I claim Hearn as essentially an American writer I realize that I make a controversial claim and that I may well be accused of the same narrowness of vision that I find objectionable in others. But although virtually unacknowledged by the American literary establishment and currently bypassed by it, Hearn is an American writer all the same, an American writer in roughly the same way and degree that Isaac Bashevis Singer, Vladmir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky are American writers. Perhaps more so, for he began with English as his native tongue. And let us not forget that Hearn spent his formative years from nineteen to nearly forty in the United States, that he wrote voluminously and graphically about American subjects, and that the prose style he developed in America is in all essentials an American English. His literary persona – ‘we’ – is American and at every stage of his career he wrote for an American market and readership. All

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his books, even those written in Japan, were published in America, and most of his journalism was destined for American newspapers and magazines. At the end of his life he was thinking of leaving Japan to return to America. Hearn has never fully become part of the American literary tradition, however. No current anthology of American literature that I know of includes writings by him. He is not taught in college and university courses in American literature or American studies. Fifty years ago, when I was a student haunting Manhattan’s then numerous secondhand bookshops, I would often come across volumes by Hearn, most of them published before the war. They were not expensive, but no one seemed interested in them or in Hearn. Why is that, I wondered? So much by and on Hearn appeared in Japan as well as America before the Second World War – what in Japan is called the Pacific War – that Hearn must once have aroused considerable interest in both countries. But the war changed that, and Hearn at least in America became hardly more than a name, a name often forgotten or hardly known. The situation has not changed greatly since when I was a student. Occasionally, books about Hearn appear in America – biographies, bibliographies, collections of his Cincinnati or New Orleans writings (sometimes confusingly mixing together essays about both cities), paperback reprints of his Japanese books. Many of these volumes have limited scholarly use. Hearn often wrote about the odd and the eccentric, and sometimes, it seems, in America at least, only the odd and the eccentric wrote (and write) about him. Copies of Hearn’s books, including the pre-war collections of his writings, are now readily available through the Internet and we may hope the puzzling and elusive writer of my student days will find new readers. Why is there now so little interest in Hearn in the United States? There are many reasons for this.First of all,Hearn is seen as not quite American. He was born in Greece, spent his early youth in Ireland, was educated in England, and lived his last fourteen years in Japan. Second,during his twenty-one years inAmerica he wrote mostly for local newspapers and, after a while, for national magazines. Journalistic writing, with rare exceptions, dates as quickly as the paper it is written on.What is not reprinted in books tends to fade away in public memory, and little of Hearn’s American journalism was reprinted in books during his lifetime. Though much of this journalism remains as fresh as when first written, there remains a

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prejudice against regarding journalism as literature. In American universities today even literature is not taught as often or as much as before,having been replaced in part by‘cultural’or other studies that treat literary works from the perspective of politics,sexual roles,race, colonialism, etc. Though Hearn was aware of and sometimes addressed these issues, they do not constitute his main interest. Born in 1850, Hearn falls between generations, half a generation younger than William Dean Howells and Henry James, half a generation older than Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. American literary scholars find it hard to categorize him and sometimes find his subject matter – nightmares, murders, ghost encounters, dream visions – repellent. Such subjects have a place in American literature but are more usually treated in imaginative writing than in essays. Mainstream American genres are poems, novels, short stories, plays. Writers make reputations in them rather than in essays. In his creativity Hearn rarely took up traditional American literary genres or subjects – novels and stories, say, with realistic urban settings – that other American writers of his time found intriguing. In addition, Hearn was interested in foreign literature, French in particular, no less than American and English, in Théophile Gautier and Pierre Loti as much as, perhaps more than, Howells and James. Finally, Hearn in America lived chiefly in the Midwest and South, in cities – Cincinnati and New Orleans – that lacked, or appeared to lack, the cultural traditions that older coastal cities like New York or Boston boasted of. New York has for over a century dictated American literary taste. Until Hearn’s time Boston rivalled New York, but when Howells moved from Boston to New York in 1889 he confirmed New York’s position as arbiter of American literary values. New York’s literary and cultural hegemony as a publishing centre (it continues to this day) puts writers who write about their experiences in other parts of the country at a disadvantage. The novels of Edith Wharton or Henry James invariably depict people from the Midwest as crude, vulgar nouveau riches, lacking culture, lacking sophistication, unwilling or incapable of acquiring it. Not until the early twentieth century did the Midwest, where Cincinnati lies, become a place for writers to come from and write about. Only after such figures as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather and Carl Sandburg arrived upon the scene did the Midwest – though with Chicago rather than Cincinnati as its literary focal point – achieve, for several decades at least, a degree of recognition.

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The South, where lies New Orleans, came into Eastern literary consciousness only after the Second World War, with the belated discovery of William Faulkner and the spectacular emergence in the 1940s of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. (The part of the country where I now live – the West – achieved recognition of its literature even later – in the 1960s and 70s, when the New York Times began to review books of writers like Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey.) New Orleans has long relished its colourful if not major literary tradition with, among others, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, early Faulkner, Walker Percy and John Kennedy Toole. In New Orleans Hearn became friendly with Cable and other literary luminaries of the city. He met there Charles Dudley Warner, best known as co-author with Mark Twain of The Gilded Age, and Richard Watson Gilder, the influential editor of the Century Magazine. Cincinnati, with impressive achievements in art and music, lacks a strong literary tradition. Kay Boyle and Edmund White hail from the city but rarely write about it. Sinclair Lewis did not hail from Cincinnati but apparently did write about it as ‘Zenith’ in Babbitt (1922), but his portrayal of the city’s social conformity and civic boosterism will strike most as a dubious recommendation.1 I

Today, there are those in most countries associated in some way with Hearn – chiefly Greece, France, Japan, Ireland – who make him the subject of nationalist or patriotic claims. If they overstate his importance for the culture they represent (or defend), we must remember that Hearn in his writings had the gift of insinuating himself into the life of the countries he experienced or wrote about. He was born Patrick Lefcadio (Lefcadio after ‘Lefkas,’ or Leucadia, one of the Ionian Islands), to a Greek mother Rosa Cassimati and an Irish Protestant father Charles Bush Hearn. Though at the age of two he left Greece forever, fond memories of his mother long haunted him.2 True, his later wish to be known as ‘Lafcadio’ implies keen awareness of that maternal bond, and true, he once described himself as ‘an Oriental by birth and half by blood’3 – most Europeans considered Greece in the nineteenth century part of the Orient – yet neither wish make Hearn either essentially or primarily a Greek or a living part of Greek literature.

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Nor, despite the accident of having been born on British territory (Lefkas was not returned to Greece until 1864) and remaining a British citizen until 1896, does he fit within the tradition of English literature. Adherents of a ‘French’ or ‘Creole’ Hearn have a more interesting case of it. They cite Hearn’s early education in France, that in America he read and translated works of nineteenth-century French literature, that he sometimes spoke of himself as a ‘Latin’ and collected a library of French books, and that in North America he chose to reside in areas where French and Creole culture thrived, ten years in New Orleans followed by two on Martinique. But alas, though just possibly Hearn may have visited Paris, exhaustive research has failed to substantiate a French education or even that he set foot in France. Hearn (as his Tokyo lectures amply demonstrate) had read more widely in English literature than in French;4 and Martinique, though now a French département and formally part of France, was not then or today exactly ‘France’ or ‘French.’ It is undeniable, however, that French literature had immense appeal for Hearn (though less so after he set foot in Japan) and that for most of his life this literature offered him a second spiritual home or refuge. 5 Ireland is the country that in recent years has most insistently claimed Hearn as one of her own. A succession of Irish diplomats posted to Japan have unabashedly declared him an Irish writer. Paul Murray, a former ambassador and biographer of Hearn, insists ‘on the Irish in him.’6 Roy Foster, the distinguished historian from and of Ireland whom I met once and admire greatly, agrees with Murray that Hearn is ‘a unique Irish writer.’7 Professor Hirakawa Sukehiro, at least in one instance, also seems to lean toward this opinion.8 At the conference – ‘Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives’ – held in 2004 in Tokyo, Nishinomiya, Matsue, and Kumamoto, Irish diplomats in attendance spoke of Hearn as an Irish writer as if it were a proven fact. Hearn, for the current incumbent Padraig Murphy, is ‘my countryman.’ Well! Not so, and not likely. Despite such seemingly impressive credentials behind it, Hearn by no stretch of the imagination can be deemed the ambassador’s countryman. The most vociferously argued-for possibility is often, as here, the least likely. Indeed, the notion of Hearn as an Irish writer elicited titters of amusement among conference attendees. To be regarded as Irish would have distressed Hearn immensely. He rejected from his teens onwards his

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Irish background and rarely in his writings mentioned Ireland. The main exception is his claim, in a 1901 letter to Yeats, that as a child in Dublin he had ‘a Connaught nurse who told me fairy-tales and ghost-stories. So I ought to love Irish Things, and do.’9 The admission to Yeats is meant to flatter the poet, and does; but the underlined ‘ought’ is deliberately ambiguous. It implies reservations. It suggests that Hearn did not, as well as did, love Irish things, and that, when he did, it could be an effort to do so. Much as I respect the Irish literary tradition and the great figures it has produced and continues to produce, I do not see how Hearn can legitimately be included anywhere in that tradition. Hearn, Greek- born, lived in Ireland from the age of two to thirteen, but soon came to hate his Anglo-Irish father who neglected him from birth and totally abandoned him when he was seven. (Hearn remembered seeing his father only four or five times in his life.) He rejected his father’s Protestantism no less than the fervent Catholicism foisted upon him by that most zealous of converts, his great-aunt Sarah Brenane, who became his guardian after his parents disappeared. Her religion had been anathema to his Greek Orthodox mother, and it became anathema to young Hearn. In reaction to encircling religiosity Hearn early became an agnostic, even before the word was invented. At times in his maturity he pondered living in England, America, or France, but he never gave a thought to returning to Ireland or involving himself in Irish life. Hearn may well have had affinities, as several have claimed, with modern Irish literature – many authors do – but such affinities do not make him an Irish writer. Appropriating Hearn for one’s culture distorts an almost infinitely varied achievement and does him and it great disservice. The attempted Irish annexation of Hearn strikes me as a petty exercise in small-country nationalism, bad taste in a conference designed to foster ‘international perspectives.’10 If anything, Hearn’s affinities were more English than Irish. The Hearns, as practicing members of the state-supported Anglican Church, viewed themselves as English, not Irish.11 In Cincinnati Hearn’s Irish relatives rejected him as he them. Cincinnati was teeming with Irish immigrants, but Hearn associated chiefly with men of German or English background. It was an Englishman, Henry Watkin, who took the youngster in and became his lifelong friend and real father, his ‘Dear Old Man,’ his ‘Dad.’ In 1876 he considered himself (and remained for another twenty years) ‘an

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English subject.’12 In Japan he worried about the fate of his young son Kazuo, not yet ‘Japanese’ but already, in 1894, with ‘his soul .. . all English.’13 Finally, it is ‘Lafcadio,’ not ‘Patrick,’ that we know Hearn by, and it is upon arriving in Cincinnati at the age of nineteen that he jettisoned Patrick forever. The opposite solution to the question of Hearn’s nationality has been to dismiss it altogether. This is the response of Earl Miner, who asks that we ‘speak of Hearn as a Westerner, not as Irish, Greek, English, or American.’14 But the responsibility of a scholar-critic is to make distinctions, to establish nuances, and, in Hearn’s case, to evaluate what impact the countries in which he lived and wrote about had upon his achievement and being. ‘Westerner’ impresses me as too nebulous a term to be useful in defining anyone’s literary identity. I

After the American Civil War ended in 1865, realistic currents surged forth in literature and art. Sargent, Whistler, Homer, Eakins, Duveneck and Chase, displacing the Hudson River School, transformed American art, much as Howells, Twain, James, later Dreiser and Crane, displaced the Genteel Tradition and transformed American literature. Whatever labels one tags Hearn with, he remains an imperfect fit. Popularly he is thought of as an exotic, a romantic of mixed background, a romantic après la lettre, not associated with a literary school or movement but of the kind that springs forth in every generation in every country. In the context of American realism, however, Hearn is less a delayed Romantic, or a late Victorian or even a prescient modernist, but part of the realist generation that came to maturity in the 1870s. In that decade, chiefly spent in Cincinnati, Hearn produced some of his best work.15 A realist then, sometimes a naturalist, once in a while a sensationalist, even (at times) a fin de siècle decadent, but always an acute observer of people and manners, no less in America than in Japan. From his earliest days in Cincinnati Hearn took an interest in American literature, and during the next twenty years he often wrote about the important writers who were his near contemporaries, among them, James, Howells, Twain, Bret Harte, Walt Whitman. He admired the works of their predecessors, Poe in

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particular, Longfellow almost as much, but also Whittier and Emerson. He wrote favourably of writers associated with New Orleans and Louisiana, including – even after a break in their friendship – George Washington Cable.16 The importance of Hearn’s path-breaking lectures delivered in Tokyo on English – and American – literature can hardly be sufficiently stressed. In the 1890s English literature had only begun to replace Greek and Latin as the main humanistic study in American colleges and universities. Nearly half a century would pass before American literature began to enter university curricula.17 Hearn was indeed a pioneer. I grant that recent Hearn scholarship in America has rarely or well argued the case for Hearn as an American writer, but such neglect does not make him less vital a part of a tradition. The full dimensions of Hearn’s American context have yet to be explored. Too many Hearn scholars today seem unfamiliar either with the events and places of Hearn’s American years or with the larger American literary and cultural background against which he lived and created. Critics without much knowledge of these years and this background can only produce a partial, a limited Hearn. In short, study solely of English or Irish or Japanese or French literature is virtually a guarantee for a radically imperfect understanding of Hearn’s achievement. He resists comprehension on such limited terms. A far more interesting Hearn awaits us. I

Hearn shines brightest as a writer about Japan. His Japanese books constitute his greatest distinction. He writes about Japan as a foreigner, and his foreignness is that he is an American writer. For over twenty years he had honed his skills in the New World. That training is the bedrock for his brilliant interpretations of Japanese life and culture. Foreigners who live in a country for a long time rarely write works of lasting value about their experiences. Hearn is a dazzling exception. America has inspired thousands of travel books, but only two probe deeply beneath the surface of custom and politics to capture the essence of American society. One is Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Démocratie en Amérique, or Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840; the other is the Englishman James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth, published in 1888. Toqueville and Bryce enable Americans to see themselves

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from the perspective of gifted, sensitive outsiders. Such studies, I believe, are what Lafcadio Hearn has given us for Japan. In the history of nations masterpieces like these are uncommon, and Japan is fortunate to have them. But as O. W. Frost pointed out long ago, ‘There is very little that he undertook in the Orient that he did not first take up in the Occident.’18 Many of Hearn’s Japanese letters are not easily available or are available only in truncated form. Their forthcoming publication by Professor Hirakawa in uncensored form will give us a clearer, more balanced picture of Hearn’s true feelings about Japan. They will also remind us that the words of praise Hearn lavished upon his most recently adopted homeland were not only sincere but hard-earned. He gradually and with difficulty shed his early idealism and in spite of all his personal and professional frustrations with ‘things Japanese’ came to love his adopted country. For someone for whom (as he said) ‘the wandering passion is strongest of all’ willing himself Japanese must have been the hardest thing he did in his life.19 A traveler, indefatigably curious, skilled with words, Hearn with his restless nature never found complete contentment but in Japan he felt more at home than anywhere else. Reciprocally, if a country’s love for an author is what best validates its claim to that individual, Hearn belongs to Japan as much as Japan belongs to him. Where place Japan’s foremost Western interpreter? In ‘A Ghost,’ a Harper’s essay of 1889, Hearn shrewdly assesses himself as ‘the civilized nomad whose wanderings are not prompted by hope of gain, not determined by pleasure, but simply compelled by certain necessities of his being.’20 Japan was a revelation for him but not an unmixed experience. An unillusioned American scholar Arthur Kunst assesses Hearn’s Japan time thus: ‘He found the other side of the world was only the other side of himself, and that each place [he went to] only brought him closer to the unmoving center.’21 Or, as Katherine Anne Porter observed, ironically perhaps, Hearn ‘became the interpreter between two civilizations equally alien to him.’22 But such an interpreter! For all the enthusiasm displayed in Hearn at the recent conferences in Japan commemorating the centennial of his death, Hearn scholarship retains huge gaps. The greatest are a full, updated bibliography of his writings and complete and reliable editions of his works as well as of his letters. Hearn as an American writer deserves sustained scholarly reassessment. One day someone will even write a superb study about Hearn’s fascinating career on three

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continents. It will require a scholar of wide vision, acutely aware of cultural differences, without obvious biases, and in sympathy with the protean nature – multiple, ambiguous, complex – of Hearn himself. Ideally, such a scholar would draw upon Greek subtlety, French sensibility, Creolean awareness, Irish pluck and dash (not Irish blarney and nationalism), English common sense, American realism, and Japanese wisdom. It can be done. Understanding Japan obsessed Hearn, and book after book about Japan poured out of him, thirteen in all. To come to even an imperfect understanding of Hearn’s awareness of Japan, foreigners would have had to have lived in the country a long time. They may well appreciate Hearn’s studies of Meiji Japan as works of literature, but few will have the background or knowledge to evaluate them as key documents of the era’s culture. In his books Hearn has given the Japanese people, no less than gaijin like myself, a very great gift. We can perhaps never sufficiently honour him for it.

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Image of ‘the Creole Mother’ in Hearn’s Youma Yoko Makino

n Japan, the name of Lafcadio Hearn is best known through his Ire-told Japanese legends and folk tales. Even children who know nothing about the author are familiar with his stories. Hearn, who worked for a newspaper in the United States, came to Japan at the age of forty. Before that, he had spent two full years in Martinique, where he had written two books: Two Years in the French West Indies, which consists mainly of travel sketches, and a novel, Youma. Hearn stayed in Japan for the rest of his life, and in these last fourteen years, besides teaching English literature, he published fourteen books on Japan. The first of those books, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan is a wonderful sketch of life in the country in the late nineteenth century. He also wrote heart-warming essays that are excellent studies of the inner life of the Japanese people. But the most widely read book of his, is his last one, Kwaidan, which means weird tales. It is a collection of strange folk tales from Japan, and was published in 1904, the year of his death. One important feature that should be noted about his Japanese re-told tales is that the folk tales were not just translated into

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English. They were ‘re-told,’ which means Hearn modified the original Japanese tales. As a result, the tales became more than just an introduction of exotic folklore to Western readers, and his retold Japanese legends undoubtedly form a very unique accomplishment in literature. My point of interest lies in his stay in Martinique before he came to Japan. That is, the relevance of Martinique to Japan in the life and works of Hearn. In other words, what did Hearn discover in Martinique, especially in Creole culture, that was to bear an important meaning for himself and to prepare his later works in Japan? I believe one answer will be found in his novel Youma, especially in the inspiring way the heroine is depicted as a Creole mother. Of course, it is quite well known that Hearn had a life-long yearning towards his Greek mother, from whom he was separated as a small child. Even his interests in foreign cultures and folklore, his settling in Japan and being married into a traditional Japanese family, may in a way be explained by his mother-sickness. The theme and image of the eternal ‘mother,’ therefore, can be detected throughout his writings, from the newspaper columns of his American days to the re-told Japanese stories of his last years in Tokyo. However, the way the mother theme appears in his novel Youma has an outstanding feature that is not only impressive in itself but is also deeply related to the meaning of his re-told Japanese stories. I would like to point out the details and the significant character of ‘the Creole mother’ depicted in Youma, as well as the fundamental meaning embodied in the mother-child relationship. This should also make clear what values Hearn saw in Creole culture. The novel Youma begins with the well-known passage about the ‘da,’ the nurse, in Martinique households; how the da cared for the child, and how she was loved and respected in return. The heroine Youma’s mother was a da for a daughter of the Perronets, and when the daughter got married, Youma went along with her, and became the da for the daughter’s baby child, Mayotte. The story about their life in the plantation and Youma’s love with a fellow slave Gabriel follows. However, a revolutionary riot breaks out and the novel ends with the famous climax scene, in which Youma, refusing Gabriel’s offer to save her, chooses to die with the infant, Mayotte, in a house surrounded and set fire to by the angry

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mob. In this last scene, Youma holds the child in her arms, and Youma’s calm beauty is described as resembling a picture of ‘Notre Dame du Bon Port’: the Holy Virgin and Child. Thus, the novel Youma begins with the da and ends with the Holy Mother, both descriptions relating to motherhood. In other words, we may say that Hearn was, in this early attempt to create a work of literature, very much concerned with the theme of the mother, and had embodied within the figure of Youma certain qualities that were vital matters to Hearn himself. Then, what are those qualities that characterize the heroine, Youma? Since the last scene of death is so dramatic and impressive, many might point out the strong self-sacrificing love of Youma towards the child. Youma is brave and mentally strong, and she protects the child to the last minute in a desperate situation surrounded by enemies. So, I think it is quite natural to see in Youma, an idealized motherhood, with a firm, self-sacrificing, absolute love, because this was just the type of mother Hearn himself never had in his life. However, I believe that more significant attributes of Youma as a mother appear in two other aspects. One is that Youma is involved with the encounter of two different cultures. The second is that Youma is a story-teller of Creole folk tales. So let us take a closer look. The story of Youma is set in the background of a Creole society. Youma, a capresse, is a da, but since Mayotte’s white mother had died young and had left Mayotte in Youma’s hands, Youma has become, so-to-say, practically the only mother of the child. As is known, Hearn had based the novel on a historical event, and there was a model for Youma. According to relevant memoirs,1 the climax scene really happened that way. But one thing was different. The real mother of the child was alive and had stayed close together with the child and the original da. In writing the novel, Hearn had changed the circumstances surrounding the child. That is, he had removed the real mother, the white mother from the scene. Here we recognize what Hearn had wanted to emphasize: the foster mother representing a different culture. Youma and Mayotte each originally come from a different part of Creole society. We may therefore say that they each belong to different cultures, with different cultural heritages. Youma becoming

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the foster mother of Mayotte, would then mean an encounter of the two different cultures. What I think should be noted here, is that in their mother-and-child relationship and more significantly in each of their own selves, the encounter of cultures operates as a factor that is both positive and negative. It is a factor that enriches and combines, but, at the same time, separates and alienates. This becomes clearer if we shift the focus to the child. When Mayotte’s mother dies and Youma becomes her substitute mother, they leave the town and go to live in a plantation by the sea. Hearn vividly depicts the long ride from the town over the mountains to the seaside. And here, a completely new world is open to the child. Youma leads and initiates the child into a world of tropical sun and vegetation, of sugar cane fields, of everyday work and joy in the plantation. Hearn writes that, ‘there, in charge of Youma, the child began to gain strength.’2 The child, as if she has obtained a new life, is no more a weak and fragile girl like her dead mother. In other words, Mayotte is healed by the adoptive mother who belongs to another culture and thus, is connected to her. But once the child is involved with both domains, the co- existence of two cultures within her starts to have an alienating effect as well. One episode shows symbolically, how Mayotte feels separated from the world: In the morning Youma usually took Mayotte to the river to bathe . . . but during the heat of the day, the child was permitted to view the wonder-world of the plantation only from the verandas of the house; .. . all the sights and odors and sounds of plantation life filled her with longing to be out amidst them. What tantalized her most was the spectacle of the slave children playing on the grass plot and about the buildings, playing funny games in which she longed to join. ‘I wish I was a little negress,’ she said one day, as she watched them from the porch . . . ‘You are a negress, da, or nearly the same thing. You are beautiful, da you look like chocolate. ‘ ‘Is it not much prettier to look like cream?’ ‘No: I like chocolate better than cream.’3 Here, Mayotte is frustrated because she feels dissociated from Youma’s world, from the world Youma had led her into. And she is here caught for the first time with an uncertainty about her own being, a feeling of doubt as to where she really belongs.

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And the most interesting thing here in this novel, is that the anxiety and fears of Mayotte, which might, in a way, be regarded as a kind of identity crisis, are dissolved and overcome by Youma’s narration of Creole folk tales. By the way, I would just like to mention the fact that, this uncertainty about one’s being can also be seen on Youma’s part as well. Youma, who was a capresse, and in Hearn’s words, ‘a type of the beauty of the mixed race,’4 was brought up as the foster-child of her mistress because her own mother also had died young. That means she was brought up under similar conditions as Mayotte, and the fact that the two in a way reflect each other gives the novel depth and a wider range of meanings. However, in this paper I will not go further into this matter, as I would like to concentrate your attention to how Youma and Mayotte are united in a space that is created by the narration of folk tales. We know that Hearn had a folkloristic interest in the folk tales, customs and religious beliefs of the locality when trying to understand a foreign culture. One of the main attractive assets of his writings is the folkloric elements he effectively introduces, as we can see for example in Two Years in the French West Indies. However, in Youma, he puts more emphasis on the manner in which a folk tale is told. He observes and describes the circumstances, the surroundings, and most important, the effects of narrating a folk tale in the Creole world. In the episode of Mayotte we just read, she says, in the last lines, No: I like chocolate better than cream . . . tell me a story, da.5 Mayotte declares that she still wants to be a ‘chocolate,’ but after that there is a pause. She is silent for a while, appearing to contemplate. And then, in a lighter tone, as if she has come to realize what she needs, she asks Youma to tell her a story. Hearn writes, as we see in the next line, that ‘it was the only way to keep her quiet’6 when Mayotte was upset about herself. Hearn then introduces the titles and the outlines of the various folk tales that Youma would narrate for Mayotte, and he describes the effect on Mayotte as follows: . . . these tales at least enhanced and colored all her other pleasures – spreading about reality an atmosphere deliciously unreal – imparting a fantastic personality to lifeless things – filling the shadows with zombies – giving speech to shrubs and trees and

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stones . . . even the canes talked to her, chououa-chououa, like old whispering Babo, the libre-de-savane. Each habitant of the plantation, from the smallest black child to tall Gabriel, realized for her some figure of the contes; and each spot of hill or shore or ravine visited in her morning walks with Youma, furnished her with the scenery for some impossible episode.7 Hearn is here saying that the stories Youma narrated gave life and gave a meaning to the trees, the stones, the shadows and the black children in the plantation: in other words, all the things that Mayotte saw in the surrounding world. Thus, the alienating gap she had felt between herself and the world disappears. After listening to the stories, Mayotte feels connected closely again to Youma. I believe one of the most impressive scenes in this novel is the following passage in which Hearn depicts in a wider perspective, the whole atmosphere that extends over the moment of narrating a folk tale: It was at Anse Marine that Youma found most of the tales she recounted to Mayotte, when the child became old enough to take delight in them. So the life had been in the valley plantation for a hundred years, with little varying. Doubtless there were shadows in it, sorrows which never found utterance, happenings that never had mention in the verses of any chantrelle, days without song or laughter, when the fields were silent. But the tropic sun ever flooded it with dazzling color; and great moons made rose-light over it; and always, always, out of the purple vastness of the sea, a mighty breath blew pure and warm upon it the breath of the winds that are called unchanging: les Vents Alizés.8 The dominating elements of this beautiful scene are: the dazzling sun and the great moon, the vastness of the sea and the breath of the winds, the unchanging hours and the presiding tranquility of the scenery. Here we do not see anything of the weird and frightening aspects of nature in the tropics, especially that of the tropical forest, which Hearn often referred to in other writings about Martinique, such as Two Years in the French West Indies. The scene depicted here gives one the impression of something more like a visionary landscape that would appear, for example, in a myth or a dream, rather than a real description of some specific place in Martinique.

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However, the lucid atmosphere of this setting is a characteristic that repeatedly appears in his writings. It could already be noticed in the poetic scenery of the sea depicted in Chita. It also recurs in Japan, in an essay called ‘The Dream of a Summer Day,’ where he writes about ‘ the memory of a place and a magical time in which the Sun and the Moon were larger and brighter than now,’ and where ‘the sea was alive, and the Wind full of joy.’9 So, you may say that this basic image of scenery was deeply rooted in Hearn’s mind. And the more significant features that mark the scene in Youma are that this lucent scene of the sun, the moon and the sea is depicted first as a symbolic space that embraces the mother and child after folk tales are narrated, and secondly, as a scene that overlaps the severe reality of life. Behind them, in the background, lies reality, where there are shadows and sorrows, silence and oblivion, anxieties and fears. But Youma and Mayotte, narrating folk tales, are enfolded by a vast expanse of mythical serenity and brightness. And here, the foster mother and child are united into one. And, if we now recall the final climax scene, in which Youma dies with the child, we will notice that it has the same symbolic structure we have already seen. Against a background of blazing flames, with people screaming in terror, Youma and Mayotte appear by the windowside. The rioting slaves had offered to save Youma, but without the child. For Mayotte, this was a separating force from outside, coming from the different world that Youma belonged to. And it was far stronger than any sense of alienation Mayotte had felt before. Youma rejects the offer, and Hearn writes: Her eyes were bent upon the blond head hiding against her breast; her lips moved; she was speaking to the child; Little Mayotte looked up into the dark, beautiful face . . . Youma then began to caress her with calm tenderness, murmuring to her, all placidly, as though lulling her to sleep. Never in Gabriel’s eyes had Youma seemed so beautiful. 10 We see in the core of this final scene of death, Youma speaking tenderly to the child, as if telling a story, perhaps, one of her favourite folk tales. And we understand that here also, it is the power of Youma’s narration that soothes Mayotte’s fear, and thus enfolds the two in a serene holiness. I have so far endeavoured to explain, how, in the novel Youma, the story-telling of folk tales by the mother, functions to dissolve

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any feeling of separation or alienation between the child and the world the foster-mother represents, which we may term, as negative effects caused by the encounter of different cultures. Then, why so? We may ask. In what way should the narration of folk tales have the power that connects and unites? I believe we can find the answer in the following passage, where Hearn analyses the uniqueness of Creole folklore: And furthermore, in these contes créoles, whether of purely African origin or merely African adaptation of old-world folklore and fable, the local color is marvelous: there is such a reflection of colonial thought and life as no translation can preserve. The scenes are laid among West Indian woods and hills, or sometimes in the quaintest quarter of an old colonial port . . .11 Hearn continues and refers to more examples: that the European cottage becomes the tropical bamboo hut, that sleeping beauties are discovered in the primeval forests by runaway slaves, that the Cinderellas and Princesses become beautiful half-breed girls in Creole costume, that Bluebeards and giants become sorcerers and devils, and so on and on. It seems that Hearn was so fascinated by the Creole folk tales that he simply could not help listing up all the examples he knew.And we should note that it was apparently the unique Creole adaptation of European and African stories that Hearn was deeply impressedby. In the Creole folk tales of Martinique, the imagination of the people has taken in stories that have come from a different culture and by modifying them, turned them into tales of their own. In other words, Hearn must have seen here in the Creole folk tales a type of narration, in which as a result, different cultures merge together and reflect a unity in the encounter of different worlds. I am sure this was at least one of the values that Hearn had recognized in Creole culture. And what I find most interesting is that this was just the type of narration that he accomplished later in Japan. As I have already mentioned in the beginning, the important and attractive feature of Hearn’s retold Japanese tales, is that he had modified the original Japanese tale, and thus had made it into a unique work of literature, in which we can see two different literary traditions meet, that of the East and that of the West. In the novel Youma, when the mother narrates Creole folk tales to the child, she is in fact narrating retold stories that have a unifying effect on the recipient as well.

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We may say, that Hearn had discovered and embodied the values of re-told literature he was to accomplish later in Japan, in the image of the Creole mother in Youma. That is why I find this novel, and the figure of Youma so interesting.

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From Folklore to Literature – Hearn and Japanese Legends of Tree Spirits Yoko Makino

hen Lafcadio Hearn first arrived in Japan in 1890, he was Wdeeply moved by the Japanese scenery, especially the beauty and charm of the trees. He recorded his first impressions of the country in an essay entitled ‘My first day in the Orient’. It was April, a lovely spring day; he spent his time visiting temples and shrines near Yokohama. He enjoyed almost everything he was experiencing about this exotic land, but one of the things he found most striking was the cherry blossom trees in full bloom, and he describes it like this: Why should the trees be so lovely in Japan? . . . here it is a miracle of beauty so bewildering that . . . the spectacle strikes you dumb . . . Is it that the trees have been so long domesticated and caressed by man in this land of Gods, that they have acquired souls, and strive to show their gratitude? . . .1

He is here referring to the fantastic scene of the cherry blossoms. However, we notice that he is not just admiring the loveliness of the flowers, he feels that here, in Japan, the land of gods, even the trees have feelings, they have hearts, and souls, and this, he thinks, is

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because the people love and cherish the trees as their companions; in other words, because there is an intimate and sympathetic relationship between man and nature. When he moved to Matsue in the summer as an English teacher for the prefectural junior high school, this first impression of his was strengthened. Izumo was the homeland of ancient Japanese mythology, where the gods and ancient beliefs still lived in the minds of the people. Hearn was touched by the serene atmosphere of the forests surrounding Shinto shrines, and was impressed when he saw huge ancient trees considered to be divine with ritual ropes hanging around the trunks. In his essay ‘In a Japanese Garden,’ he writes down every small legend, folk song, superstition, etc., about the flowers and trees in his garden. In a word, Hearn simply rejoiced in the abundance of Japanese plant folklore. And he states his thoughts in the following way: . . . trees, at least Japanese trees, have souls, .. . This is a popular belief in Izumo and elsewhere . . . it is much closer to cosmic truth than the old Western notion of trees as things created for the use of man.2 These first impressions of the trees and his thoughts were to be developed later into stories of tree spirits, included in his last book, Kwaidan (1904). I would here like to focus on one of these stories: Hearn’s ‘Jiu-Roku-Zakura.’ This short but impressive story is a legend about the spirit of an old sacred cherry blossom tree, and like many of his other weird tales, is a retold version from an original Japanese text. But before beginning my discussion, I would like to refer to the significance that folklore bears in Hearn’s works. Before he came to Japan, Hearn had already established a career as a journalist and a travel writer. As is well known, Hearn was interested in non- Western cultures,and non-Christian religions.First,he was attracted to the exotic. In the United States, he had sympathized with the minorities, such as the blacks in Cincinnati and the Creoles in Martinique. He also had a strong life-long inclination towards the supernatural: the strange, ghostly world. In a word, we may say that he was drawn to the outskirts or margins of nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon society. He was determined to cross the borders and go to the other side of his age and his culture. And in this, he had succeeded, with his insight into folklore as his means. Folklore, for Hearn, was primarily the key to understand the

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mentalities and feelings of another people. He believed that something very essential, that touches the core of a culture, lies within such small details as legends, customs and religious beliefs; so to say, the minor, sub-culture. So, in many of his travel sketches and essays, he makes full use of his knowledge of folklore and interposes small episodes about the district. Thus, we have his books on Japan as an accomplishment of this way of approach. He was able to depict effectively the inner life of the Japanese. However, I believe that his folkloristic concern led him to a dimension further and deeper than he had at first intended. Hearn, during his fourteen years in Japan, eventually became more inclined to introducing and retelling old Japanese stories. In his first book, the stories were inserted in between the travel sketches, but the number of tales included in his books kept increasing, until finally we get to Kwaidan, his last book. This book was totally dedicated to such retold stories. Moreover, the folk tales were not just re-written into English. He would emphasize certain parts, and other parts he would eliminate. Hearn modified the story. His initial intention probably was to make the story more artistic, effective and acceptable to Western readers. But in doing so, he projected onto the original Japanese story a different shade of imagination. And here, folklore had become more than the means to understand a foreign people; it had become the key to penetrate into the secrets of the human mind and of his own self. So, from this perspective, I would like to discuss ‘Jiu-Roku- Zakura.’ And by comparing it with the original tale, I would like to show how different a story Hearn created, and what finally he had expressed, in the form of an old Japanese legend. Let us read the complete text of ‘Jiu-Roku-Zakura’ by Hearn: In Wakegori, a district of the province of Iyo, there is a very ancient and famous cherry-tree, called ‘Jiu-Roku-Zakura,’ or the ‘Cherry- tree of the Sixteenth day,’ because it blooms every year upon the sixteenth day of the first month (by the old lunar calendar) – and only upon that day. Thus the time of its flowering is the Period of Great Cold – though the natural habit of a cherry-tree is to wait for the spring season before venturing to blossom. But the Jiu- Roku-Zakura blossoms with a life that is not – or, at least, was not originally – its own. There is the ghost of a man in that tree. He was a samurai of Iyo; and the tree grew in his garden; and it used to flower at the usual time – that is to say, about the end of March or the beginning of April. He had played under that tree

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when he was a child; and his parents and grandparents and ancestors had hung to its blossoming branches, season after season for more than a hundred years, bright strips of colored paper inscribed with poems of praise. He himself became very old – outliving all his children; and there was nothing in the world left for him to love except that tree. And lo! in the summer of a certain year, the tree withered and died! Exceedingly the old man sorrowed for his tree. Then kind neighbors found him a young and beautiful cherry- tree, and planted it in his garden – hoping thus to comfort him. And he thanked them, and pretended to be glad. But really his heart was full of pain; for he had loved the old tree so well that nothing could have consoled him for the loss of it. At last there came to him a happy thought: he remembered a way by which the perishing tree might be saved. (It was the sixteenth day of the first month.) Alone he went into his garden, and bowed down before the withered tree, and spoke to it, saying: ‘Now deign, I beseech you, once more to bloom – because I am going to die in your stead.’ (For it is believed that one can really give away one’s life to another person, or to a creature, or even to a tree, by the favor of the gods; – and thus to transfer one’s life is expressed by the term migawari ni tatsu, ‘to act as a substitute.’) Then under that tree he spread a white cloth, and divers coverings, and performed hara-kiri after the fashion of a samurai. And the ghost of him went into the tree, and made it blossom in that same hour. And every year it still blooms on the sixteenth day of the first month, in the season of snow. 3 ‘Jiu-Roku- Zakura’ is the name of a tree that actually existed in the province of Iyo. The story starts in a very quiet tone, in the simple style of a legend narrative. ‘The tree was known for blooming every year in mid winter, on the 16th of January. Cherry blossoms in the midst of cold, surrounded by snow’; this alone is a fantastic, mystic scene. But Hearn’s story tells us that ‘there is the ghost of a man in that tree,’ and that it is the spirit of a samurai who had killed himself in order to save the ancient tree he had loved from withering. The original Japanese text of this legend is to be found in a magazine named Bungei-kurabu, issued in 1903 (the thirty-sixth year of Meiji). It is a short article in a series entitled ‘Shokoku-Kidan,’ meaning strange stories of the provinces. It begins by explaining how widely admired this famous winter cherry tree is, and recommends that the readers visit this tree which is located near the Dogo hotspring. The article is a sort of touristic guide, introducing historic places with interesting stories.

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And according to the original legend here, an old man, who owned the tree and adored flowers, feared he would not be able to live until springtime; whereupon the tree, hearing his sad words, answered his wish, and bloomed. Here, the cherry is not necessarily an old tree, the man is not a samurai, and he does not kill himself for the sake of the tree. The tree blossoms in gratitude for the man’s love, and seeing this, the old man and the people around are all moved to tears in return. The main point of this legend lies in the phrase, geni kusaki saemo kokoro arite sono jo ni kanzeshinaran,4 that ‘even plants and trees indeed have hearts, and will respond to man’s feelings.’ Similar stories, like the famous episode of Sakuramachi-Chunagon in Heike-Monogatari, that relate the intercourse between men and trees or flowers, can be found in other districts of Japan too. The legend is simple but has a touching gentleness, a warmth about it that may signify the basic intimacy of the relationship between trees and the Japanese people. And the cherry tree, by blossoming every year on the same date, provides a festive opportunity in which people can reconfirm the bonds of affection that united the man and the tree. Thus, the original legend of ‘Jiu- Roku-Zakura’ may be regarded an ideal specimen of folklore, at least in its aspect as an embodiment of the Japanese mentality. However, in his retold version of the tale, Hearn altered the original motif by making two major changes. First of all, he added a striking element: that is, the act of ‘hara-kiri’ performed by a samurai, under the tree. Secondly, in Hearn’s story, it is the ancient character of the tree that the samurai cherishes and dies for. Now let us examine the first point, the act of ‘hara-kiri.’ To begin with, we may note the fact that Hearn uses the Japanese words, ‘samurai,’ ‘hara-kiri’ and ‘migawari-ni-tatsu.’ Hearn knew that these words had a strong impact on his Western readers. A. B. Mitford, in 1871, had given a detailed and vivid description of the rather shocking ‘hara-kiri’ scene in his book, Tales of Old Japan. He accounts for the act as ‘the mode of suicide adopted amongst the Samurai when they have no alternative but to die,’5 whether committed by free will or as an execution. Mitford had witnessed the ceremonial harakiri of Taki Zenzaburo in 1868, who had been condemned of attacking the foreign settlement in Hyogo. A witness had been sent from each of the foreign legations, and the execution thus sensationally reported in the newspapers. In 1890, Basil Hall Chamberlain stated in his book, Things

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Japanese, that ‘harakiri’ was then already a word well known all over the world. He explains that there are two types to the act, voluntary and obligatory. And he defined the act of voluntary death as ‘being practised, when in trouble, or out of loyalty, or in order to protest.’6 We may also recall that, only four years before Hearn’s Kwaidan, Nitobe Inazo had published his book Bushido – the soul of Japan in which he had written a whole chapter about ‘hara-kiri,’ as a symbolic embodiment of the noble samurai spirit. Undoubtedly, these books, especially the widely read Bushido, had contributed in popularizing the image of the Japanese ritual suicide committed by the samurai class. Now, the interesting thing about the ‘hara-kiri’ act in Hearn’s ‘Jiu-Roku-Zakura,’ is that, although Hearn is usually regarded as the preacher of the values of ‘old Japan,’ and in fact was praised in Nitobe’s book, as ‘the most truthful interpreter of the Japanese Bushido mind,’7 and was even presented a signed copy by Nitobe, he did not depict the ‘hara-kiri’ act here as a performance of samurai ethics in the way Chamberlain and Nitobe explain. But, what Hearn might have noted in Nitobe’s book is the passage stating the old belief common to both the Japanese and the Greek people, that the soul of man dwells in the abdomen, which is thus the particular part of the body that needs to be cut open.8 Hearn had rendered in ‘hara-kiri,’ a different meaning. And that is expressed in Hearn’s following phrase, ‘to transfer one’s life.’ The samurai kills himself, but his death has not much to do with such ethics as loyalty, honour or self-sacrifice. He dies in order to save the tree’s life, but that does not mean he accepted self-annihilation. Instead, his soul moves into the tree and the old man, thus transformed into the spirit of the tree, gains eternal life. We may say that Hearn had re-told his story as a tale of transformation, that is, metamorphosis into a sacred tree. Now, it is true that tree mythology, where a sort of metamorphosis is implied, exists almost all over the world. In many of these tales, flowers and plants grow out of the ashes, blood, or the grave, of men who died a tragic death. Here, the souls of the dead are believed to dwell in the plants. Or, as in Greek mythology, the gods, when they pity humans in crisis, transform them into trees. In these tales, the trees and plants are symbols of rebirth, and the tales may have been meant to have the power of a requiem or catharsis for the dead. However, the uniqueness of Hearn’s ‘Jiu-Roku-Zakura,’ when placed among such metamorphosis tales, lies in the character of the

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samurai’s death. There is nothing tragic, or untimely about his death. By his own will, the samurai dies a positive death; he kills himself for a definite purpose, to become the spirit of the tree. The samurai spreads a white cloth under the tree, sits upon it and cuts open his bowels. Red blood splashes upon the whiteness on the cloth; one can visualize the soul emerging from the body and passing into the tree, thus making the tree bloom again. And every year, the phantom-like vision of the act is reflected behind the beautiful figure of the tree in mid-winter. It is as though the pale pink colour of the cherry blossoms is alive with the warmth of man’s blood. And it is in this strength and boldness of his intended act of transformation, that the ritual of ‘hara-kiri’ takes vivid life, comprising an impressive scene in Hearn’s story. Now the second point of change marks what the samurai, hence Hearn himself, values about the specific tree. As already mentioned, the original legend says nothing about the age of the tree. The old man adored the cherry tree for its blossoms. But in Hearn’s version, the tree is more than a hundred years old. The samurai not only cherishes his memories of having played under the tree as a child, but his speculations go back further into the past, when his grandparents and ancestors had also spent the same time under the blossoms. And it is this ancient character of the tree that was so dear to the samurai, that he had to make the tree live on. Under the old cherry tree, seasons have been repeated; numerous lives of people have been repeated. Time passes, and is accumulated into eternity within the sacred space under the flowering branches. And it would seem as though the ancient tree had manifested its sacred nature, in the form of a ghostly tree that blossoms every year in mid winter. Hearn’s ‘Jiu-Roku-Zakura’ is the story of a man who had faced eternity embodied in an ancient tree, and who had manifested to the world the sanctity of the tree by transforming himself into the tree spirit. Hearn ends his tale by lighting up again the mystic beauty of cherry blossoms that bloom in the season of snow. And I believe, that the scene of ‘hara-kiri’ is deeply impressive, because it is only through this momentary act of a mortal human being, condensed into a ritual, that the eternity of nature was able to take visible form. So far, I have attempted to explain Hearn’s retold story, and show how it differs from the original Japanese tale. The characteristics of ‘the sacred tree’ in Hearn’s version that I have noted are, in a way, a

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projection of the author’s particular vision of nature and the meaning of human existence, that he had reached after his cross- cultural experiences in life. As mentioned in the beginning, Hearn was deeply impressed by the Japanese scenery. He especially thought the cherry blossoms, the trees and the forests were beautiful. He also was inspired by the abundance of tree-rituals and legends in Japan. But as he himself admits in his recollections of his childhood, which was entitled ‘the Gothic Horror,’ his original sensitive ability to feel the spirituality of a tree had been rooted in his young days in Ireland, when he was surrounded by ancient Celtic myths and folklore. But what he had felt from the trees, before he came to Japan, was only a fearful power. In other words, he had a terribly ambivalent image of nature. This we can see in his sketches of the tropical forest in Martinique. Perhaps we may say that, because of his Celtic upbringing, he was able to grasp the essence of Japanese folklore. But in order to open his heart, he had to cross the boundaries of the Western world. And when he had crossed the boundaries, and had opened his heart, he expressed in his retold tales images and truths that transcend differences between East and West, or between the centre and the outskirts; just as we have seen in his ‘Jiu-Roku-Zakura.’ Or we may put it this way, that folklore led and helped Hearn to discover a universal essence through the local and particular. In Japan, Hearn is widely read and appraised as a writer who could understand the inner life of the Japanese people. In the West, on the contrary, he has been neglected, or criticized for dreaming and idealizing Japan. And there have been disputes between those who value him and those who do not. This gap between the two reputations may derive from the difficulty of interpreting a foreign culture, and the difficulty of evaluating the interpretation itself. I believe, however, that his retold folk tales, shaped into impressive works of literature, and thus creating a new archetype of man’s experiences, form a very valuable part of all his works. I feel sure his folk tales will outlive all disputes and evaluations. They will live on, not only as literature in the English language, but as a part of the Japanese imagination.

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Hearn and ‘Orpheus’ – His Art of Retelling Stories of Old Japan Yoko Makino

he name of Lafcadio Hearn, or rather Koizumi Yakumo, which Tis the name he adopted when he became a Japanese citizen, is best known in Japan through his re-told Japanese legends and folk tales, many of which are ghost stories. The book Kwaidan, which means weird tales, is probably the most famous of all his works. Published in 1904, the year of his death, it is a collection of Japanese strange stories, re-written in English. It was, in fact, his last book, excluding those published posthumously. My aim here is to focus on the first story in this book, which also happens to be the best known one: ‘The Story of Mimi-nashi- Ho¯ ïchi’ (which means, Ho¯ ïchi the Earless) I would like to indicate how Hearn had projected the image of a Greek mythological figure, namely Orpheus, onto a seemingly genuine Japanese medieval character, and moreover, what meaning this story bears, for the author himself and also in relation to his place in the history of literature. Before going into details of the story, we should first confirm what distinguishes this last book Kwaidan, from his other earlier works. From the year 1890, when he was forty years old, he spent

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the last fourteen years of his life in Japan, with his Japanese family, and as a professor of English and English literature. In these fourteen years, he published thirteen books on Japan. Many of his works, including the ones written in his American days, are sketches and miscellaneous narrative essays. In these, we can see the diversity of his interest in non-Western cultures, non- Christian religions, the supernatural, the grotesque and exotic fantasies and folklore, mingled together. His first book on Japan, the two-volumed Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) shows the accomplishment of his writing style, of which the main characteristic is, that within the basic outer form of a travel sketch, or a diary-like essay, he interposes interesting episodes, old legends, traditional customs and popular beliefs of the district, adding to them his own speculations. This style is not only attractive as a piece of literature, but also effective in incorporating a living image of a foreign culture. It may be true that his writings are not systematic, and his interpretation of Japanese culture may have constantly been attacked by authoritative scholars of Japanology. But still, he was able to depict not only the nature and culture of an exotic land but the inner life of a people through his unique style. And we can see here, in this method of his, the author’s belief in the importance of such details as legends, customs, religious beliefs and folklore. In Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, inserted in between the travel essays, we find the first examples of old Japanese stories, re-told by Hearn himself.His fundamental stance as a writer remained the same over his years in Japan,but we may point out one major change.That is, year by year, he seems to have become more inclined to introducing his re-told versions of Japanese ghost stories. The numbers of such tales keep increasing, until we get to Kwaidan, his last book, which was totally a collection of such stories. Keeping this in mind, I would like to draw your attention to ‘The Story of Earless Ho¯ ïchi.’ It is a story of the strange experience of Ho¯ ïchi, a blind minstrel biwa player who chants the tragedy of the Heiké clan. (the biwa is a kind of a four-stringed lute, chiefly used in musical recitative.) As already noted, this story is, the opening piece of the book. And according to his wife’s recollections, it was his favourite. It begins like this: More than seven hundred years ago, at Dan-no-ura, in the straits of Shimonoseki, was fought the last battle of the long contest between the Heiké clan and the Genji clan. There the Heiké

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perished utterly, with their women and children, and their infant emperor likewise . . . And that sea and shore have been haunted for seven hundred years . . . there are many strange things to be seen and heard along that coast. On dark nights thousands of ghostly fires hover about the beach, or flit above the waves . . . and whenever the winds are up, a sound of great shouting comes from that sea, like a clamour of battle. Dan-no-ura and the straits of Shimonoseki are located at the western end of the Inland Sea of Japan. In this beautiful quiet sea, surrounded by the mainland and the two big islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, with many small islands in between, many historical battles were fought, the most famous of them being the ones here cited. As for the war between the two clans that divided medieval Japan, the dramatic battles, the heroic episodes, the romances of princes and warriors of both sides, and the tragic fall of the Heiké reign became beloved epics recited and chanted by anonymous professional minstrels, which were eventually compiled into the famous Heiké Saga. Thus, with this historical sea and the Heiké legend as the background setting, the story goes on: Ho¯ïchi is a blind minstrel, with a wonderful skill in playing the biwa and reciting the Heiké tragedy. He lives in a Buddhist temple nearby the sea. This temple happened to be erected in order to appease the dead Heiké, and memorials for them were set up within its grounds. One summer midnight, Ho¯ïchi is alone and he is visited by a strange samurai warrior. He says his lord, hearing Ho¯ïchi’s reputation, wishes to listen to his performance, and commands Ho¯ïchi to follow him. Now, as Ho¯ïchi is blind, he can not see, but it seems to be a large residence of a person of high rank. Ho¯ïchi chants the highlight scene of the tragedy, and the noble audience is extremely impressed and moved by his wonderful performance. Ho¯ïchi is required to come again to recite the rest of the saga. However, Ho¯ ïchi’s strange behaviour is to be noticed, and the priest of the temple, worried, orders men to follow him. And that night, he is discovered in the cemetery of the temple, sitting alone before the memorial tomb of the Heiké, making his biwa resound, and loudly chanting the chant of the battle of Dan-no-ura. And all around him, and everywhere above the tombs, the fires of the dead are burning like candles. Ho¯ ïchi is taken back to the temple. The priest, in order to save

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him from the ghosts, traces upon the whole body of Ho¯ ïchi – the chest, the back, the head, hands, feet, all over – the text of the holy sutra, and tells him to wait for the samurai ghost. The holy sutra will protect him, and make him invisible. When the ghost, not being able to find him, gives up and leaves, then Ho¯ ïchi will be saved. But if he should move or cry out, he will be torn to pieces. Night comes. He dares not move, but it happened that the priest had forgotten Ho¯ ïchi’s ears. The two ears, with no holy words written on them, are detected by the ghost, and are torn off violently. The pain is great, but Ho¯ ïchi gives no cry. Thus he passes the danger, and since then, known by the appellation of ‘Ho¯ ïchi the Earless,’ his fame spreads far and wide. This is the gist of the story. It is full of frightening elements as a ghost story. Many people find the suspense in the last scene especially effective. However, the story of Ho¯ ïchi differs from many other Japanese ghost stories by Hearn, in one aspect: the ghosts appear only to Ho¯ ïchi, but he has done them no wrong to earn their anger or enmity. Furthermore, there is no predestined connection between them, either in this world or in any former state of birth. This difference is quite important. For, one of the reasons why Hearn continued retelling Japanese old ghost stories, besides his own personal innate attachment to the supernatural unseen world, was that the topic of ghosts was linked with the Japanese notion of death and rebirth, in other words, the notion of the inevitable relationship that binds the living and the dead, and the idea of destiny as determined by one’s past deeds (generally termed ‘Karma’ or ‘Ingwa’), in which he had a strong interest. But, in ‘Ear- less Ho¯ ïchi,’ unlike the other weird tales, there are no such elements. Then, why was this story his favourite as his wife said, and what was special about it that made him place it as the opening piece of the book Kwaidan? The answer to this, I believe, lies in the characterization of Ho¯ ïchi, and the role he is given in the story. The story of Ho¯ ïchi is a re-told version, which means there is an original Japanese text. This is found in Gayu-Kidan, an anthology of miscellaneous tales compiled in the 1780s. The original piece, written in old classical Japanese, is brief. The book itself being a forgotten minor publication of the Tokugawa Era, the tale was quite unknown, until Hearn discovered it. Hearn did not just collect materials as a folklorist, presenting them as they were. In most cases,

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he modified and improved the original tale in his more artistic English adaptation. I cannot here go into every detail of the difference between the original article and Hearn’s version. I will just explain the major parts Hearn modified intentionally. Because through these modifications, we can see what he wished to emphasize, and what he wished to convey as a story-writer. The most conspicuous dramatization added by Hearn, is the scene in which Ho¯ ïchi chants his song in front of the ghostly audience. In the original text, it is only one short sentence, stating that the audience, impressed by Ho¯ ïchi’s performance, starts to weep when it comes to the part of their death. But Hearn narrates it like this: Then Ho¯ïchi lifted up his voice, and chanted the chant of the fight on the bitter sea – wonderfully making his biwa to sound like the straining of oars and the rushing of ships, the whirr and and the hissing of arrows, the shouting and trampling of men, the crashing of steel upon helmets, the plunging of slain in the flood. And to left and right of him, in the pauses of his playing, he could hear voices murmuring praise: ‘How marvellous an artist!’ ‘Never in our own province was playing heard like this!’ ‘Not in all the empire is there another singer like Ho¯ïchi!’ Then fresh courage came to him, and he played and sang yet better than before; and a hush of wonder deepened about him. But when at last he came to tell the fate of the fair and helpless – the piteous perishing of the women and children – then all the listeners uttered together one long, long shuddering cry of anguish; and thereafter they wept and wailed so loudly and so wildly that the blind man was frightened by the violence of the grief that he had made. This scene is not only longer and more descriptive than the original; but here, Ho¯ ïchi is clearly depicted, not just as a minstrel, but as an outstandingly gifted artist. And it is solely the power of his music, the power of his art, and not anything to do with resentment or the Japanese notion of death and fate, that brings the ghosts of Heiké to him. I believe, his role in the story becomes more evident, and his characterization can be better understood, when juxtaposed with the Greek Orpheus. When some minutes ago, I spoke to you about the location of the Inland Sea of Japan, its historical and literal connotations, and about the Heiké saga, some of you may have been reminded of the Aegean Sea and all the heroic epics of ancient Greece. It is very natural to think that Hearn felt the same way too. As is well known and repeatedly pointed out, Hearn loved his

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Greek mother; he had a love for Greek things, especially ancient Greek culture, throughout his life. One of his motives in coming to Japan, was that, having read Kojiki, the book of Japanese mythology translated by B. H. Chamberlain, he associated the ancient world of Japanese gods with that of Greece. So, in his travel sketches of Izumo, the province of ancient mythology, and in the description of the oldest Shinto shrine there, he uses attributes mentioning the similarity to the Greek world. Later on, at Tokyo University, he lectured to the students that the only two peoples that have poetry dealing with the music of insects, are the Greeks and the Japanese. Ancestor-worship was another common feature Hearn fondly pointed out between Japan and ancient Greece. A man of such mentality, and whose favourite book as a boy had been Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for my Children (1856), was sure to detect, in the story of Ho¯ ïchi, certain elements very similar to that of Orpheus. For example, we see the legendary sea in the background of both stories. Both Ho¯ ïchi and Orpheus are especially gifted musicians. They sing, and play the lute and the lyre miraculously. And their music has the mystic power to move the hearts of supernatural beings, such as the ghosts of Heiké in Ho¯ ïchi’s case, and in Orpheus, stormy winds and waves, the witch Siren, the guards of Hell, and Pluto, the king of the underworld. When Ho¯ ïchi tried to escape from singing for the Heiké, his ears were ripped off, and when Orpheus did not feel like singing anymore after he lost his wife, he was torn to pieces by the women of Trakia. Both of them were attacked by their angry former audience because they attempted to quit their roles as musicians. Orpheus, needless to say, is a symbolic figure of an artist in the literary traditon of the West. When Lafcadio Hearn, a half-Greek, half-English writer, got to know the original story of Ho¯ ïchi, his imagination must have been stimulated and the figure of Orpheus aroused, thus projecting the image onto Ho¯ ïchi’s character. We have read, in the climactic scene where Ho¯ ïchi chants in front of the Heiké, how the ghostly audience repeats words of highest praise. ‘How marvellous an artist!’ This is the key phrase that Hearn inserted. And we here perceive that Ho¯ ïchi is made to represent the figure of a true artist who is gifted with a special power. Then, what exactly is true about his art, what is the power of his music? Is it that his songs are so beautiful that the audience are moved to tears? No, not just that. Then, is it the mystic power to

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communicate with the supernatural just like Orpheus? We may see in Orpheus an archetype of an artist. He sings to the winds and trees,the animals and the gods and goblins,and brings reconciliation between man and the universe. If this is the archetype, then what about the art of Ho¯ ïchi? We now must go back and take a closer look at the scene of Ho¯ ïchi’s performance. When Ho¯ ïchi starts to chant the battle on the sea, he makes his biwa actually sound like ‘the straining of the oars, and rushing of the ships, the hissing of he arrows’ and so on. Here, he reproduces and visualizes the whole battle, with a power that fascinates the listeners. Ho¯ ïchi does not yet know at this point of time, that the audience are the ghosts of Heiké. He does not doubt that he is in a nobleman’s residence, and that is because the ghosts make the blind man imagine so, through the many sounds they let Ho¯ ïchi hear, such as their soft, noble voices, the rustling of silk robes, the opening of the gate and the doors, screens sliding, feet hurrying, etc. In other words, they are visualized, and they revived themselves in Ho¯ ïchi’s imagination, as if responding to his music. And of course, it is the power of Ho¯ ïchi’s art that enables them to revive. Ho¯ ïchi does not sing just any song. He chants their story, their story of the past, that would have faded away, if not for him. In the beginning of the tale, it is explained why the temple Amidaji was erected: in order to appease the spirits of the dead. Here Hearn adds an account of his own: ‘that in former years, the Heiké were much more restless than they now are. They would rise about ships passing in the night, and try to sink them; and at all times they would watch for swimmers, to pull them down.’ But, after the temple had been built ‘and Buddhist services were regularly performed there, on behalf of the spirits,’ the Heiké gave less trouble than before.’ Which nevertheless means that their existence as ghosts has weakened and that they are losing power. But when Ho¯ ïchi chanted their story, you remember, ‘all the listeners uttered together one long, long shuddering cry of anguish; and thereafter they wept and wailed so loudly and so wildly that the blind man was frightened by the violence of the grief that he had made.’ Now, the traditional role of the medieval biwa minstrels, who had their heads shaven and wore robes like Buddhist priests, was to appease the spirits of the dead, to help them quietly rest in peace. But Ho¯ ïchi, instead of doing that, stirs up once-forgotten violent

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passions. By reproducing the original battle scene, he evokes the half-asleep spirits, revitalizes them, gives them visual shape, and installs into them renewed life. Thus, Ho¯ ïchi and the spirits, that is, the artist and the audience, the present and the past, this world and the other world, are here not only in tune with each other, but respond to each other, creating together an intimate world. I

I suppose by now you will have noticed that when Ho¯ ïchi reproduces the original battle scene, he is, in fact, retelling the original story. It is this retelling act of Ho¯ ïchi, this revitalizing effect of his art, that is rewarded with the words of praise. And here, we can perceive the self-confidence of Hearn himself as an artist engaged in retelling old legends and folk tales. Therefore, the placing of this story at the beginning of Kwaidan, must have been significant. It was meant to be a sort of a manifesto of re-told literature, which was in fact the genre Hearn intentionally chose as the final goal of his literary career. In the nineteenth century, and perhaps even now, the value of a piece of literature depended solely on its originality, the creativity and genius of the author. It was the age of the individual, and Western culture itself esteemed the inventive capacity of the person. As we have already observed, Hearn left us miscellaneous writings, including travel sketches, studies of Japanese culture, works of folklore and retold legends. But he did not write poetry, novels or plays, which were and still are considered the mainstream of literature (though he did attempt two novels). This makes him difficult to accommodate within the context of literary history, and is, one of the several causes of the constant ambiguity of his evaluation and fluctuation in his reputation throughout the years up to now. However, the story of Ho¯ ïchi suggests that Hearn had been well aware of the situation of literature, and his place in it, and that he believed in and stood for the intrinsic values of retold literature; that is, by constantly retelling and therefore reviving the spirits of the past, thus he could build bridges for them to the future. These are values of a completely different nature from that of modern Western literature, which prizes creativity. And I believe that it was

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his attachment to his image of ancient Greece on the one hand, and his understanding of Japanese culture on the other hand, that enabled him to be free from the views of nineteenth-century Europe. ‘The story of Mimi-nashi-Ho¯ ïchi,’ seemingly an old Japanese ghost story, but in fact a recreation of Hearn, has spread widely and deeply into the imagination of the Japanese people. Even children who do not know the name of Hearn, know the story. This itself is an amazing fact. I have tried here to explain the elements I believe to constitute the charm and power of this story. Primarily, the picturesque quality of the highlight scene of Ho¯ ïchi’s performance, which I have quoted several times. There is the dark midnight sea, with demon-fires flittering like innumerable candle-lights. Over this sea, there is the ancient tragic drama of the battles fought. And we see the noblemen of the court, all clad in magnificent medieval garments. These two visionary scenes are superimposed over the dark sea like fantastic tapestry hanging in the night sky. And in the midst of all this, we have the figure of the artist. Secondly, in retelling the original story, Hearn has secretly added a Greek touch, mingling it with the Orpheus myth. The story of Ho¯ ïchi can be read as Hearn’s version of Orpheus, as his ‘self- portrait of the artist’. And finally, what this story conveys: the confidence and self-awareness of Lafcadio Hearn as a literary artist, whose re-told literature may have more significance now at the end of the twentieth century, when established values and concepts of literature are being questioned.

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Lafcadio Hearn and Yanagita Kunio: Who Initiated Folklore Studies in Japan? Yoko Makino

anagita Kunio (1875–1962), who is called the founder of YJapanese Minzokugaku (folklore studies), conducted extensive research into, and established the methods and framework for folklore studies in Japan. However, the works of Lafcadio Hearn were already widely read when Yanagita started his folklore studies. And, as is often pointed out, one of the main characteristics of the works of Hearn is his deep concern with folklore. He was interested in, and recorded the legends, superstitions and religious customs in New Orleans, Martinique and in Japan. Folklore was always his means of understanding the mentality of the people. I would like to show that although Yanagita established folklore as a new academic field in Japan, he was inspired by Hearn in certain aspects, and that this influence, or perhaps we might say, emanation of imagination from Hearn to Yanagita, played a role which was not insignificant in deciding the character of Japanese folklore studies.

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Yanagita was a man who had an extensive career. He was a poet in his younger days, and also worked as a government bureaucrat and diplomat for many years. He then worked as a journalist, travelling throughout the country and publishing numerous books on Japanese folklore and culture. But perhaps for the general public, he is best known as the author of The Legends of Tono (1910), a collection of tales and legends of the Tono district in northern Japan. Lafcadio Hearn wrote fourteen books on Japan. The first book, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), which established his name as a writer on Japan, is a collection of travel sketches and essays about his stay in the Izumo district. In these essays, he depicts the legends, traditional customs and popular beliefs of the district. The book shows his unique style of combining travel- writing together with folklore studies, which was effective in giving readers a living image of life and culture in Japan. Hearn then gradually became more involved in retelling ghostly legends, and Kwaidan (1904), his last and perhaps most popular book, is a collection of such retold stories. Yanagita Kunio thought highly of Lafcadio Hearn. His high evaluation of Hearn is to be particularly noted, because most of Yanagita’s followers, especially the academic scholars of Japanese folklore studies, tend to ignore Hearn’s role in folklore studies. For example,one scholar,Maruyama Manabu,acknowledged that Hearn did have an insight into folklore and did write down legends, but considered that he lacked theory, and that his writings were not systematic. From a scholar’s standpoint, this was deemed a crucial defect of Hearn as a folklorist. Yanagita himself was free of such academic rigidity in appreciating Hearn’s work. In his Meiji- Taisho shi, seso¯-hen (History of the Meiji- Taisho Period; Aspects of Social Mores, 1921), he stated that no foreigner would seldom be able to observe and understand Japan better than Hearn. Yanagita also remarked in Seinen to Gakumon (1928) that Hearn’s first work,Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, succeeded in grasping the Japanese mentality much better than Japan: an attempt at Interpretation (1904).This indicates that Yanagita approved of Hearn’s style of combining folklore with travel writing. Another interesting fact about Yanagita’s references to Hearn is Yanagita’s repeated mentioning of Hearn’s ‘Miminashi- Ho¯ ïchi.’ ‘Miminashi-Ho ¯ ïchi,’ included in Kwaidan, is one of Hearn’s most well- known tales. (According to the index in the collected works

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of Yanagita, Hearn’s name appears twelve times in his works, more than half of them refer to the tale of ‘Miminashi-Ho ¯ ïchi.’) However, Yanagita does not discuss the work of Hearn; he simply cites the tale as typical in the explanation of a certain folk tale type, but we can perceive through his references that the tale had left a strong impression on Yanagita. Yanagita, in his efforts to establish folklore as an academic science in Japan, is known to have comprehensively studied the works of contemporary English folklorists. (Yanagita left a huge library collection of these works and he had the habit of underlining sentences, and writing in question marks and comments as he read.) It has already been pointed out by several scholars that he had been influenced by the works of, for example, George Lawrence Gomme (1853–1916), who was the president of the English Folklore Society. But it was mainly the framework, the methods and theories of English folklore studies thatYanagita adopted.There was one point on which he did not agree with Gomme, and that was the idea of ‘survivals,’ which, in fact, constitute the central theme of Gomme’s folklore studies, as can be seen in his book, Ethnology in Folklore (1892). Gomme thought of old customs and folk beliefs as ‘survivals’ and ‘fragments’ of ancient cultures destroyed long ago. And he considered that the aim of folklore studies should be the research into these ‘survivals’ of ancient times, which remain ‘isolated,’ ‘meaningless’ and ‘useless’ in modern civilized society.1 (The phrases I just quoted in Gomme’s book are the ones that Yanagita underlined, writing question marks in the margin.) Here in Gomme’s idea of folklore there is no continuity between the past and the present culture. However, what Yanagita sought in his folklore studies was,on the contrary,a culture where the past was alive in the present, and where ancient beliefs and images continually have significance in the minds of the people and where old practices are observed by the community.And I believe that it was on this point thatYanagita appreciated and was inspired by the works of Hearn. From this perspective, I would like to examine The Legends of Tono in relation to Hearn’s works. It is one of Yanagita’s earliest publications and it marks the starting point of Yanagita Kunio as a folklorist. The book,as I mentioned earlier,is a collection of tales and legends of the Tono district. The tales are numbered from 1 to 119, with a table of contents classifying them according to type and theme. The tales range from the ancient myths of the mountain

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goddesses surrounding the Tono plains, to ghostly stories of encounters with spirits. There are the deities of the house and of the village community, and the supernatural inhabitants of the mountains. We see visions of the other world, we also see tales of communication between the living and the dead, and between humans and animals. The predominant setting of these narratives is the deep mountains surrounding Tono, and Yanagita himself calls these tales ‘the legends of the mountains and the mountain people.’ The thematic contents of the legends have already been discussed from many perspectives: sociological, ethnological, historical, psychological and so on. But I find the following two points especially significant: First, the tales are related as actual living experiences. The legends and beliefs are vividly alive and are not to be ascribed to the vanished past in contrast to the modernized contemporary world. Secondly, the tales are chosen and retold by Yanagita, representing his basic world view. The legends are not recorded in an academic style merely to be preserved as historical data. Now, the first point, that the legends are true and living facts, is emphasized by Yanagita himself in the introduction. He begins by explaining that he had written the stories down, word by word, just as they were told to him by a young man named Sasaki from Tono. Yanagita then goes on to narrate his own visit to Tono, which comprises the main part of the introduction. And finally, Yanagita finishes the introduction by declaring that, unlike ‘the case of the 900- year-old Konjaku-monogatari, whose tales existed in the past and are now old, the legends of Tono reveal facts which exist before our eyes.’ He repeats that ‘the legends are present-day facts. This alone is their raison d’être.’2 Most of the tales are related as the experiences of relatives, friends and neighbours of Sasaki. And as if to give a kind of documentary quality to the tales, Yanagita gives information about when and where exactly the things described happened, the names of the persons involved, where the witnesses live now, and so on. But I believe that there is a hidden device which gives reality to the tales. And that is the framework enveloping the legends, which is established by the description of Yanagita’s visit to Tono. Yanagita begins by stating that it was late August when he visited Tono. Forty kilometres from the town of Hanamaki, he travelled

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through ‘green mountains and open fields.’When he got toTono, he rented a horse and rode around the nearby villages. He notices the numerous tombstones alongside the road, and from a hilltop he views the ripening rice fields of the valleys. The surrounding mountains are veiled in a thin mist.At the shrine on a hill there is a festival and he watches the traditional ‘dance of the deer.’He listens to the music of the lute and the strange songs sung so low that he could not understand the words.The sun sets, the wind begins to blow,andYanagita reminds us that it is the Bon Festival time. In the growing dusk,he notices red and white flags hung outside the houses to welcome back the souls of the dead.And he continues as follows: ‘a calm settled on the mountains of the souls.The dusk of twilight hovered over them all and then covered them up.’3 This passage, in which Yanagita narrates his visit to Tono, has a striking similarity to the journey that Hearn described, in a chapter titled ‘Bon- Odori,’ in the book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. It also was in late August. It was a four- day journey, Hearn says, ‘over the mountains to Izumo, the land of the Kamiyo, the land of the Ancient Gods.’4 The long route through the valleys, with rice fields ascending the slopes ‘like enormous green flights of steps,’ and the mountains in the distance soft in mist. Hearn describes the simple stone carvings of faith alongside the road, and when he finally reaches the village of Kamiichi, he notices ‘through the warm dusk, lights, colored lights, the lantern of the Bonku, suspended before each home to welcome the coming of beloved ghosts,’ ‘for this is the first night of the Festival of the Dead.’5 Hearn then hears a distant sound of music and he is led to see the Bon- Odori. He is enchanted by the ancient dance performed in the divine night, and calls it the Dance of the Souls. Hearn’s ‘Bon-Odori’ is not only the poetic record of his actual journey, but is situated in the book, Glimpses, as a prelude to other essays in which he introduces various legends and folklore of the Izumo district. And just as Hearn effectively leads us into ‘the land of the gods,’ so does Yanagita with his travel narrative, prepare us to enter the world of Tono. The readers envision in their minds the journey, and thus have the impression that they are actually listening to the tales in the landscape of Tono, although the legends were in fact written down in Yanagita’s house in Tokyo. The two journeys of Yanagita and Hearn both took place in August. And both depicted the countryside and the village scenes at the time of the Bon Festival, when the dead visit the living.

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Hearn was in fact travelling in August because he was being transferred to Matsue as a new teacher starting work from September, and he perceived and depicted the magic of the season. And for Yanagita, who, as I mentioned at the beginning, had appreciated Hearn’s travel essays, it also had to be August. He had already finished writing down the stories from Sasaki nearly eight months previously. His collaborator, Mizuno Yosui, who was a novelist and also had listened to Sasaki’s tales, had visited Tono in spring and also wrote about his journey to Tono. But Yanagita waited until August. He had purposely chosen this season when people move back in place and time and think of the dead, the season when the imagination of the people is directed towards the other world. Yanagita may have followed in the steps of Hearn by embedding folklore in the landscape. And thus the basic outer form of the travel narrative, into which the legends of Tono are woven, gives the ghostly legends an intense and live quality, as is also the case in Hearn’s Glimpses. The second important point I referred to earlier is that the legends, in a way, reflect Yanagita’s own world view. For example, the vivid description of the Yamabito, the enigmatic mountain- dwellers, allows us to perceive a touch of the contemporary age of Yanagita. Yanagita relates, in the first tale of the mountains, how a hunter went deep into the mountains and came across ‘a beautiful woman seated on a rock combing her long black hair. Her face had a beautiful whiteness about it.’6 This vision has elements similar to that in the dream of a Celtic woman that Hearn had when travelling in Izumo. In that dream in ‘By the Japanese Sea’ (Glimpses), a woman seated on a pedestal loosens her long hair until it falls coiling upon the stones. The Tono mountain woman is always described as being tall and slender, fascinatingly beautiful, with long waves of black hair. Such a figure has the ambience of the females depicted in Art Nouveau. In fact, after The Legends of Tono was published, Sasaki wrote to Yanagita that he had the impression of reading something from European literature, rather than what he had originally related to him. In The Legends of Tono, we see apparently native mountain figures portrayed with images that are more akin to fin-de- siècle art. And this echo of the modern age that Yanagita lived in expands our comprehension of Yanagita’s basic concept of the ghostly other

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world. The mountains are the realm where past ages accumulate, from the ancient mythical age of the gods, to the Westernizing contemporary age. It is in these multifold layers of time that all the miscellaneous ghostly tales blend together to form an organic whole of the other world. And here the continuity of time between the past and the present is an essential element. What, in effect, has happened is that Yanagita had projected in the text of The Legends of Tono his own imagination and sensibilities. This point is further illustrated when we examine the tale of ‘The Old Woman of Samuto,’ which is one of the most famous tales in The Legends of Tono: In Japan, as in other countries, women and children playing outside at dusk sometimes disappear in mysterious ways. In a peasant household at Samuto in Matsuzaki village, a young girl disappeared leaving her straw sandals under a pear tree. One day, thirty years later, when relatives and neighbours gathered at the house, she reappeared very old and haggard. When asked why she returned, she replied, ‘I wanted to see everyone and came back. Now, I am off again. Farewell.’ Again she disappeared without leaving a trace. On that day the wind blew very hard. The people of Tono, even now, on days when the wind roars, say that the old woman of Samuto is likely to return.7 The interesting fact about this tale is that the original story that Sasaki narrated is known and is still in print. There are minor differences between the two texts, such as the name of the village. Samuto was originally Noboto, and also, in Yanagita’s version, a tragic tone is added to the girl’s fate. But the most important difference is the way the tale ends. In the original legend narrated by Sasaki, the village people did not welcome the return of the old woman, because she always brought stormy winds along with her. So the villagers erected a stone pagoda on the village boundaries to ward her off, and after that the woman never came back again. We can understand the original tale as a village community narrative. Village life is severe, endangered by invisible forces from the outside world,and the legend reflects the will of the community to protect themselves within their boundaries. However, Yanagita changed the meaning of the legend by rewriting the ending. In his version, the people do not reject the woman’s visits, the woman is free to come and go between the mountains and the village, that is, between the other world and this

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world. The woman thus becomes the wind from the ghostly mountains which occasionally blows into the people’s mind fresh visions of the other world. The way Yanagita modified the legend reminds us of how Hearn retold the story of ‘Mimi-nashi-Ho¯ ïchi.’ ‘Mimi-nashi-Ho¯ ïchi’ is the story of the strange experience of a blind minstrel biwa player, who chants the tragedy of the Heiké clan. I will not go into the details of Hearn’s modification, as I have already discussed the matter elsewhere. I would just like to point out here the fact that the change Hearn rendered deals with Ho¯ ïchi’s role in the story. The traditional role of medieval Buddhist minstrels was to appease the spirits of the dead, to help them quietly rest in peace. But Hearn added a dramatic scene in which Ho¯ïchi sings in front of the ghostly Heiké audience. And here Ho¯ ïchi, by telling the Heiké their stories, awakens the half- asleep spirits instead of appeasing them. He stirs up once forgotten passions, and installs into the spirits of the past, renewed life. Both Yanagita and Hearn changed the original tale so that the ghostly other world is not to be either rejected or appeased. Both focus on the communication between this world and the other, and between the present and the past. Both tales reflect the will to continually revive and renew the connection with the other world. Moreover, Hearn is clearly emphasizing the re telling act of Ho¯ ïchi and the revitalizing effect of his art on the Heiké. ‘Mimi- nashi-Ho¯ ïchi,’ the opening story in Kwaidan, is meant to be a sort of manifesto of retold ghostly tales. And this was what Hearn chose as the final goal of his literary career, and of his folklore concerns. As I mentioned at the beginning, Yanagita repeatedly refers to ‘Mimi-nashi-Ho¯ ïchi’ in his folklore studies. And I believe that he was inspired by the story and had perceived in it the meaning that retold tales bear, in the field of folklore. That is, to retell old legends in one’s own words, is to accept the past culture, to re new it in the present context and to hand it over to the future. We are able to see here the motivating and imaginative power inspired by Hearn that later developed into the folklore research Yanagita conducted. Where legends are told to ‘reveal present- day facts’ as Yanagita declared in the introduction to The Legends of Tono, old beliefs and practices embodied in folklore continue to be alive and venerated in the community. The whole idea will later be developed by Yanagita into the concept of ‘jo-min’: the concept of the common folks of Japan, which becomes the pivot of Yanagita’s

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later folklore studies. And this is the point in which Hearn inspired Yanagita. This is also the important feature of Yanagita’s folklore studies that makes it different from that of Gomme. Therefore by playing an important role in forming the idea of folklore in Japan, we may say Hearn inspired the folklore studies of Yanagita. As is well known,Yanagita dedicated The Legends ofTono to‘people residing in foreign countries.’ For Yanagita, Tono symbolically represented Japan, just as Izumo, ‘the Province of Gods,’ was symbolic for Hearn. Both Yanagita and Hearn were involved in a search for values antithetical and converse to nineteenth- century Western supremacy. Yanagita developed his folklore studies when Japan was undergoing drastic changes and was challenged by the powers of the West. And I am aware how Yanagita is often discussed in relation to a nationalistic cultural movement and the quest for a national identity. But, today, I have tried to illustrate the intrinsic link between the two men by focusing on the basic ideas comprising their works of folklore and their manner of retelling folk tales. Seeking identity in the connection to the past and the other world; valuing the continuity of time and culture in the present age; reconfirming one’s existence in the retelling of ghostly tales; through these essential phases of their commitment to folklore, I believe, we are able to see the works of both Hearn and Yanagita in a wider and a more profound perspective of human existence, one that transcends the age and specific cultural situation of any one country. I would like to conclude by introducing a short article written a year before Yanagita started working on The Legends of Tono. In this article, entitled ‘Dokusho- yodan’ (1907) Yanagita writes about books he has recently read. He states that he was absorbed in reading the tales of the French writer Théophile Gautier, and that he was especially impressed by the piece ‘Aria Marcella.’ And he adds that Lafcadio Hearn, also, had admired this story. ‘Aria Marcella’ is a fantastic tale about a young man who fell in love with the beautiful ghost of a woman he encountered in the ruins of ancient Rome. Lafcadio Hearn had translated the works of Gautier in his American days, and it was, in fact, his first publication. He had admired this story and discussed its significance in one of his lectures later at Tokyo University entitled ‘The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction.’ The woman in ‘Aria Marcella’ is, in effect, an embodiment of the past and of the ghostly other world.

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In Yanagita’s article, we see Yanagita, together with Hearn and with Gautier, sharing a fantastic vision of falling in love with a beautiful phantom from the other world. The three figures, with their different careers and different backgrounds here join in the same imaginative sphere. And this, personally, is one of my favourite scenes in which Yanagita and Hearn appear together.

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Insect-music: Lafcadio Hearn’s Orphean Song Hitomi Nabae

– why European poets, during the last two thousand years have written so little upon the subject of insects? Lafcadio Hearn, ‘Some Poems about Insects’1 afcadio Hearn went to Japan in 1890 as a reporter commis- Lsioned by Harper’s Weekly. He had just published, Two Years in the French West Indies, a travelogue based on his Martinique experiences which received good reviews. After having worked as a journalist, literary editor, book reviewer and translator for twenty years in Cincinnati and New Orleans as well as Martinique, he was determined to become an independent writer and explore a new literary territory. Japan was his next material. His initial plan was to spend a year or two gathering information for his book, but he ended up spending the rest of his life there. He found a teaching position, first at Matsue Ordinary Middle School, then at the Fifth Higher Middle School in Kumamoto, later at Tokyo Imperial University, and lastly at Waseda University. Moving around in Japan such a way, his Japanese experience literally ranged from the small Japanese ancient city of Matsue to the modern Westernized capital of Tokyo. He married a Japanese,

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learned old Japanese tales, customs and habits, and published eleven books on Japan. These books earned him the reputation of a Japanologist rather than a literary writer; however, his life-long goal was to become a prose-poet who could evoke in his writing the spirit of a place. His essays are descriptive and exact, reflecting his training as a journalist in his youth, but they are also crafted and suggestive. His Japanese experience inspired him and, as will be discussed in this paper, made him search for an Orphean voice. Hearn worked on a metaphorical form of the essay in which both ancient and modern voices could mingle, turning an old story into a modern allegory and bringing the dead back to life through his narrative. Curiously, one particular literary subject that Hearn favoured was the insect. His interest in insects can be traced back to his early American days; he wrote newspaper and magazine articles on both entomological and literary issues. In Japan, he discovered the aesthetic appreciation of listening to insects, and considered the insect to be a suitable subject for modern poetry. This paper will chronologically examine Hearn’s insect writings and the transformations of his treatment of the insect as an object of observation and as a literary subject. As early as 1876, he reported on an exhibition of butterflies with vivid colour descriptions in the Cincinnati newspaper. In his 1884 magazine articles on the New Orleans World Exposition, he admired the Japanese display of hand-crafted miniature insects. In the essays and lectures of his Japanese period, from 1890 to 1904, the insect was no more a simple object of observation and curiosity; it became a compound metaphor to render both aesthetic and ethical aspects of culture. He wrote his books in English, and most of them were published in the US and some in UK. His works were also translated into several European languages, such as Finish, French and German.2 To his Western readers, Hearn introduced the Japanese custom of listening to insect-music3 as an example of an aesthetic sensibility which the West had yet to learn. To his Japanese students, he lectured on the insect poetry, comparing cultural and literary histories in the East and the West, and pointed out that both the old Greeks and the Japanese wrote poetry about ‘musical insects, crickets, cicadæ,’ underlining the long tradition of the Japanese insect poetry.4

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BUTTERFLIES

In his American writings, Hearn especially excelled in micro- scopic descriptions. Edwin Henderson, the editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, thought that Hearn was gifted and could use his language ‘as polished and as full of colour as if it had come from the pen of Gautier.’5 Hearn’s ‘Butterfly Fantasies’ (9 May 1876) is such an example of a vivid and colourful presentation after Gautier who was one of young Hearn’s literary inspirations. In this article,Hearn gives a report on an entomological exhibition and describes the colours, shapes and sizes of butterflies collected from all over the world.6 He calls the beauty of their wings as ‘Nature’s painting’ and names the colours to present its ‘artistic design’:‘Combinations of gold, with a gleam of green; of blue, with silvery veins; of scarlet, with ermine white; of ebony black,with flaming yellow;of onyx colour,with purple-edged dots of brown; of blood red,’ and these colours ‘scintillated, shone, flashed.’7 He enjoys depicting the insects as if he were an illustrator of a coloured picture book.As a reporter at a scientific exhibition, he must be objectively accurate in his delineation but does not have to be worried about the meaning of the ‘Nature’s painting.’ He freely takes advantage of the opportunity and experiments with his language to produce true-to-nature but lusciously aesthetic effects. Hearn’s article, however, is not a mere (dis)play of colours; it testifies to his realization that no matter how he tries to hold up a transparent mirror against ‘Nature,’ his mirror is warped by his preconception. When he comes across with one ‘grotesque’ moth, colours suddenly fade away and it immediately reminds him of its other name used by the superstitious English peasant, ‘the death’s head.’ Then, he starts making associations with the image: ‘its wings have the richness of costly funeral trappings; its back bears plainly painted, in the yellowish colour of moldering bone, the hideous outlines of an eyeless and gibbering skull.’8 In the para- disiacal world of ‘aerial graces’ of butterflies, he encounters death, and the article bespeaks a conventional moral, memento mori, whose message is reinforced by the use of words such as ‘funeral’ and ‘skull.’ The change of tone also betrays the rapture in the narrator’s point of view; while he tries to illustrate the entomological exhibit as an objective, moral-free, and artistic reporter, he cannot do away with his tendency to apply a known maxim to humanize the natural phenomenon.

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He feels refreshed, however, on entering the Oriental section because he is able to admire the beauty of the insects,forgetting the haunting image of death:‘To turn from this grotesque insect to the spiritually delicate butterflies of China and Japan was something of a relief.’9 He once again plays with the colours and makes aesthetic associations,linking one pattern to another.A different atmosphere provides him with a different emotion. He thus imagines a correspondence between people’s character and their environment:‘the nature of a race is molded by the nature of the climate of their land; that their arts and customs are strongly influenced by the conditions of their atmosphere; that their tastes are developed in accordance with the peculiarities of their natural surroundings.’10 The discovery was liberating, since, in the case of the Japanese, he assumes the correspondence spiritual and aesthetic.Wings of the Japanese butterflies, therefore, remind him of the patterns on the Japanese fans: ‘One, a Japanese butterfly, bore upon its wings in scarlet and pale blue, mingled with touches of white, an exact counterpart of a favourite sky-design on Japanese fans.’11 The Oriental section, moreover, excites him because he also discovers the privilege of being a stranger. He feels that there is no need to be obsessed by the preconceived moral framework of his Western mind.The position of a stranger, in other words, enables him to become a fanciful ethnographer of culture. For young Hearn, Japan was a remote and exotic world. He filled up its unknown space with his imagination and fancied a world of beauty which he believed could no longer exist in the Western hemisphere. ‘Butterfly Fantasies’ foretells Hearn’s desire to find the Orient, namely Japan, as an ideal literary Utopia where he can let his language freely fly. Two decades later, in one of his Tokyo Imperial University lectures, he refers to the butterfly as an important metaphor for the spirit in both Western and Japanese poetry. His idea of insects gradually matured throughout his career as he learned more about insects in both literature and science.12 Before going into a discussion of Hearn’s literary achievements in Japan, his view of Japanese art in relation to insects first needs to be examined.

COTTON INSECTS

Hearn welcomed entomological discoveries of his day, and regarded that they would break the spell of old superstitions and

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beliefs about insects. He was especially impressed by the communal life of insects described in Jules Michelet’s L’Insecte and wrote an article in 1882 entitled, ‘News about Ants.’ Hearn spot- lighted Michelet’s account on ‘the Republic of the Ants’ and introduced the life of ants as organized as the ideal ‘Greek republics.’ He also learned that they had a highly developed sensitivity. Knowing entomological discoveries of his day, Hearn assumed that, as far as the evolution of the conscious was concerned, insects might be more advanced than humans; therefore, they were moral-free but orderly, and sentiment-free but supersensitive. In Hearn’s logic, they were ethical because they were devoid of egoistic desires.14 When he saw beautifully crafted imitation Japanese insects, he immediately associated Japanese culture with both of his ideal models of insects and ancient Greece. In 1885, Hearn wrote a series of reports on the New Orleans Exposition.15 His articles on the Japanese exhibit show his excitement at witnessing a happy marriage between old tradition and modern technology. He examines the display of printed books which are overlooked by most visitors and expresses his admiration at the level of the Japanese technology which is comparable with any Western counterpart.16 Such modern features in the Japanese exhibit dispel the fixed notion of Japan as the exotic Other but allow Japan to claim its presence in the civilized modern world. Hearn finds two particular items in the exhibit, crafted ‘cotton’ insects and a musical instrument very similar to ‘the ancient Greek seven-stringed lyre,’ which perfectly proved his belief in aesthetic and ethical Japan.17 The ‘cotton’ insects are especially the objects of his wonder, and he reveres the subtlety of Japanese craftsmanship on two levels: that they are able to produce such skilful miniatures, and that they are attentive even to the smallest elements of their exhibition: [The bugs and beetles] are so life-like that you may actually weigh one in your hand a moment before you find that it is made of cotton . . . There are cotton crickets with the lustre of lacquer, and cotton grasshoppers of many colors; the korogi, whose singing is like to the sound of a weaver, weaving rapidly (‘ko-ro-ru, ko-ro- ru’), and the kirigiri, whose name is an imitation of its own note.18 The ‘cotton’ insects are ‘so life-like’ not only because they represent the anatomical exactness but also because they bear a sense of life in motion and appear as if they might at any moment

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‘fly away’ and start singing in silvery chorus. He intuits that the essence of such craftsmanship is ‘movement’: ‘What Japanese art of the best era is unrivaled in – that characteristic in which, according even to the confession of the best French art connois- seurs, it excels all other art – is movement, the rhythm, the poetry, of visible motion.’19 Japanese craftsmanship captures the lively vibrations of the ‘cotton’ insects. In ‘Butterfly Fantasies,’ Hearn experimented with his language to illustrate colourful designs of butterflies; now, he discovers that the Japanese are able to express the ‘visible motion’ of the passing moment in the static art forms. The craftsmanship of the ‘cotton’ insect is a factual evidence for Hearn that Japanese art is the product not of imitation but of recreation of the prime moment of life. In his 1898 essay, ‘About Faces in Japanese Art,’ he describes that, while Western painting focuses on imitation and particular characteristics, Japanese painting on idealism and the general law of form registered in the painter’s ‘memory.’20 He also explains the long apprenticeship period that is required for a Japanese craftsman to master one brushstroke, a fleeting movement that appears effortless and spon- taneous. He describes how such a drawing is made: The Japanese artist depicts an insect, for example, as no European artist can do: he makes it live; he shows its peculiar motion, its character, everything by which it is at once distinguished as a type, – and all this with a few brush-strokes. But he does not attempt to represent every vein upon each of its wings, every separate joint of its antennæ: he depicts it as it is really seen at a glance, not as studied in detail. We never see all the details of the body of a grasshopper, a butterfly, or a bee, in the moment that we perceive it perching somewhere; we observe only enough to enable us to decide what kind of creature it is. We see the typical, never the individual peculiarities.21 Living in Japan, Hearn comes to value a sense of the passing moment as an important subject of art. In the Western way of realism, an artist will immobilize an object in order to depict it from a fixed perspective. Hearn, however, learns that an artist does not have to be concerned with anatomical particulars and there is no need to dissect to kill to capture reality; all he has to do is to register the impression of the moment. The fact that he refers to the insect as an example in the above passage is significant, because it announces the insect as a representative subject matter in Japanese art. In poetry, he also learns that the custom of

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listening to the insect music and composing poems about it is a most cherished aesthetic pastime for the Japanese for more than one thousand years. From Hearn’s Western point of view, however, the insect theme is a discovery.

INSECT MUSICIANS

In one of his lectures at Tokyo Imperial University, ‘Old Greek Poetry about Insects’, Hearn introduces the Greek insect poetry and explains how their appreciation of insects is similar to the Japanese. He categorizes the Greek insect poetry into three classes, ‘cicadæ, musical grasshoppers, and some kinds of night crickets’ and contends that the three correspond exactly to the classes of ‘Japanese musical insects.’22 His reference to the ancient Greek poetry enables him to define Japanese culture as equally significant and worthy of respect by the Westerners. The more he learned about the insect as a theme in Japanese art, the more it became valuable for him to revive it in his writing. With his knowledge in both literatures of poetry and of science, he regarded the insect theme as a useful compound metaphor which would superimposedly project both literary (non-material) and scientific (material) aspects of culture. ‘Insect-Musicians’ (1898) is an example of Hearn’s attempt to write a philosophical essay on culture which is at once literary and scientific, or socio-historical, naturalistic, poetic, and critical. In this essay, Hearn uses a Japanese poem as an epigraph and guides his readers to learn how to read its hidden meaning. For this purpose, he provides the readers with detailed accounts of the history of the insect-music and its literary tradition in Japan. The prefacing poem is also followed by his own translation: Mushi yo mushi, Naïté ingwa ga Tsukuru nara? ‘O insect, insect! – think you that Karma can be exhausted by song?’ –23 The narrator talks about his experience of purchasing an insect at a night festival. A connoisseur of Japanese culture, he knowingly introduces the history of the Japanese custom of keeping insects as pets as well as the history of the insect business. In the manner

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of a naturalist, he categorizes insects, explains their characteristics, supplies with their scientific names and life-size illustrations, tran- scribes their sounds, lists their prices, and complements this with Japanese insect poems. After having spent about forty pages on socio-historical, scientific, and literary portraiture of insects, the narrator reintroduces the previously cited poem. The poem, therefore, must be read again anew with some knowledge of Japanese cultural background in order to construe the ‘indirect double-suggestiveness’ of the poem. The narrator tries out his interpretation: ‘The Western reader would probably suppose that the insect-condition, or insect-state- of-being, is here referred to; but the real thought of the speaker, presumably a woman, is that her own sorrow is the result of faults committed in former lives, and is therefore impossible to alle- viate.’24 The poem not only expresses the speaker’s sorrow but also carries the echoes of the ‘revival of ancestral pain’ and ‘inherited . . . memories’ of the race. Being exposed to Japanese culture, the narrator’s Western mind is challenged. He humbly admits that the Japanese know not only how to enjoy ‘insect-music’ but also how to respond to the ‘sorrow’ of the race which is vibratingly transmitted in its tone. Such sensibility, which responds to the vicissitudes of life, he calls ‘an aesthetic sensibility,’ and regrettably declares that it has been left ‘unexplored’ in the West.25 The ideal Japanese ‘aesthetic sensibility’, however, may soon be extinct. Hearn was clearly aware of the rapid process of Westernization in Japan. He concludes ‘Insect-musicians’ with his critique of modern culture: Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy-swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical, their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness; but in the knowledge of the natural, in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth, they exceeded us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilized their paradise . . . that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed.26 His reference to ancient Greece here adds an elegiac tone. The ideal ancient Greek culture perished, and so would be the fate for Japanese culture. Using the editorial ‘we,’ Hearn places himself as one of the ‘aggressive’ Westerns. No matter how he tries to live a

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Japanese way of life and learn their ‘aesthetic sensibility,’ he is a stranger representing the powers of Western modernization. ‘The Insect-Musicians,’ nevertheless, is a testimony of Hearn’s compassionate response to the kind of Japanese sensibility that could pity an insect, because it was believed to have a soul of its own and shared the same fate as humans. From Hearn’s vantage point as a Western outsider in Japanese society, he was able to observe the idiosyncratic nature of the Japanese sensibility, very different from the Western one, and discerned the formula of the ‘indirect double-suggestiveness’ in an innocuous popular poem. For the Japanese, the poem’s elegiac tone was so internalized an experience that, although emotionally felt, it was not analytically explained; on the other hand, for most Westerners, insect poems appeared as playful and primitive pathetic fallacy, thus unworthy of special attention. Hearn in this sense was an exception. He was a surprisingly insightful culturalist who detected in an obscure poem the essential nature of the race. ‘Insect’ as a literary metaphor was an inspiration for him, since it would allow him to write a modern allegory in which both an ancient wisdom and a modern perspective could be simultaneously rendered.

KUSA-HIBARI (GRASS-LARK)

Hearn’s essays on Japanese culture and translations of old Japanese tales have ethnographical value. As to the actual collecting of various materials for his writing, however, the credit goes to his students. They were asked to make a thorough search at the Imperial Library or other archives in order to find, for example, poems on a certain subject that he was after.27 It is pointed out that Hearn’s discovery of the Japanese insect poetry is ‘the result of a successful obsession’ and his Japanese writings do not so much mirror Japan as Hearn himself.28 Indeed, Hearn selected his material and used them to create his Japan; nonetheless, if he was obsessed, it was not because he was a collector but because he was searching for a new literary form which could mirror the changing modern world. He considered that any fixed image about Japan would be a retrospective cliché; Japan could only manifest itself phenomenologically in relation to its position in the world as well as to his own perspective as an immediate experience. He esteemed old tradition because it is something that can

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be re-experienced and redefined in the context of his particular contemporary situation. Hearn’s stories and essays, therefore, are his attempts to revive the old spirit in a modern narrative. The Japanese insect poetics reveals its meaning in the light of Hearn’s own experience. In his lecture, ‘Some Poems about Insects,’ he introduces the image of a butterfly in Greek literature and how it serves as ‘the emblem of the soul’ and ‘immortality,’ and fancifully defines that poetry is ‘the sea in which the soul of man can swim even as butterflies can swim in the air, or happy ghosts swim in the finer element of the infinite ether.’29 He, however, leaves the Greeks and lectures on three nineteenth-century English and American poems with references to butterflies, spiders and ants.30 As he concludes his discussion, he asks: ‘why European poets, during the last two thousand years have written so little upon the subjects of insects?’31 He answers himself that insects had symbolized mysterious powers in pre-Christian narratives and thus were later considered unsuitable for literary subject in the view of monotheistic Christianity which does not acknowledge divinity in any other forms. He, however, tells his students that the insect would be a befitting subject for future poetry. He calls attention to the Japanese tradition of appreciating insect-music and suggests that the kind of sensibility that responds to nature’s music will be able to awaken the eye of the modern people to the rejuvenating and emotional experience of nature: . . . we must think of insects either in relation to the mystery of their marvellous lives, or in relation to the emotion which their sweet and melancholy music makes within our minds. The impressions produced by hearing the shrilling of crickets at night or by hearing the storm of cicadae in summer woods – those impressions indeed are admirable subjects for poetry, and will continue to be for all time.32

Hearn tells his students the importance of ‘impressions’ in poetry. What he means by ‘impressions’ does not allude to a display of personal sentiments but an expression of impersonal race memory that one inherits in one’s unconscious. The idea comes from Herbert Spencer whose theory of organic memory Hearn readily adopted.33 The ‘impressions,’ Hearn conceived, are the echoes of organic memory which are transmitted through time and space and perceived anew; therefore, one’s emotional experi-

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ence is the re-enactment of the proto-experience of the human race.34 In ‘On Love in English Poetry,’ he refers to Spencer and explains that ‘love’ is ‘a kind of organic memory of relations that existed in thousands and tens of thousands of former states of being’ and it is a retracing experience of ‘a longing and struggling feeling’ to be linked to the original experience of ‘love.’35 ‘Insect- music,’ Hearn imagined, would be the vehicle to re-experience the long-lost love that echoed in organic memory, and to revive the awe-inviting powers of nature which had inspired poets in the pre-Christian era. In Japanese insect poetry, Hearn acknowledged ‘love’ in the form of pity – a feeling towards all mortals, human or non-human. In ‘Kusa-Hibari’ (1902), Hearn demonstrates how the ‘insect’ theme can recreate in the modern era a forgotten emotional experience of encountering the mysteries of life, which, he believed, was the most essential element in both Eastern and Western literatures. The essay begins with the narrator listening to the insect, posing as a cultured Japanese. He feels as if his room is filled ‘with a delicate and ghostly music of indescribable sweetness – a thin, thin silvery rippling and trilling as of tiniest electric bells.’36 He complacently enjoys being a connoisseur of subtle Japanese culture. He feels good about having purchased a grass lark for only ‘twelve cents’ which is a bargain, and, to enhance the cozy atmosphere in his room, he makes use of ‘a good stove’ of a Western make. Settled in his room and listening to exotic background music, he absorbs himself in his fancy, thinking that the grass lark sings a love song which is ‘a song of organic memory, – deep, dim memory of other quintillions of lives, when the ghost of him [the grass lark] shrilled at night from the dewy grasses of the hills.’37 The insect-music makes him nostalgic because he interprets that the grass lark is ‘unconsciously retrospective’ and longs for his lost beloved.38 The narrator, filled with a romantic notion of love, tries to find a female mate for his grass lark, but the season for these musical insects is already past and his efforts end in vain. Thanks to the good stove, the grass lark lives beyond its life- span in the narrator’s room, but one day it is found by the narrator to have starved to death. For lack of food and proper attention, it has even eaten its own leg. The death of the insect affects him so much that, in desperation, he accuses his housemaid Hana of neglect, although he is aware that he is only shifting the blame on

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her. Remorseful and penitent, he wonders what the grass lark and Hana might think and feel. His sympathy is quickened. In fact, the last three paragraphs in the essay, set apart with a space from the previous section, seem to represent three different ways of looking at the insect. First, the narrator sums up the incident, the death of the insect, his treatment of Hana and the silence in the room. Then, as he reflects, it dawns on him that they all share the same fate as fellow mortals. He becomes aware that he has felt ‘the charm of the delicate voice’ of the insect because ‘the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost within myself [sic] were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the Vast of being.’39 In other words, he was able to respond to ‘the charm’ because he had something within himself that sympathized with the chirping of the insect. He humbly accepts supernatural powers in all forms of life, as the Japanese do, and asks for forgive- ness from their ‘gods.’ In the final paragraph, the tone changes once again. It is as if some other voice comes out of his unconscious – perhaps the echoes of organic memory: ‘Yet, after all, to devour one’s own legs for hunger is not the worst that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing.’40 The narrator, possibly Hearn’s persona, hears of his own fate as one of the ‘human crickets’ who is pitied and is fated to sing to the last. ‘Kusa-Hibari’ has a Japanese proverb as an epigraph on the title page: ‘Issun no mushi ni mo gobu no tamashii’ (Even an inch-long insect has half an inch soul of its own). In the essay, however, Hearn does not provide its English translation nor refer to it. The essay itself seems to serve as its illustrated translation. Moreover, the proverb obviously projects a Japanese animistic world-view on the insect, which the Japanese would readily accept, but which his Western readers may feel sceptical about.41 Instead of giving its expository explanation, Hearn dramatizes a story of the death of an insect in order to evoke their compassion and stimulate their imagination. The essay is meant to appeal to their sentiments rather than reason. The insect-music then works as a befitting metaphor to emphasize the potential of sense perceptions which may bring the forgotten and neglected ‘ghosts’ back to life again. In ‘Kusa-Hibari,’ Hearn best expresses his voice as a prose-poet, by listening to the small insect which sings for both the living and the dead. From his American days, Hearn was always interested in insects,

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and in Japan the insect-music particularly enchanted him not because it was curious and exotic but because it allowed him to enter into the inner world of the Japanese psyche.42 And to the last, Hearn was listening. On his deathbed he told his wife Setsu: ‘That tiny creature has been singing nicely. It’s getting cold, though. Is it conscious or unconscious that soon it must die? It’s a pity, indeed.’ Then, he died with ‘a little smile about his mouth.’43

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lthough Lafcadio Hearn was not an academic expounder of AShinto, he loved the native religion of Japan and wrote many beautiful literary essays on it. In fact, he was the first Western appre- ciator of Shinto1 and successfully showed us what a great possibility it has for the modern world. Picking up the ancestor worship as the most important aspect of Shinto,2 he interpreted it by writing down its ancient thoughts and feelings in plain words, transforming them into the modern acceptable ones. Hearn, moreover, discarded many other aspects of Shinto as useless and out of date. In a word, he presented a new version of Shinto, especially in his Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation. It was the same kind of concentration and transformation of his ghost stories. If the word ‘creolize’ means the creation of a new product of cultural interaction, then he certainly creolized Shinto. And in the process of this transformation, elements from different cultures were mixed and combined because they had a meaning or a function useful not only to him, but also his readers at the time. So Hearn’s Shinto may have a meaning or a function useful to all of us who are living in the age of migration and globalization.

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To examine how the transformation was carried out, I will begin my paper with a quotation from his essay ‘A Living God,’ his most successful story of Shinto: As for myself, whenever I am alone in the presence of a Shinto shrine, I have the sensation of being haunted; and I cannot help thinking about the possible apperceptions of the haunter. And this tempts me to fancy how I should feel if I myself were a god – dwelling in some old Izumo shrine on the summit of a hill, guarded by stone lions and shadowed by a holy grove. Elfishly small my habitation might be, but never too small, because I should have neither size nor form . . . As air to the bird, as water to the fish, so would all substance be permeable to the essence of me. I should pass at will through the walls of my dwelling to swim in the long gold bath of a sunbeam, to thrill in the heart of a flower, to ride on the neck of a dragon-fly . . . Power above life and power over death would be mine – and the power of self-extension, and the power of self-multiplication, and the power of being in all places at one and the same moment. Simultaneously in a hundred homes I should hear myself worshipped, I should inhale the vapor of a hundred offerings: each evening, from my place within a hundred household shrines, I should see the holy lights lighted for me . . . From the dusk of my ghost-house I should look for the coming of sandaled feet, and watch brown supple fingers weaving to my bars the knotted papers which are records of vows, and observe the motion of the lips of my worshipers making prayer . . . Sometimes a girl would whisper all her hearts to me . . . And in the fragrance of that offering – the simple fragrance of her peasant youth – I, the ghost and god, should find again the feelings of the years when I was man and lover. Mothers would bring their children to my threshold, and teach them to revere me . . . Then I should hear the fresh soft clapping of little hands, and remember that I, the ghost and god, had been a father.3 Reading this passage as an interpretation of Shinto, I always have a slight feeling that something is wrong, or something is missing. But what is something? I am not ready to answer the question fully, but I would like to try. The god in the passage looks like an Irish fairy in a fantasy or a god in a Greek legend rather than a Shinto god. He does not look like a Shinto god partly because he rides on the neck of a dragon-fly. There is a horse made of a cucumber for the dead in Bon-festival. We have the saying that the dragon-flies during the festival are the

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dead or the dead souls returning home. The insect can lead the dead to his home. It may be an envoy from the dead. But I have never heard of the saying that the dead or a god rides on the neck of a dragon-fly. Hearn wrote about ‘the strange belief that certain dragon-flies are ridden by the dead – used as winged steeds.’4 So he had a source, but I think it was not a general image of a Shinto god as he supposed. We usually do not have such a clear visual image of a Shinto god except in the popular arts or stories. His image of a god riding on the neck of a dragon-fly would be a minor change. But what matters to me is his whole concept of a Shinto god in the passage. The god in the passage has the power above life and over death, the power of self-extension, the power of self-multiplication, and the power of being in all places at one and the same moment. Also, he has the feelings of the years when he was man and lover, and calls up memories of his fatherhood. In an animistic faith, a ghost or a soul generally has a supernatural power and a personal emotion such as happiness, love, fear, anger, or hatred. But Hearn’s god seems to be too powerful and emotional. Some gods are very powerful and emotional in Shinto, but it is often thought of as the attribute ofTatarigami or Onryō (evil gods or vengeful ghosts). And the habitation of a Shinto god is strictly limited, and he can communicate with us only through certain rituals for a limited period. There are innumerable compli- cated rules and limitations there, which Hearn simply ignored. Another problem is ‘nature’ in the passage. According to Hearn, the god flies like a bird,swims in the water like fish,thrills in the heart of a flower like a butterfly,rides on the neck of a dragon-fly.What is suggested here is that a Shinto god loves nature. But nature thus represented is romantically idealized nature in the modern Western minds, which has nothing to do with terrible awe-inspiring nature in the old traditional Shinto faith.The gods identify with nature in Shinto. So a god in romantic nature does not look like a Shinto god. He belongs to the modern world. However, Hearn insists ‘lovers of Nature’ are ‘the ordinary traditional’ aspects of the gods: The Kami-sama in art bear no likeness to the Buddhas. These more ancient divinities have no downcast gaze, no meditative impassive- ness. They are lovers of Nature; they haunt her fairest solitudes, and enter into the life of her trees, and speak in her waters, and hover in her winds. Once upon the earth they lived as men; and the people of the land are their posterity. Even as divine ghosts, they remain very human, and of many dispositions . . . Of course such

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representations vary greatly. But were you to ask what is the ordinary traditional aspect of a Kami, I should answer: ‘An ancient smiling man of wondrously gentle countenance, having a long white beard, and all robed in white with a white girdle.’5 Does he look like a Shinto god? Is this the ordinary traditional aspect of a Kami? To me, he looks like a wizard in the popular Taoism or in a Western fairy tale. However, ‘such representations vary greatly.’The Shinto-folklore, the formal faith of Jinja-Shinto and the teachings of the modern Shinto sects would have different representations. There might be no general concept. But the most extraordinary aspect of the passage is not his idea of a Shinto god, but the perspective. It is written from the perspective of a god himself. It is a vision of a Shinto god and a view from inside a Shinto shrine. We rarely find such a perspective in the traditional Shinto literature. There has not been such a perspective because there has not been such a relationship between men and gods in Shinto. We usually do not have such a full identity as a god. We rarely have such a close affinity with a god. Even with a traditional living god like Senge Takanori, Hearn’s friend and the chief priest of Izumo Shrine, people do not have a close affinity.6 The chief priest of Izumo is a living god or haunted by the gods both in the eyes of the local people and in his own consciousness when he performs certain rituals. But that does not mean a close affinity between them. On the contrary, it shows a vast distance and an obvious distinction between them because the gods communicate with us only through the priest and certain rituals. Takanori’s son, Takamune wrote about those rituals, but never confided his own apperceptions as a living god.7 People were never interested in them, and the scholars never tried to find them out. As Masuda Katsumi says in his study on Munakata Shrine, ‘backing away from a god (atozusarisuru)’ is the traditional way of showing more respect for a god.8 Almost a half-century after Hearn’s death, Yanagita Kunio, the leader of the folklore studies in Japan, discovered the ancestor worship to be the archetype of the Japanese religion and tried to restore the ancient form of the faith.9 But his image of the dead was a collective shapeless shadowy being who was allowed to come home only for several days in January and August. As a designer of the modern image of a native god, Yanagita was very conservative and traditional, as Hearn was radical and revolutionary.10

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To the ancient people who never had a strong affinity with the gods, the world Hearn created would seem a barbaric place, where the gods fly freely all over you, watching for you constantly, trying to communicate with you all the time. They used to build a Shinto shrine to be protected by the gods, but in some cases to keep away from the gods. Hamaguchi, the model of ‘A Living God’, did not become a living god. Hearn’s story was, as Professor Hirakawa pointed out, a fiction. An official history says they offered to build a shrine for him, but Hamaguchi refused.11 I think, however, people would have built a shrine if they had really felt the divinity in his self-sacrificing acts and humanitarian aids. Apparently, people loved him too much and had a too strong affinity with him to worship him as a living god. Hearn was not an expounder of Shinto, as I said earlier, but an artist and a poet who enjoyed writing stories from various imaginative perspectives. ‘The Story of Mimi-nashi-Hōichi’ was told from the blind man’s perception and ‘the Story of Ko¯gi the Priest’ from a carp’s point of view. So was it just another artistic technique? No. He had another motive to see the world with the god’s eyes: While resting under the pines that fringed the beach, something in the vital warmth and luminous peace of the hour – some quivering rapture of wind and light – were strangely bestirred an old belief of mine: the belief that all being is One .. . The novelty of the experience was altogether in the peculiar intensity with which they presented themselves; making me feel that the flashing dragon-flies, and the long gray sand-crickets, and the shrilling semi overhead, and the little red crabs astir under the roots of the pines, were all of them brothers and sisters . . . And I tried to think the long slow thoughts of the long gray crickets – and the thoughts of the darting, shimmering dragon-flies – and the thoughts of the basking, trilling cicadae – and the thoughts of the wicked little crabs that lifted up their claws from between the roots of the pines.12 This romantic pantheism or his ‘belief that all being is One,’ which did not originate from Shinto, was the motive that made him try to think the thoughts of the Shinto gods. In another essay the same motive made him try to see the world with the infinitesimally small eyes of ‘Noctilucae.’ In this three-page prose poem in Shadowings, Hearn was watching the sea running in ripples of fire of noctilucae. Wondering and dreaming, suddenly he knew himself

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‘a phosphor-point – one fugitive floating sparkle of the measureless current.’ And he saw his light shift tint with his changing of thought, ruby, sapphire, topaz and emerald. But there were no white lights around him. Then a voice said to him: ‘The White are of the Altitudes. By the blending of the billions they are made. Thy part is to help to their kindling. Even as the color of thy burning, so is the worth of thee. For a moment only is thy quickening; yet the light of thy pulsing lives on: by thy thought, in that shining moment, thou becomest a Maker of Gods.’13 There is a striking similarity between ‘A Living God’ and this ‘Noctilucae.’ Watching something divine, he is suddenly haunted or becomes a part of it, and begins to see the world from inside a divinity. Apparently, two essays deal with the same kind of revelation. So when he speaks of Shinto, he always speaks of the revelation: They [doctrines of Shinto] conflict less with our human ideas of justice; and, like the Buddhist doctrine of karma, they offer some very striking analogies with the scientific facts of heredity – analogies which prove Shinto to contain an element of truth as profound as any single element of truth in any of the world’s great religions.14 In other words, he created his own Shinto which conflicts less with the Western ideas of justice, Buddhist doctrine of karma and scientific facts of heredity. As Hearn pointed out, the cult ‘originating in those dim ages when fear was stronger than love – when the wish to please the ghosts of the departed must have been chiefly inspired by dread of their anger’15 would not appeal much to the younger generation of the age when many shrines in big cities are turning their holy groves and courts into paid car-parking. We do not fear nature now. We rarely dread the anger of the dead. Yanagita’s restoration of the ancestor worship, having once commanded great popularity, no longer arouses much emotion in us as we are leaving behind the traditional village communities and the old family system. In front of a Shinto shrine, we are now in the same awkward position as Hearn was when he arrived in Japan with his different cultural background. In order to redefine and redesign Shinto, some of his literary inventions, particularly the vision from a Shinto shrine, could be useful. It would show up the values and lessons we can learn from

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the past. Even his peculiar image of a Shinto god may be helpful. A fairy-like god in his Hamaguchi story, loving nature, smiling and watching for us, riding on the neck of a dragon-fly, flying beyond the boundaries of the old family system and the small local communities by his virtues, somehow strongly appeals to us. Most of us would like it, and I like it.

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Two Springs: Hearn’s and Kyōka’s Other Worlds Cody Poulton

ltimately, the socially disenfranchized and the spiritually Udispossessed are really no different. In due course, time renders us all ghosts, but those whose character or way of life does not sit well with the times are as good as ghosts while they are still in the flesh. A few months before Lafcadio Hearn left for Japan, he published the following remarks in the December 1889 issue of Harper’s Magazine: Perhaps the man who never wanders away from the place of his birth may pass all his life without knowing ghosts; but the nomad is more than likely to make their acquaintance. I refer to the civilized nomad, whose wanderings are not prompted by hope of gain, nor determined by pleasures, but simply compelled by certain necessities of his being, – the man whose inner secret nature is totally at variance with the stable conditions of a society to which he belongs only by accident.1 There is no indication in this essay, called appropriately, ‘A Ghost,’ as to what sad circumstances had alienated him from ‘the

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stable conditions’ of society and one can only guess what the public made of this strange piece. The reader has no concrete details on which to pin Hearn’s impressions. His subject drifts from ‘he’ to ‘you’ to ‘us,’ studiously shy of ‘I,’ and what he confesses is strangely impersonal and abstract, but the essay is nonetheless a confession. Hearn’s sense of being haunted is linked to his (here unspecified) feelings of rootlessness, and he links a sensitivity to the supernatural with the anomie of the nomad. He describes how, ‘in the course of wanderings more or less aimless, there has grown upon you a suspicion of being haunted,’ ‘a certain gentle presence,’ a ‘sensation within us, though seemingly not of us.’2 Hearn’s haunting seems to have its source in something metaphysical and cosmic, but before I say any more about what he was running towards, I want to dwell on what he was running from, something pointedly avoided in this essay – what can perhaps be described as the personal source of his supernaturalism. His poor eyesight, for one, no doubt rendered to whatever he gazed upon a dim, hallucinatory quality. (Izumi Kyo¯ka’s penchant for the occult has also been credited to a similar physical disability.) But Hearn had good cause to feel disengaged from his own culture, because his own origins were so problematic. His story is well known, of course. Born of a Greek mother and an Anglo-Irish father on an Aegean island that was known over the course of many coloniza- tions variously as Levkas, Lefkada, Leucadia and Santa Maura, he was torn from his mother, rejected by his Irish Protestant father and raised and educated by Catholic relatives, servants and priests. Banished to America by a conniving rival to his aunt’s estate, he drifted through a succession of jobs until he found what became (before Japan) his only real home, the English language. Rejecting his Irish name, Patrick, Hearn paid tribute to his mother’s birth- place with the exotic name, Lafcadio. In a letter to his brother Daniel, he wrote: Whatever there is good in me – and, I believe, whatever there is deeper good in yourself – came from that dark race-soul of which we know so little . . . It is the mother that makes us, at least makes all that makes the nobler man, not his strength or powers of calcu- lation, but his heart and power to love.3 Hearn’s story has all the obvious makings of a Freudian family romance, an Oedipal love of the maternal principle and a rejection of the father and all he represented, chiefly an aversion to Protestantism and a growing interest in the primitive and pagan,

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that ‘dark race-soul’ he mentions in his letter. Professor Hirakawa suggests (rightly so I think) that Hearn’s paganism was ultimately more Irish than Greek. He was separated from his mother and her homeland at an age too young to have any but the dimmest memory of the place and all his understanding of Greek culture came later through books. Professor Hirakawa also suggests that the ballads and folk tales told to him by his Irish Catholic nannies and servants had a profound effect on his imagination,ultimately making him more receptive to similar polytheistic and oral elements in Japanese culture.4 (Being half Celt myself, I can only agree with this assessment.) But because Ireland stood for his father, it was necessary to create in his imagination an idea of Greece as mater- nally pagan, warmly sympathetic and instinctual. Hearn’s reference to the ‘dark race-soul’ hints at a sort of essentialism he probably got from Herbert Spencer, the idea that particular ethnic and racial groups are fundamentally, spiritually different, but he did not use such theories, like other social Darwinists, to advance a notion of white supremacy, quite the contrary. He was, as it were by birthright, a critic of empire and a skeptic of Western civilization, and he thought that his genetic link to his mother overrode any amount of indoctrination he had received later on. He was attracted less to the light of reason than to the shadows – dark skin, night, instinct – a region both exotic and erotic, though his general avoid- ance of overt reference to sexual or physical matters marks him as more Victorian and Irish than he may have wished to be. Hearn’s fundamental disenchantment with his paternal culture informed his quest for enchantment in the darkness and instinctualism of exotic cultures. His was an intensely romantic quest that sought in foreign cultures something ultimately not of this world, but rather a connection to the land of the dead, what Orikuchi Shinobu called hahagakuni, the ‘motherland.’(Incidentally, it is ironic that for all his talk about the darkness of Greek paganism, he hailed from an island whose name, Levkas, means ‘white.’ Ireland, with its rain, is surely a darker place than the sun-drenched islands of the Aegean!) A few years after arriving in Japan, Hearn wrote in a letter to his friend Basil Hall Chamberlain that, as a child, he saw ghosts: ‘bad dreams took . . . real form and visibility. [.. . But] the fear of ghosts was greater than the fear of whippings – because I could see the ghosts.’5 He continues: Now I believe in ghosts. Because I saw them? Not at all. I believe in ghosts, though I disbelieve in souls. I believe in ghosts because

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there are no ghosts in the modern world. And the distance between a world full of ghosts and another kind of world, shows us what ghosts mean – and gods. [.. .] There are no ghosts, no angels and demons and gods: all are dead. The world of electricity, steam, mathematics, is blank and cold and void. No man can even write about it. Who can find a speck of romance in it? . . . Those who write must seek their material in the parts of the world where ghosts still linger – in Italy, in Spain, in Russia, in the old atmosphere of Catholicism. The protestant world has become bald and cold as a meeting house.6 In short, Hearn was running from a world that he felt had been divested of mystery. His salvation – if such it can be called – was to be able to situate his personal story in a larger cultural trend of the late nineteenth century. This period marked a kind of twilight in both European and Japanese culture, a time when many sensitive critics of modernity turned their minds away from ‘enlightenment’ and science to peer into the darkness of their respective pasts. It was an essentially romantic attempt to salvage truth from the irrational and create personal versions of the sacred from the dregs of the past. For the Victorians, this tendency was expressed in an interest in the occult and spiritualism on the one hand and, on the other, in the beliefs and ways of ‘primitive’ and ‘exotic’ peoples. For we must remember that before Hearn was ‘Japan’s greatest interpreter,’ he was a translator of the fiction of such French fantasists as Théophile Gautier. An interest in the occult, in the irrational, was itself a critique of contemporary society. ‘The nineteenth century,’Tsvetan Todorov reminds us, ‘transpired in a metaphysics of the real and the imaginary, and the literature of the fantastic is nothing but the bad conscience of this positivistic era.’7 Reflecting on a nightmarish experience he had had in Martinique, Hearn noted that ‘the training of the mind under civilization has been directed toward the conquest of fear in general, and – excepting that ethical quality of feeling that belongs to religion – of the supernatural in particular.’8 But the primitive substratum of fear and faith lay dormant in the psyche of every person. ‘Whoever pretends not to believe in ghosts of any sort,’ Hearn added in another essay, ‘lies to his own heart. Every man is haunted by ghosts.’9 To a degree more than other critics of empire like Melville, Stevenson, Conrad and even Kipling, Hearn would join his fascination for the exotic to an interest in the occult. It is no wonder that he has been described by two of his biographers as a ‘blue-’ or

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‘wandering ghost.’Though he had been attracted to the occult long before he traveled to Japan, this country became for him a realization of his dreams, an advanced civilization that owed nothing to Christian culture and Western rationality, but one nonetheless under its threat and in need of defense. Japan presented Hearn with his muse, turning him from a good writer into a great one. Hearn’s nomadism no doubt fostered his powers of observation and a certain folkloristic sensibility. At home nowhere, he needed to take mental stock of whatever culture he found himself in, simply in order to survive. His early training as a journalist in Cincinnati no doubt helped to develop such powers. Professor Hirakawa is certainly right in noting one masterful feature of Hearn’s style: his marriage of keen, even scientific powers of observation and objective description with a sympathetic understanding of his subject.10 His writing is at its best when he strikes a balance between the two. I am not sure whether Hearn invented the impressionistic essay in English – he had models like Ruskin perhaps – but his interest is more far-reaching and ethnographic. But Hearn was keenly aware that Japan itself did not exist as some curiosity frozen, as it were, in amber. It was a living culture, or rather, and more importantly for him, one dying under the onslaught of Western ways. In his writings on Japan, he struck a retrospective note that has since been rung by several generations of Western commentators, those who write, even today, nostalgi- cally of a ‘lost’ or ‘vanishing Japan.’ ‘What is there, after all,’he asked ‘to love in Japan, except what is passing away?’11 It was as if Hearn had occulted Japan itself, turned it into a ghost, a kindred spirit. This was less a case of projecting his desires onto the country (as many critics of orientalism would have us think) than of finally discovering the objective correlative to the emotional states that he wrote of in such essays as ‘A Ghost.’Yet wishful thinking is indeed an important part of his literary project. His evocation of a ‘ghostly Japan’ (the title of one of his books) constitutes a kind of verfrem- dungseffekt, a means of making something strange in order to render it into an aesthetic product. This was not untypical of many Western reactions to Japanese culture – Gilbert and Sullivan parodied it in the Mikado – but with Hearn it reaches metaphysical proportions. Such adjectives as ‘queer,’ ‘odd,’ ‘alien,’ ‘extraordinary,’ ‘enigmatic,’ ‘unimaginable,’ ‘curious,’ ‘occult,’ ‘weird,’ ‘peculiar,’ ‘unfamiliar,’ ‘fantastic,’ ‘antipodal’ and nouns like ‘bewitchment,’ ‘bewilderment,’ ‘wizardry,’ ‘charm,’and ‘fairyland,’are all keywords for Hearn’s Japan.

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The exotic is made unheimlich – the ‘unhomely,’Freud’s term for the uncanny – in Hearn’s prose. A cynic might argue that Hearn had a professional stake in making Japan incomprehensible so that he could serve as its expert interpreter, but he was more modest of his own abilities to explain the country to his readers ‘back at home’ and sincere in his belief that few Westerners could ever crack its mysteries. Still, he clearly had a deep and personal need to maintain what must have increasingly seemed the illusion of this country’s inscrutability. The title of his last book, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, states explicitly that his project will always fall short of an explanation. But in attempting to explain Japan, this book is also one of his least successful. Like the Jesuits of the sixteenth century, he lists in the first chapter, ‘Strangeness and Charm,’ all the topsy- turvy things that the Japanese do for the bewildered delight of the new visitor: Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into Fairyland – into a world that is not, and could never be your own. You have been transported out of your own century – over spaces enormous of perished time – into an era forgotten, into a vanished age, – back to something ancient as Egypt or Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of things, – the secret of the thrill they give – the secret of the elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate mortal! The tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that here all is enchantment, – that you have fallen under the spell of the dead.12 Indeed, the ‘spell of the dead’ – an oddly ominous coda to this dizzying description of bemusement – became a keynote in much of his writings on Japan. Herbert Spencer provided the theoretical armour to substantiate his impressions in this final work of his. There, quoting Spencer, Hearn writes that ‘Laws, [.. .] whether written or unwritten, formulate the rule of the dead over the living,’ implying ‘a tacit form of ancestor worship.’13 In an account of a poor Japanese woman corrupted by Western missionaries, Hearn writes: Human society, in this most eastern East, has been held together from immemorial time by virtue of that cult which exacts the gratitude of the present to the past, the reverence of the living for the dead, the affection of the descendant for the ancestor. Far beyond the visible world extends the duty of the child to the parents, of the servant to the master, of the subject to the sovereign. Therefore do the dead preside in the family council, in the

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communal assembly, in the high seats of judgement, in the governing of cities, in the ruling of the land.14 The notion that all life – not just in Japan, but in all cultures – is ultimately governed by the dead, is developed in an essay on ancestor worship in his collection, Kokoro: Unless we deny psychological heredity, we cannot honestly deny that our impulses and feelings, and the higher capacities evolved through the feelings, have literally been shaped by the dead, and bequeathed to us by the dead. [.. .] Figuratively we may say that every mind is a world of ghosts – ghosts incomparably more numerous than the acknowledged millions of the higher Shinto¯ Kami; and that the spectral population of one grain of brain-matter more than realizes the wildest fancies of the mediaeval schoolmen about the number of angels on the point of a needle.15 Hearn’s ‘story of soul structure built up by dead lives’16 may sound macabre to many European ears, but I believe it accords with the experience of many Japanese, not to mention with his own. Hearn was certainly familiar with the unheimlich, and it may even be said that in his writing the supernatural often takes on an erotic quality, the quest for an ‘Eternal Feminine.’ In many of his more personal essays he relates being haunted. In ‘Vespertina Cognitio’ for example, Hearn’s haunting takes on a female, but cosmic form, the ‘phantom light of long expired suns.’17 A remarkable description of the cosmic female is given a dream related at the end of his essay, ‘By the Japanese Sea’: Awhile I thought that I had remembered her, – a woman of Izumo; then she seemed a weirdness. Her lips were moving, but her eyes remained closed, and I could not choose but to look at her. And in a voice that seemed to come thin through the distance of years she began a soft wailing chant; and, as I listened, vague memories came to me of a Celtic lullaby. And as she sang, she loosed with one hand her long black hair, till it fell in coiling upon the stones. And, having fallen it was no longer black, but blue, – pale, day-blue – and was moving sinuously, crawling with swift blue ripplings to and fro. And then, suddenly, I became aware that the ripplings were far, very far away, and that the woman was gone. There was only the sea, blue-billowing to the verge of heaven, with long, slow flashings of soundless surf.18 The ‘woman of Izumo’ (a miko?) is transformed into a woman of Aran, someone who is simultaneously a maternal substitute from a dimly remembered childhood and the object of displaced erotic

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desire; then, as it were, she dissolves into the landscape, becomes a kind of magna mater. It is an amazing piece of writing, remarkable for its quintessentially Hearnian blend of keen physical observation, ethnographic accuracy and unbridled fancy.

Hearn’s evocation of the ghostly female (see his famous story ‘Yuki Onna,’ where the woman is simultaneously terrifying, erotic and maternal) is strikingly reminiscent of the works of the Japanese fantasist Izumi Kyōka, whose career as a novelist began in the same decade, the 1890s, that Hearn wrote much of his best work. Hearn and Kyōka were two springs (Izumi and Koizumi) that drew from the same source. Like Hearn, Kyōka lost his mother when he was young; the maternal became the focus for erotic longing, which in turn was displaced onto the world of the dead. Kyōka’s idealization of women may be taken as a regard for the feminine sex as the eternal Other, the symbol of an abject past, and as the maternal, an entry into both the natural and supernatural mysteries of existence. Women were typically represented in his fiction and drama as the sacrificial victims of a cruel and patriarchal project of modernization. His heroines are peripheral people, whom society has flung onto the fringes of existence. Like Hearn with his Irish nannies, Kyōka’s imagination was fed by the tales that local women told him in his home town, Kanazawa, when he was growing up and, like Hearn, Kyōka employed folk tales and fantasy as a critique of modernity. Both writers created in their writings an extraordinary atmosphere, an unsettling amalgam of horror and nostalgia. But the otherworldly also takes on a weirdly carnal quality in Kyōka’s work, more overtly erotic than Hearn’s ‘Eternal Feminine.’ In his fascinating book Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan, Gerald Figal writes that Hearn did for Japanese ‘ghost lore’ what Ernest Fenollosa had accomplished for Japanese art.19 Not only did Hearn respond in much the same way as Kyo¯ka to the imaginative structures of Japanese folk belief and practice – a remarkable achievement in itself from a European man of the Victoria era – but he also anticipated the work of another native son, Yanagita Kunio, in Japanese ethnography. Hearn’s discovery of Japanese spiritual culture thus constituted a kind of gyaku-yunyū, a

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case where European recognition of something traditionally Japanese inspired a reappraisal of a tradition the Japanese themselves had been busy jettisoning in an effort to acquire Western ways. His warm acceptance of Japan’s past happened to coincide with a turning point in Japanese culture during the third decade of the Meiji era, a turn towards the conservative in politics and a redis- covery of native literary and spiritual traditions. But Hearn’s appeal to Japan’s supernatural culture, Figal warns: . . . possessed a deeply romantic, even erotic longing that tended to fetishize the fantastic, reifying fragments of fushigi into whole cultural manifestations that could then be identified as authenti- cally ‘Japanese’ because of their ‘unfamiliarity,’ their ‘strangeness and charm.’ [.. .] His fetishization of Japanese culture as manifest fushigi has not only fed similar foreign observers of Japan, it also dovetails with the domestic production of a cultural essentialism that operates to undermine any critical discourse on Japan.20 There is undoubtedly an orientalist tendency in Hearn, but, to my taste, he is always a better writer, not when trying to advance a theory of Japanese culture, but rather when describing his own personal impressions of the country and its people. In such cases, he is more honest with himself and his reader. As I have noted, Hearn’s feelings of deracination not only informed his sense of being himself a kind of ghost who was sensitive to occult presences, but also quickened his sympathetic understanding of cultures not his own. His insights into Japanese culture are no less real for being impressionistic. For example, we have this reflection at the conclusion to his essay ‘In the Cave of Children’s Ghosts.’ It is long, but worth quoting in its entirety: Assuredly those impressions which longest haunt recollections are the most transitory: we remember many more instants than minutes, more minutes than hours, and who remembers an entire day? The sum of the remembered happiness of a lifetime is the creation of seconds. What is more fugitive than a smile? Yet when does the memory of a vanished smile expire? Or the soft regret which that memory may evoke? Regret for a single individual smile is something common to normal human nature, but regret for the smile of a population, for a smile considered as an abstract quality, is certainly a rare sensation, and one to be obtained, I fancy, only in this orient land whose people smile forever like their own gods of stone. And this precious experience is already mine: I am regretting the smile of Kaka.

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Simultaneously there comes the recollection of a strangely grim Buddhist legend. Once the Buddha smiled; and by the wondrous radiance of that smile countless worlds were illuminated. But there came a voice, saying ‘It is not real! It cannot last!’ And the light passed.21 This beautiful passage encapsulates Hearn’s idealization of Japan and, simultaneously, his disillusionment, or rather, his realization that it is his own desire for an ideal world, a paradise on earth that makes his Japan so beautiful, if so fleeting. There is great psychological insight here: Hearn does not fool himself, even if he wishes to. And so his image of Japan is filled with retrospection (quite literally, too, for he is gazing back from a boat on the receding scene of a coastal village) and regret. And it is his keen sense of regret, of the ephemeral nature of experience, of life itself, which is perhaps what is so ‘Japanese’ about Hearn and his writing. It is nothing less than the expression of mono no aware. Ohno Yoshito, son of the nonagenarian butoh dancer Ohno Kazuo, relates that when he was a boy in Hakodate, his mother used to frighten the living daylights out of him by reading the ghost stories of Hearn and Kyōka. These memories later contributed, however, to his ‘yūrei dances’ like The Dead Sea. ‘Performing these pieces affords him with an opportunity to revisit his childhood’ Yoshito writes.22 We can see here how the writings of both Kyōka and Hearn allow contemporary Japanese an aperture through which they may glimpse, not only their past, but also the world of the dead, a world still very much alive for some Japanese artists. For, as Hearn himself pointed out in his ‘Story of Kwashin Koji,’in any great work of art ‘there must be a ghost’.23

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‘Weird Beauty’: Angela Carter and Lafcadio Hearn in Japan Susan Fisher

afcadio Hearn and Angela Carter make an unlikely pair. Carter L– female, tall, resolutely English, outspoken, brazen, full of wild surmise and outrageous humour – was a steady, if somewhat cultish success from the moment she started writing and publishing in the 1960s. By the time of her death in 1992, she had become ‘the modern author most widely studied in British universities and colleges’ (Lodge 16).1 Hearn, on the other hand – small, reticent, half-blind, a misfit and recluse – was never quite Irish or Greek or American or Japanese, and spent much of his life as an impoverished failure. But these two writers, separated by nearly a century (Hearn was born in 1850, Carter in 1940), share a sensibility that was admirably suited to recording an encounter with Japan. In 1969, when she won the Somerset Maugham award for her novel Several Perceptions, Carter took her prize money and went travelling, first to the United States, and then to Japan. She stayed in Japan until 1972 (Lee xiii; Peach 19). The literary products of her Japanese experiences are relatively few: four short stories with Japanese settings; a dozen essays and reviews for New Society and other British periodicals; and, in her novel The Infernal Desire

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Machines of Dr Hoffman, a fantasy setting based on Japanese details. In the torrent of critical writing about Carter that has spilled out since her death – more than a dozen books and over a hundred scholarly articles – her relationship with Japan has gone largely unexamined. But travelling to Japan was not a minor incident in Carter’s life. Lorna Sage, author of a monograph on Carter and editor of a collection of essays on her work, describes Japan as ‘the place where [Carter] lost and found herself’ (24). As Donald Richie puts it,‘Japan, itself so subservient to social restraints, had taught her to throw them off’ (181). Carter herself said that ‘in Japan I learnt what it was to be a woman and became radicalized’ (Nothing Sacred 28). I would like to think that Carter went to Japan because of Lafcadio Hearn. Alas, there is no definitive evidence. Carter’s publisher, Carmen Callil, recalls that Carter mentioned Hearn, but she does not know which of his books Carter read or when (Clapp). During the late 1960s – i.e. just before Carter’s departure for Japan – Kobayashi Masaki’s film version of Kwaidan (1965) was very popular: it won an award at Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award. Its success may have brought Hearn, and thus Japan, to Carter’s attention. My purpose in placing Carter and Hearn side by side is not, then, to suggest direct influence. Rather it is to explore two phenomena: first, the close imaginative alliance between the Gothic and the Orient; and second, to suggest how self-consciousness about the dangers of exoticizing has altered representations of Japan. I want to begin by pointing out how much Carter’s sensibility resembles Hearn’s. Both were students of what we now call ‘popular culture’. In the recent anthology Lafcadio Hearn’s America, Simon J. Bronner brings together the ‘ethnographic sketches and editorials’ Hearn wrote in or about America. Bronner notes that critics and biographers (most importantly Malcolm Cowley) have ‘fixed the reputation of Hearn as a literary artist whose greatest contribution was an interpretation of Japan’ (30). While Bronner does not dispute the enduring interest of Hearn’s writing about Japan, he champions Hearn’s work in recording ‘rare glimpses of nineteenth-century American urban ethnic and occupational life that are needed to inform a fuller, if darker, picture of American social development’ (31). Hearn’s American writings are often represented by the lurid and sensational reports he wrote on such topics as murder and

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slaughterhouses; indeed, his time in Cincinnati is sometimes referred to as his ‘gruesome’ period (Rosen 154). But Hearn was attentive to many dimensions of American life. In the same period that he wrote ‘Violent Cremation’ with its grisly description of a burnt corpse, he also wrote ‘The Manufacture of Yellow and Rockingham Ware in Cincinnati’, a detailed analysis of the success of the American pottery industry, complete with a step-by-step account of the manufacture of a mixing bowl. When he moved to Louisiana, Hearn collected local songs and legends; he wrote a Creole cookbook and a dictionary of patois. In Japan, too, he continued to write in an ethnographic vein. In Kokoro, for example, alongside the crime reportage in ‘At a Railway Station’ and the lofty theorizing about Spencer and evolution and karma, Hearn provides translations of popular ballads and descriptions of the clothing, houses, and dialect of an outcast settlement. Carter also paid attention to the beliefs and practices of everyday life. An early short piece, ‘A Victorian Fable (with Glossary)’ consists of two pages of narrative and seven pages of Victorian slang. She reviewed cookbooks and analysed food fads for New Society; she wrote about make-up, punk, the pant suit, underwear, clothing with slogans, mourning clothes. She also wrote about home decorating, pets, and movie stars. Her travel writing about English places – Bradford, the London Zoo, the Lake District, South London – shows her ability to find revelatory detail in the everyday life around her. Like Hearn, Carter was passionately interested in fairy tales and folk tales. She translated and edited a collection of French fairy tales; she also edited two other collections of fairy tales for Virago Press. Her best known work, The Bloody Chamber, consists of rewritings of classic fairy tales. Even the titles of her fiction suggest an interest in the supernatural: American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, The Magic Toyshop. Hearn’s oeuvre is similarly full of titles alluding to the supernatural: Japanese Fairy Tales, Some Chinese Ghosts, In Ghostly Japan. Both Hearn and Carter were profoundly attracted to French romanticism and exoticism. Sukehiro Hirakawa has shown the influence of Flaubert’s ‘Saint Julien l’Hospitalier’ on Hearn’s ‘Oshidori’ (20–21). Yoko Makino has demonstrated the links between ‘Yuki-Onna’ and a Baudelaire prose poem. George Hughes has noted Hearn’s admiration for Baudelaire’s ‘Une Charogne’, suggesting that its vivid, eroticized description of a corpse may have inspired Hearn’s own depiction of a murder victim in ‘Violent Cremation’ (86). Among the titles Hearn listed

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for a projected work to be entitled Ephemera is ‘A Hemisphere in a Woman’s Hair’ (Hutson 7–8). Surely this strange title was inspired by Baudelaire’s ‘Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure’, a prose poem that, in a mood of drunken ecstasy, connects the smell of his lover’s black hair to a checklist of exotic sensations: air perfumed with tropical flowers, ships at port, opium, musk, coconut oil. Baudelaire’s mistress at this time was a mulatto named Jeanne Duval. George Hughes has suggested that Lafcadio Hearn’s first wife, a mulatto named Mattie Foley, was ‘the Jeanne Duval to his Baudelaire’ (87). Carter, as it happens, wrote a novella about Jeanne Duval called ‘Black Venus’, in which she tried to recreate the relationship with Baudelaire from Duval’s point of view. Baudelaire also appears as a minor character in A Self-Made Man, Carter’s radio drama about the British exoticist and decadent, Ronald Firbank (Curious 142). Both Hearn and Carter have been characterized as Gothic writers. Indeed, the only book in which they both appear is Clive Bloom’s Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond. Hearn is represented by an extract from ‘Nightmare-Touch’, an essay that considers the apparently universal human susceptibility to strange imaginings, and Carter by a critical essay on her fiction. Carter deliberately and self-consciously located herself in the Gothic tradition. In the original afterword to Fireworks (a collection which includes four stories about Japan), Carter identifies them as Gothic tales: I’d always been fond of Poe, and Hoffmann – Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious – mirrors; the exter- nalised self; forsaken castles, haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects . . . The Gothic tradition .. . deals entirely with the profane. Its great themes are incest and cannibalism. (121–122)

Carter’s words for the Gothic are cruelty, wonder, terror, unconscious, the forbidden, the profane, incest, cannibalism. The Gothic quality of Carter’s Japan stories is startlingly evident in ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’, which relates the career of a geisha who has been transformed into a bunraku puppet. The puppet seduces the Asiatic Professor – the omozukai who controls her strings – and manages to sink her teeth into his throat, thereby killing him and revivifying herself. She is the ultimate femme fatale, both dead and deadly. While Hearn never used the term Gothic to describe his own

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work, he certainly dealt in the imagery and themes that typify Gothic writing. The ‘Fantastics’ that he wrote for the New Orleans Item in the 1880s obsessively repeat such hallmark Gothic motifs as the vampire lover and the graveyard tryst. According to Hearn, ‘there is one twin-idea running through them all – Love and Death’ (qtd. in Hutson 3). The tales in Kwaidan are similarly Gothic in mood. Consider the severed ears of Mimi-nashi-Hōïchi; the crypto-cannibalism of the falconer Sonjo’s killing and eating of the duck/woman; the ghost wife O-Tei, returned from the grave to marry Nagao; the beheaded man whose chopped-off head grips the stepping stone with its teeth; the old priest who is a jikininki, an eater of human flesh. Strip away the Japanese details from these stories, and one could be in deepest Transylvania. Hearn declared in a letter that he had ‘pledg[ed] himself “to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous”’ (Cowley 11; Hughes 88). In the preface to Some Chinese Ghosts, published in 1887, Hearn uses the phrase ‘weird beauty’ (np; italics in original) to describe the atmosphere of these tales – perhaps in Hearn’s case a more appropriate term than Gothic, since it has none of the latter’s associations with medieval Germany. It does not seem mere coincidence that two writers with an interest in ‘weird beauty’ were attracted to Japan.With its own rich tradition of ghost stories, hauntings, cannibalism and animal lovers, Japan provides plenty of material for the Gothic imagination.But to acknowledge the presence of such elements in Japanese culture is not to say that Japanese culture is inherently more strange or morbid than the European culture that formed Hearn and Carter. Hearn and Carter may celebrate the perverse or ghostly side of Japanese life,but it is abundantly clear that they noticed its orderly,domestic side too. Carter, for example, praises the ‘cosy charm’ of her Tokyo neighbourhood, where everything is so clean that ‘you could eat your dinner off the children’ (Shaking 232). Nonetheless, for both writers,Japan represented the ultimate escape from the mundane and the familiar – a drastic stimulant to the literary imagination. In an extended essay on Hearn, Hirakawa describes Hearn as ‘that rara avis, a Western observer of Japan who, coming to the Far East in the 1890s, did not take as an act of faith the superiority of Western Christian civilization’ (25). He was different from other Japanologists of his day in that he was, first and foremost, ‘a literary artist: Hearn did not seek knowledge for the sake of information. He tried to use Japanese materials for the sake of his artistic

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aspirations’ (25). Inasmuch as Hearn’s interest in ghost stories and supernatural legends predated his arrival in Japan (as we can see in Some Chinese Ghosts and Fantastics), Hearn’s attention to ‘weird beauty’ in Japan has as much to do with his own ‘artistic aspirations’ as it does with Japan. George Hughes explains this ‘mental grammar’ of Hearn in terms of a basic notion underlying the fin- de-siècle aesthetic credo: . . . there are two distinct and very different worlds: an occidental world and an oriental world; a mundane world and an exotic world; a materialist world and a world of fantasy. The artist is the person who can go between them. (97) Hughes makes a convincing case that Hearn’s fascination with ghosts, crime, death, and taboo (that is, with topics and images we now label Gothic) was not separate from his fascination with Japan: both were expressions of a fin-de-siècle aesthetic. Carter belongs to another fin-de-siècle – the end of the twentieth century. She could hardly accept unquestioningly the ‘mental grammar’ of the century before. She always questioned the habits of thought that divide the world into mundane and exotic, sacred and profane, magic and real. Her self-critical awareness of exoticism is startlingly evident in Come unto These Yellow Sands, a 1983 radio drama about Richard Dadd, the notorious Victorian painter and parricide. Carter recreates Dadd’s travels to Egypt; there he encounters a shopkeeper who boasts of how he has sold ‘projections of exotic violence’ to Victor Hugo and ‘succulent trinkets’ to Gérard de Nerval. The shopkeeper then proceeds to deliver his ‘lecture on Orientalism’, a neat précis of Edward Said’s argument about the ‘magnetic attraction’ the Orient exercised on the European middle class, who wanted to be taken out of themselves’ and ‘dr[ink] deep of the savage splendours of the East’ (Curious 43–44).2 In Carter’s stories about Japan, this critical self-awareness – what Lorna Sage calls her ‘new-fangled Orientalism’ (26) – becomes a central focus. ‘A Souvenir of Japan’ examines the relationship between an Englishwoman and her Japanese lover. Carter evokes the tensions in this relationship through a series of sharply realized tableaux: a fireworks display; the narrator’s vigil on the streets of their neighbourhood, waiting for the return of her lover; their first meeting a year before, when they had walked through the streets of Tokyo looking for a hotel room. The predominant setting of each of these scenes is ‘a throbbing, voluptuous, platitudinous, sub-

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tropical night’ (Burning 5). The narrator’s over-the-top description of her Japanese lover – with its bizarre notes of bestiality and necrophilia – alerts us to the true subject of this story, which is not Japan but the narrator’s expectations of it. She describes her lover as possessing an ‘inhuman sweetness’, ‘a curiously unearthly quality’, he seems ‘almost goblin’, ‘a weird visitor’, perhaps a fox in human guise; his face is a ‘mask,’ his ‘blunt, bee-stung lips those of Gauguin’s Tahitians’. Her description culminates in the wish ‘to have . . . him embalmed and . . . [to] keep him . . . in a glass coffin’ (5–6). The narrator is attempting to heighten the erotic charge between herself and her lover by characterizing him in the most exotic terms she can imagine. Meanwhile, he is doing exactly the same thing: I [the narrator] had never been so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic (7). Carter not only reverses gender roles here – with the lover playing Butterfly to her Pinkerton, Chrysanthemum to her Pierre Loti – but colonial roles as well: his Occidentalism matches her Orientalism. In a story entitled ‘Flesh and the Mirror’, the narrator, another Englishwoman adrift in Japan, realizes that Tokyo was merely a backdrop for her romantic fantasies: I had been attracted to [Tokyo] first because I suspected it contained enormous histrionic resources . . . Always dissatisfied, even if, like a perfect heroine, I wandered, weeping, on a forlorn quest for a lost lover through the aromatic labyrinth of alleys. And wasn’t I in Asia? Asia! But, even though I lived there, it always seemed far away from me. It was as if there was a glass between me and the world. (69) That second ‘Asia!’ conveys completely the narrator’s awareness of her own illusions. She even diagnoses her condition as ‘the Bovary syndrome’: ‘Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it’ (69). (As Edward Said has pointed out, Emma Bovary’s fatal yearnings came ‘packed inside Oriental clichés: harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on’ [190].) Carter’s stories about Japan recall Graham Huggan’s definition of the Oriental quest novel, in which a ‘restless Western dreamer takes temporary refuge in the East, hoping to find either physical stimulation or spiritual enrichment or, preferably, both; instead, said

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dreamer finds only the limitations of his/her own culture, a culture to which s/he nonetheless returns, suitably “enlightened” by the experience’ (182). Huggan puts ‘enlightened’ in quotes, as if claims to understanding or revelation were inherently suspect, but I think Carter really did learn something in Japan. Not Japanese – she tried and failed to acquire it. But in studying the language, she did make a valuable discovery: ‘Now that I am trying to learn Japanese, I find myself having to turn my head inside out – always good therapy. Japan is like going through the looking-glass and finding out what kind of milk it is that looking-glass cats drink; the same, but totally other’ (Shaking 204). As a resident in a quiet Tokyo neighbourhood – she calls herself ‘the first coloured family in this street’ (Shaking 234) – Carter had the unremarkable but career-altering discovery that her own values, outlook, social position, identity and so forth were just as arbitrary as the Japanese way of life unfolding around her. As Lorna Sage puts it, in Japan Carter embarked on her ‘project of estrangement’ (Flesh 9). The experience of Japan sent Hearn in quite different directions. Once he arrived in Japan, he essentially devoted himself to writing about Japanese themes and topics, never reverting to the analysis of his own cultural tradition (except in his essays on English literature). Moreover, despite his admiration of those supreme ironists Baudelaire and Flaubert, Hearn never lost his almost child- like reverence for mystery, magic, and ghosts. Hearn took his decadence straight, whereas Carter took from Baudelaire and Flaubert their fine awareness of the human capacity for self- deception and self-destruction. Yet Hearn was not entirely naïve. For example, in his account of his first day in Japan, he notes that he ‘finds himself thinking of fairy-land’ (402). He despises this sort of response, which he derides as ‘hackneyed to the point of provocation’. Nonetheless he concludes that this ‘world where land, life, and sky are unlike all that one has known elsewhere . . . is surely the realization . . . of the old dream of a “World of Elves”’ (402–403). A more poignant form of self-awareness appears in his description of a shrine in Kokoro. In his description of ‘the Ways that go to Nowhere’ (50), Hearn seems to acknowledge the futility of trying to capture Japan: You come to some great flight of steps ascending through green gloom to a terrace umbraged by older and vaster trees . . . And you climb and climb and climb, till at last, beyond a gray torii, the goal appears, a small void, colorless wooden shrine, a Shinto miya. The

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shock of emptiness thus received, in the high silence and the shadows, after all the sublimity of the long approach, is very ghost- liness itself. (51) ‘Emptiness’, ‘silence and shadows’ are all that the shrine delivers. This disappointment seems emblematic of Hearn’s sense that he would never grasp the spirit of Japanese life. Despite his Japanese wife, his Japanese citizenship, his Japanese children, Hearn would remain an outsider, condemned to write for and identify with a Western audience in order to make his living. In comparison with Carter’s ironic anti-exoticist stories, Hearn’s tales of Japan – his sketches, glimpses, folk tales and fairy stories – seem rather naïve, yet they remain immensely readable. One reason may be that in the 1890s, Hearn deliberately set about simplifying his style (Cowley 11). He turned away from the excesses of his early ghost stories – the ornate turns of phrase and deliberately archaic diction – to a plainer, more delicate style. As a consequence, his renderings of Japanese tales and legends do not seem the product of an outmoded taste. It is not just this symposium that attests to Hearn’s continuing popularity and to his enduring place in British, American, French and Japanese literary studies. An impressive number of biographies and critical works have been published in the last decade or so. About two dozen of his works remain in print. Gillian Rubinstein, the author of the Tales of the Otori trilogy – a current best-selling romance set in medieval Japan – has adopted the pseudonym Lian Hearn in deliberate homage to his work. As an admirer of Carter’s writing, I hope that she will enjoy a similarly long and varied afterlife. But it may be that Carter’s account of Japan, so decidedly ironic and self-conscious, will not last as long as Hearn’s. While Hearn’s ghost stories and cultural commentary can hardly serve as reliable guides to present-day Japan, they continue to offer a gateway into the rich world of traditional Japanese culture and literature. And they still transmit to readers that fascination with Japan that, despite all that we hear about Japan the ugly, modern, and the industrialized, draws readers to this country, looking for the land that Hearn saw.

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Hearn and the Muse Ted Goossen

or a contemporary scholar there are aspects of Hearn which are, Fto put it mildly, problematic. In the time that has passed since his career came to a close – with his death in Japan in 1904, by which time he had been adopted into his wife’s family and taken the name Koizumi Yakumo – a great deal has changed. We are far more sensitive now to the ways in which Asian culture has historically been packaged for a Western audience, and the persistence of certain patterns, lumped under the term Orientalism, which have distorted and stereotyped the Western view of ‘the East.’Without a doubt, Hearn is complicitous in some of these. Yet, at the same time, his work cannot be so easily dismissed if only for the fact that so many continue to take him seriously in Japan, where translations of some of his stories form a part of the national cultural heritage. What is needed is a balanced view which can critically assess Hearn’s strengths and weaknesses without resigning him to the rubbish heap of the politically incorrect, which is piled high with the remains of anything that smacks of the exotic. Yet should the exotic be discarded in such fashion? I would argue that, if honesty is our aim, we should acknowledge the role

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the exotic continues to play in our lives, even while we attack the stereotypes and prejudices it may engender in the world around us. This is not to deny the fact that, as Mario Praz first suggested in The Romantic Agony, and countless contemporary critics have since echoed, the transformed world the armchair exoticist seeks is no more than the projection of his or her own ‘vibrating senses’ – ‘the other,’in this mode, can be none other than ourselves.1Yet the story should not be seen to end there. Is it not a fact that, for some of us at least, it is the lure of the exotic that initially draws us out of our armchairs, and sends us off to explore new and foreign vistas whose realities we discover to be far more complex than any imaginative projection. Some, of course, seem able to ignore these realities however long they journey. For others, however, the ‘quest for the exotic’ may ultimately work as a kind of booster rocket, which falls away when its function has been fulfilled. This may help explain why someone like Lafcadio Hearn could be so keenly attuned to the exotic ‘vibrations’ of which Praz speaks on the one hand, and such a fine observer of foreign cultures on the other.Whereas Loti, Gautier and Flaubert, for example, stood with their readers safely outside the exotic lands they described, Hearn, a child of both worlds,tried to immerse himself in them,providing for his readership a bridge across which they could journey beyond the exotic.The memory of his Greek mother,Rosa Cassimati,of course, was a key to this process.He could not summarily dismiss the‘native’ women he encountered, as the other writers did, for to do so would be to take his hated father’s side, thrusting yet another barb into Rosa’s fallen figure;yet,at the same time,like his contemporaries,he beheld in the dark eyes of those women the promise of Eros fulfilled. Such a close link between the maternal and the sexual carries with it, of course, incestuous connotations, which may have actually benefited Hearn’s reception in Japan. What I wish to stress in this brief essay, however, is the creative power this link unleashed, and the Muse-like figure that presided over it. We may be allowed a glimpse of her, perhaps, in this account of a dream he experienced beside the sea in a place called Hamamura, published in the collection Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan: Some pale broad paved place – perhaps the thought of a temple court – tinted by a faint sun; and before me a woman, neither young nor old, seated at the base of a great gray pedestal that supported I know not what, for I could look only at the woman’s face. Awhile I thought that I remembered her – a woman of

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Izumo; then she seemed a weirdness. Her lips were moving, but her eyes remained closed, and I could not choose but look at her. And in a voice that seemed to come thin through distance of years she began a soft wailing chant; and, as I listened, vague memories came to me of a Celtic lullaby. And as she sang, she loosed with one hand her long black hair, till it fell coiling upon the stones. And having fallen, it was no longer black but blue – pale day-blue – and was moving sinuously, crawling with swift blue ripplings to and fro. And then, suddenly, I became aware that the ripplings were far, very far away, and that the woman was gone. There was only the sea, blue-billowing to the verge of heaven, with long slow flashings of soundless surf.2 My first observation about this passage is more of a question than a comment: is the broad, paved temple court that is the setting for this dream more reminiscent of a Japanese temple, or one that might be found in Greece? I lean towards the latter, for I see neither the darkened wooden walls nor the shadows that I associate with holy places in Japan – instead all is open, barren, and tinted with faint, pale sunlight. Similarly, the ‘great gray pedestal’ would seem more fitting within what I imagine to be the grounds of a Greek temple. Are we to assume that the statue of a deity sits atop that pedestal? Or might there be no statue at all, but rather the body of work that Lafcadio had produced, and was yet to produce? Were such a hope to exist in the writer’s mind, it would help explain why he found himself incapable of casting his gaze upwards. For he would have feared that the pedestal was, after all, empty, a cruel mockery of all he had tried to achieve in the name of literature. At any rate, the dreamer finds he can only keep his eyes fixed on the woman’s face. She appears to have no age, being ‘neither old nor young,’nor to belong to any specific race, although at first he takes her as ‘a woman of Izumo.’Eyes closed, lips soundlessly moving, she seems, in one of the writer’s favourite phrases, ‘a weirdness,’a voiceless, reluctant Muse. When the voice does emerge, it is described first as ‘thin through distance of years.’We can take this either to mean from Hearn’s earliest childhood, or from far earlier, at the dawn of civilization. Perhaps most likely it is both, for it reminds him of a lullaby, a song of infancy, from the Celtic tradition, which is one of the most ancient in Europe. It is certainly maternal, but far from being reas- suring, its soft, wailing quality, and the fact that it is chanted, recalls the pain of a mother bereft. In fact, it is rather like the plaintive song of the mother of Anju and Zushiō, exiled on the island of Sado in

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the classic Japanese story of mother-child separation, ‘Sanshō the Baliff,’ which some readers may have heard in Mizoguchi Kenji’s great movie of the same name. Then, quite suddenly, the aura of the gentle, long-suffering mother is broken by a new, unexpected image, that of loosened hair, long and black, which falls ‘coiling upon the stones,’ and then, moments later, appears ‘moving sinuously, crawling with swift blue ripplings . . .’ by which point, of course, the form of the woman is well along in its transformation into the sea itself. What I find striking here, however, is the rapidity with which the initially non- sexual figure of what we might call the Mother/Muse is eroticized – in effect, there are two transformations, the first from the maternal to the sexual, then from the sexual to the cosmic. Moreover, there is something disquieting about the serpentine writhings of the hair, which seems to possess its own independent existence. This may remind us of the long black hair which, as Hirakawa Sukehiro has noted, Hearn inserted in one of his most famous stories, ‘The Reconciliation.’3 (As Hirakawa also mentions, this image is ampli- fied even further in Kobayashi’s film Kwaidan, where it literally chases the hero around the room!) Finally, Hearn’s description of the second transformation, in which the Muse merges with the sea, closely resembles the way he ended his most famous (and most creatively retold) story, Yuki-Onna, where the heroine dissolves into a white mist of snow. What are we to make of the fact that these memorable images, which Hearn used much later in two of his best ‘retold’ Japanese stories, appear here, in what he insists is a dream dreamed ‘the night before’? For some – Americans particularly,perhaps – this may stand as yet one more example of Hearn’s tendency to fabricate: Brad Leithauser, a most American writer who has written a mediocre novel about Japan of his own,4 has written,‘if not a pathological liar, (Hearn) was most certainly a habitual one.’5Viewed this way,Hearn’s prefacing comments are more than a little suspicious: Nine hundred and ninety-nine of a thousand dreams are indeed hopelessly evaporative. But certain rare dreams, which come when fancy has been strangely impressed by unfamiliar experiences – dreams particularly apt to occur in time of travel – remain in recollection, imaged with all the vividness of real events. Of such was the dream I dreamed at Hamamura . . . In this instance, I think many a reader would assume the writer has protested too much, and that what Hearn has given us is a ‘fake

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dream,’ a pretext for publicly and consciously grappling with literary material that would find its crystallized and polished form in ‘The Reconciliation,’ ‘Yuki-Onna,’and others of his later works. Of course, the question, did Hearn actually dream the dream or not?, is quite impossible to answer, although we can assume at the very least that the writer trimmed, shaped, and ‘packaged’ what he may have recalled when he opened his eyes. Even if we choose to regard this dream as a conscious fabrication, however, it is far from irrelevent. For a creative writer like Hearn, the boundary between unconscious ‘dream’ and conscious literary ‘craft’ was – indeed, had to be – a flimsy and highly permeable thing: images struggled with during the day were bound to reappear at night to taunt, or inspire. Even we academics, immersed in what the world likes to see as a dry and logical exercise, know what it is like to wake in the morning with ‘the answer’ to the previous evening’s labours miraculously risen to our minds. Hearn’s ‘Muse,’ as I have called her, is thus neither the pure, unconscious manifestion of what Carl Gustav Jung called the ‘Anima’ nor the calculated manipulation of the writer’s conscious mind. Instead, I think we can assume that she belonged to both realms, and that Hearn was quite aware of what she represented, at least in a general, provisional sense. Indeed, it is striking re-reading Hearn’s writings from various points in his career how much closer ‘Greece’ became to him the moment he stepped on Japanese soil. We are all perfectly aware that, having left Lefkada at the tender age of two, he could hardly have retained any clear memories of the place. Yet it is equally clear that Greece – or more specifically his idea of Greece, refracted through his vague memories of his mother, and the stories she told him – flowed through his heart and mind like the blue, rolling sea, and suffused his soul like a mist of snow. She was his original Muse; she set the pattern. Others followed, of course. There was his Irish nanny, with her rich brogue and store of Gaelic lore, who may well have chanted him Celtic lullabies; Mattie Foley, the young mulatto woman he married, whom he loved and suffered for so much during his early years in Cincinnati, and who repaid him, not with love perhaps, but with endless anecdotes and legends from the Southern plantation where she had grown up; the Creole-speaking women of New Orleans and Martinique, personified in the figure of the story- telling ‘Da,’ the black nurse-cum-surrogate mother featured in his novel Youma; and, finally, his Japanese wife Setsuko, who helped

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connect him to a country he could barely see, and to a language he had to strain to understand. What Hearn was as a creative writer he owed to these women – they were not merely his ‘informants’ in an anthropological sense, they were his inspirations, his Muses, and he was conscious of that fact. When, towards the very end of his life, he pointed at the row of books on Japan on his bookshelf and told his eldest son, Kazuo, ‘All these books were born thanks to your good Mama-san!’ I think it may have been partly to acknowledge that creative debt. There is, of course, another factor that binds Hearn’s string of Muse-like women to one another: all of them spoke to him in languages or accents that were strange and unfamiliar. Moreover, none of these was the tongue of modern European civilization; each carried with it the melodic strains of worlds that predated the coming of the modern West, and its rational, monotheistic biases. From Hearn’s perspective, which placed ultimate value on a racial, genetically determined heritage, the stranger and more alien the tongue, the better it could communicate the mysteries of an alter- nate, more spiritual view of life which stood against the narrow ugliness of modernity. It was purer, truer and more ancient, and thus wiser. This wisdom, in turn, invoked not a single Divinity but a myriad of gods, within whose infinite variety all the contradictory aspects of human nature – from the most spiritual to the most sensual – could be acknowledged and expressed. It was crucial for Hearn, therefore, that Greece be seen, not as the home of the Greek Orthodox Church, but as the proper domicile of the gods of Greek antiquity: Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite, Eros and all their kinfolk. Clearly, Hearn’s vision of Greece was an anachronism of the first order, since it effectively erased over sixteen hundred years of Christianity, choosing instead to rest upon the discarded deities of ancient times. This made his already tenuous tie with the world of his mother – who fervently believed in the Christian saints – even more flimsy. In fact, it could only be through her cultural and genetic origins – her ‘dark race-soul,’ to employ one of his more memorable turns of phrase – that he could establish common ground with her and lay claim to his wished-for polytheistic Greek birthright. Nevertheless, during my brief visit to Greece, I found myself wondering if Hearn’s religious inclinations were really so far removed from the world-view of his mother and other Greek Christians. A day or two before the symposium, my wife and I found

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ourselves aboard a day-long ‘pleasure cruise’ to three islands not too far removed from the port of Athens. At the last stop, on the island of Aegina, I wandered into a tiny chapel built amidst the docks which was filled with the painted icons of the Greek Orthodox faith. I lit a candle for my recently departed father, and paused for a moment of quiet reflection. As I stood there, one of the sailors from our boat – a humble man, judging from his clothing – entered and began making the rounds of the hanging icons. He stopped before a number of these, crossing himself and speaking in low tones, as if to a friend, or priest. Several he kissed. Is such a man, in the strictest sense of the word, a ‘monotheist’? Or have he and his countrymen preserved a form of polytheism within the structures of the Christian faith? I know this confession will mark me as an ‘exoticist’ in the eyes of some, but I rather hope it is the latter. For like Lafcadio Hearn, I, too, have always rejoiced to find in cultures distant from mine a place where my own distinctly non-monotheistic sensibility can feel at home. It would not surprise me if many other members of monotheistic Western societies feel in much the same way. If that be the case, then perhaps we can better understand the reason why Lafcadio Hearn continues to be read in the West, despite the outdated nature of so many of his beliefs. His view of the mysteries of ancient cultures was no more than an exotic dream, perhaps, but that dream is one we can share, for it touches the roots of what we intuitively feel to be our own collective origins. In that sense, however personal it seems, Lafcadio’s muse belongs to all of us, a voice from the depths of our imagined cultural pasts.

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‘The Real Birthday of New Japan’ – Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘After the War’ Peter McIvor

‘ he birth of the New Far East,’said the writer, Arthur Diósy in T1898, took place ‘on the seventeenth of September, 1894, from noon to sunset,’as the ‘thunder of great guns rolled over the waters of Korea Bay, between the Island of Hai-yang and the mouth of the Yalu river.’1 Diósy was referring to the battle of Yalu, that fierce naval encounter between the fleets of Japan and China, which effectively determined the outcome of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/95 in favour of Japan. It was, according to Diósy, ‘the most important naval action since Trafalgar,’a battle which proclaimed Japan’s entry into the modern world as an independent military power, as a ‘nation no longer in leading strings, but capable of being, and fully determined to be, a dominant factor in Eastern Asia.’ The rest of the world was forced to take note. ‘As the battle-smoke drifted away over the waves of the China Sea,’ he said, with the colour characteristic of his prose, ‘the astonished eyes of Occidentals beheld the Old Far East sinking in the flood, along with the boasted naval

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power of China, and, in its stead, rising steadily from the ‘edge of Asia,’ the New Far East came into view.’2 Diósy, born in 1856 of Magyar background, was, of course, only one of the many Western commentators ready to offer views on the Sino-Japanese War. As a rule, these contemporary commentators agreed that the outcome of the war was of great importance for the development of modern Japan. Historians since that time have also regarded the conflict as a turning point in the history of Asia, defining the future role of Japan as the dominant power in the region. For his part, Diósy considered the war as a ‘wake-up call’ to the Western powers. Before the war, he said, Japan was, in the opinion of the great majority of Europeans and Americans, ‘what it had always been, – a pleasant land of beautiful scenery, bright with lovely flowers . . . that strange medley of the beautiful and the comical described in the narratives of scores of travellers in the Land of the Rising Sun.’ Until Yalu, ‘Western peoples had never taken Japan seriously.’Nor did Diósy exempt Westerners resident in Japan from ignorance of the people among whom they lived. ‘There are, probably, no communities, residing out of their own countries,’he wrote, ‘so absolutely isolated from the people amongst whom they live, so completely out of touch with native feelings and aspirations, as the European, and, to a lesser extent, the American, colonies in the Far East.’3 Diósy, of course, did not consider himself as part of this fraternity of the uninformed. Early in his book he establishes himself as a Japan-expert, describing in its opening chapter a conversation among six members of the Japan Society in London two years before the opening of hostilities in the Sino-Japanese War, during which, he claims, only he correctly predicted the outcome of any future Japanese war with China. Where the naval power of Japan itself was concerned, he had, in fact, some first-hand knowledge. In his book, he describes a visit in November 1893 to the Japanese warship, Yoshino, then lying off Plymouth, which he had made at the invitation of its captain, who had previously been Naval Attaché at the Imperial Japanese legation in London. A few months later, the Yoshino would itself see service in the war against China, but in his account of action at Yalu on 17 September, the opening day of naval activities, Diósy drew particular attention not to the Yoshino but to action on the Japanese flagship, the Matsushima. Diósy included in particular the heroism of the principal medical officer on board, Dr Hōshū Kawamura, the Inspector

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of Hospitals and Fleets. According to Diósy’s narrative, a shell from a Chinese vessel, the Chen-yuen, struck the Matsushima at the bow, shattering a gun and destroying the surgery on the lower deck where the medical corps was already at work. Despite his great injuries (he lost consciousness on two occasions), Dr Kawamura spurned assistance from crew members. Instead, he continued to exhort the crew to action and also resumed duties directing the work of the remaining surgeons and their assistants. ‘I think I am justified,’ Diósy writes, ‘in asking the printer to describe him as a MAN, in capital letters.’4

If Diósy followed the war from London, through reports from distant Japan carried in the English press and with the help of anecdotal evidence from later contacts with his Japanese acquaintances, the travel writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), was also closely following events in China, though in his case from a somewhat closer remove, from within Japan itself. At the start of the war, Hearn was still teaching in Kumamoto. However, on 6 October he left that city to travel to Kōbe to take up a new position as an editorial writer with the Kobe Chronicle, the English-language newspaper there. Hearn took an immediate interest in the war and, in fact, even before his departure from Kumamoto, he had written of his impressions of the arrival of troops in Kumamoto prior to their departure for the front and of the loyal disposition of local people to the war effort. His impressions were contained in the essay ‘A Wish Fulfilled’ which was first published in January 1895 in the Atlantic Monthly and later republished in Out of the East (1895). Of course, as a journalist in Kōbe, Hearn took a keen professional interest in developments in China, particularly given the strong public interest in the war within the expatriate community. His writings on the war, therefore, reflect first-hand experience of the national mood in Japan at that time. In fact, Hearn was to write a great number of editorials about the war for the Kobe Chronicle.These reflect his consciousness of the extraordinary achievement of Japan in the early months of the war. Like Diósy, Hearn carefully registered this achievement, acknowl- edging ‘the totally new spectacle of an Oriental Power waging

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scientific warfare with extraordinary success against colossal odds’ and emphasizing Japan’s ‘right by scientific knowledge to an honoured place among civilized nations.’5 Like Diósy too, Hearn criticized the tone in which English-language newspapers, at least when the war commenced, wrote about the war, employing a tone which Hearn believed signified hope that Japan would be defeated. These were, Hearn believed, ‘irrational articles,’ the authors of which failed to understand the serious consequences which a Chinese victory over Japan would have for all foreign residents in Japan.6 At the same time, he tried to see the Sino-Japanese relationship in a longer-term perspective, arguing (in December 1894) that there was no reason why the present hostilities should destroy the ‘old race-sympathies’ between the countries, which were based on the great historical and cultural traditions between them.7 Hearn’s editorials were necessarily written quickly to satisfy the immediate demands of his job as editor but, as was often the case when Hearn considered national contemporary events in Japan, he reflected slowly and carefully on their place in the broader Japanese historical and cultural continuum. In the case of the Sino-Japanese War, he put his reflections on the conflict into a more permanent form in an essay entitled ‘After the War’ which he included in his book Kokoro (1896).

III

In structure, ‘After the War’ is a typical Hearn essay, a mixed bag of general impressions, scene-setting by means of some historical narrative, and impressionistic descriptions of two specific incidents in the immediate post-war period in which Hearn himself was involved. Hearn first sets the scene by presenting Hyo¯go on a fine spring morning in 1895. Koi nobori – giant coloured paper balloons in the shape of flying carp symbolizing the birth of a son and the hope of parents for the future – are fluttering in the breeze. But it is May 1895: Japan has been victorious in war and Hearn is not slow to link the flying of the koi nobori to military victory. The koi nobori symbolize, he says, ‘the great trust of a nation regenerated through war.’8 Thereafter, the essay presents instances demonstrating popular support for the war – the manufacture of children’s toys marking successive military victories; dramatic representations of battles for

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the stage and the production of commemorative objects in porcelain, textiles and laquer-ware. Descriptions of two post-war events at which Hearn himself was present, follow, one the return of a regiment from the front to Kōbe on 9 June, which Hearn viewed with a companion, Manyemon; the other the opening to public inspection, on 15 May 1895 at the port of Kōbe, of the Matsushima- kan, that same vessel which Arthur Diósy had described in his book on the New Far East.

The Matsushima was the Japanese flagship at the battle of Yalu and its victory, secured only at great cost to the lives of its crew members, became a source of pride and awe in the popular Japanese mind. Hearn himself would have had no difficulty in following the course of the battle of Yalu, including events specifically relating to the Matsushima, in breaking-news stories carried in the English- language press in Japan. The Japan Weekly Mail, in its editions of 22 and 29 September, for example, carried extensive reports on the battle. Details of action seen by the Matsushima were highlighted, including the fact that the vessel had received the brunt of the enemy’s fire, and that casualties were very high (the ship itself had suffered comparatively little, though one of its guns had been disabled). The newspaper reported that after the battle, the vessel had returned to Sasebo for repairs and had then docked in Kure, where her captain had made a personal report on the battle to the Emperor Meiji, who was then directing the war from his Hiroshima headquarters.9 A week later, on 29 September, the newspaper presented a dramatic account of the Battle of Yalu as it related to the Matsushima. No less than 110 of her crew, the weekly reported, were put hors de combat: Yet she fought on to the bitter end. The total casualties in the Squadron were 239. Hence the Matsushima suffered nearly as much as all the rest put together . . . According to what we have learned, a shell from one of the enemy’s big guns struck the second gun on the starboard side of the vessel. The Matsushima has six guns mounted forwards, three on each side. Thus, when in action, a great number of her crew are collected in one part of the ship, and it appears that the blow which temporarily disabled No. 2 starboard gun caused great carnage among the men.10

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In ‘After the War,’ Hearn describes the events surrounding the Matsushima during the battle ofYalu in highly emotional terms. If he lightens the account by interspersing comic anecdotal asides about the public inspection of the vessel (including a short vignette of the rescue of two women who fall into the sea during the open day and are rescued by crew members),the overall tone of the narrative is one of deep and grateful respect for what was achieved by the men of the Matsushima and at such a high cost. Much of the narrative is conveyed through an eye-witness report by one member of the crew.As in Diósy’s account,what is emphasized is the heroism of the crew,fighting under what seem to be insuperable odds. He traces for us, below, the course of a thirty-and-a-half centimetre shell that pierced the ship. ‘When it came,’ he tells us, ‘the shock threw men into the air that high’ (holding his hand some two feet above the deck). ‘At the same moment all became dark; you could not see your hand. Then we found that one of the starboard forward guns had been smashed and the crew all killed. We had forty men killed instantly, and many more wounded: no man escaped in that part of the ship. The deck was on fire, because a lot of ammunition brought up for the guns had exploded; so we had to fight and to work to put out the fire at the same time. Even badly wounded men, with the skin blown from their hands and faces, worked as if they felt no pain; and dying men helped to pass water. But we silenced the Ting-yuen with one more shot from our big gun. The Chinese had European gunners helping them. If we had not had to fight against Western gunners, our victory would have been too easy.’11 Hearn ends his account of his visit to the Matsushima by saying that the sailor who had expressed these sentiments had sounded ‘the right note.’ And he continued: ‘Nothing on this splendid spring day, could so delight the men of the Matsushima Kan as a command to clear for action, and attack the great belted Russian cruisers lying off the coast.’12 The reference to a possible future war with Russia is a recurring motif in the essay (three of the four sections of the essay end with a reference to the threat from Russia). In fact, the essay ends with the word ‘Russia,’ as Hearn records the words of the companion, Manyemon, with whom he had watched the return of the regiment to Kobe in June 1895. To Hearn’s statement that the returning

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soldiers will be thinking of their comrades who can never return to Japan, Manyemon replies: There are no Japanese dead who do not return. There are none – who do not know the way. Fom China and from Chōsen, and out of the bitter sea, all our dead have come back, – all! They are with us now. In every dusk they gather to hear the bugles that called them home. And they will hear them also in that day when the armies of the Son of Heaven shall be summoned against Russia.13

By ending with Manyemon’s statement, Hearn is reflecting contemporary anti-Russian sentiment in Japan heightened by the success of the‘triple intervention’of April 1895 when Russia,France and Germany disallowed one element of the peace settlement between China and Japan – the ceding by China of the Liaotung Peninsula to Japan. In the essay, Hearn has no hesitation in representing the ‘triple intervention’ as interference and bullying. The Japanese Government, he said, gave into this bullying because of the weakness of its navy, which though a ‘splendid fleet of small, light cruisers’which‘without the loss of a single vessel,had annihilated the Chinese fleet in two engagements . . . was not yet sufficiently heavy to face the combined navies of three European powers.’ Hearn describes the decision of the Japanese Government to yield as one of ‘faultless wisdom’ (a costly war with Russia would have resulted in disastrous consequences for the Japanese economy). But, as we have seen, he carefully acknowledges the wish of the Japanese navy itself to take on the three powers, including Russia. (‘It would have been a great fight, for no Japanese commander would have dreamed of yielding, no Japanese ship would have struck her colours.’) In addition, the Government’s decision had affronted public opinion. ‘National pride,’Hearn maintained ‘has been deeply wounded, and the country can still scarcely forgive its rulers.’14

If Hearn’s ‘After the War’ offers an important contemporary presentation of the national mood in Japan after the war, and is valuable in this sense, the modern reader, with the benefit of historical hindsight, will nevertheless ask whether the thrust of Hearn’s presentation is a responsible one. The assumption underlying the essay, that the Sino-Japanese War should be regarded simply as a

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marker of what Japan might be capable of in the future, contributes to this unease.‘The military revival of the empire,’ Hearn states, ‘– the real birthday of New Japan – began with the conquest of China. The war is ended; the future, though clouded, seems big with promise; and, however grim the obstacles to loftier and more enduring achievements, Japan has neither fears nor doubts.’15 A future ‘big with promise’? ‘Loftier and more enduring achievements’? Those familiar with Hearn’s earlier work, with its emphasis on the values and traditions of an ‘Old Japan’ under threat from Western industrialization will be forgiven their surprise at Hearn’s apparent volte face when it came to military victory in China, a victory which, after all, could not have been secured without foreign intervention, without the reorganisation of the army and navy along Western lines and without foreign technical assistance. In the essay, Hearn is even happy to provide a listing of the Western technology on board the Matsushima which ensured victory: ‘the huge thirty-centimetre gun, with its loading apparatus and directing machinery; the quick-firing batteries; the torpedoes, with their impulse tubes; the electric lantern, with its searching mechanism.’!16 Hearn himself, of course, came from a military family (a fact he acknowledged in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain on 11 September 1894, just six days before the Battle of Yalu)17 and he saw contemporary Japanese military capacity as part of a longer tradition of military activity in Japan. ‘The Japanese are essentially a fighting race,’he wrote on 12 February 1894 ‘. . . as much so at least as the Ghoorkas or the Sikhs, – not merely a nation of artists, weavers and poets.’18 At the same time, there is something unchar- acteristic about Hearn’s interest in Japan’s military capability. He wrote more often of the weavers and the poets (or this, at least, is where his reputation as an interpreter of Japan lies). His response, can, in part, be explained by the historical context in which the essay was written and it is, of course, important to fully appreciate this context.Attitudes in Japan to the war were remarkably homogeneous in support of Japanese military action. Donald Keene reminds us that there was virtually no trace of anti-war feeling at any stage during the war19 and G. B. Sansom writes that ‘no voices were raised against the war, and the only note of dissent, if it may be so called, was a suspicion that the government would make peace too soon.’20 In fact, Hearn was congratulated by contemporaries on the position he took.Writing in June 1910, just five years after Hearn’s death, Yoné Noguchi, then Professor of

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English Literature at Keio University, wrote that during his life Hearn had two opportunities to bring himself close to the Japanese public. ‘The first opportunity came to him in the form of the China-Japan War. And the Russian-Japan War was the other.’ Noguchi added, ‘I believe that such opportunities do not often fall to the lot of a writer of the type of Lafcadio Hearn.’21 There can be no doubt that Hearn, like other foreign commentators such as Arthur Diósy, was powerfully affected by the enthusiasm demonstrated in Japan, as elsewhere, at the results of the Sino-Japanese War, and he wrote the essay within this context. But it is also reasonable to argue that Hearn took in too easily the vocabulary and attitudes prevalent in Japan at the time. If he would, no doubt, have been gratified at Noguchi’s assertion that his view of the war reflected the popular Japanese mind, his real target, in fact, lay in the West.All his considerable literary skills (including the use of domestic points of reference in the essay, such as koi nobori, or the material about children’s toys and other pieces of family bric- à-brac manufactured to mark success in the war, were used to ensure that his sympathy for the Japanese cause would appeal to his Western, English-speaking audience. The dramatic narrative of events on the Matsushima, through what is presented as a verbatim account by a Japanese sailor, is a case in point. It is, in fact, highly unlikely that the sailor gave such an account during the open day and even more unlikely, if he had, that Hearn would have understood it. In fact, Hearn drew for this material on newspaper reports such as those published in the Japan Weekly Mail. Much of the detail in the essay is culled from such reports: the material on the items manufactured to mark success in the war draws on a similar account which appeared in the Japan Weekly Mail on 1st June 1895.22 ‘After the War’ is, therefore, a somewhat unusual essay from the pen of Lafcadio Hearn. If it combines a great many of the characteristics which are typical of Hearn’s work as a whole – the episodic narrative, the pleasing interest in ordinary human experience, the insistence on interpreting current conditions in the context of the cultural traditions of the past, it goes further than other essays written at this time in exploring the implications for Japan of its industrial development just prior to the turn of the century.In this case Hearn appears to support the process of modernization. Certainly, ‘After The War’ gives the lie to the popular conception of Hearn’s work as out of touch with political and social developments in Japan following the Meiji restoration.

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The Image of the Mother in the Work of Hearn George Hughes

eading Lafcadio Hearn we are very often in the company of Rmothers. They are prominent in both his fiction and non- fiction, and have a key role in his general ideas. We find them in his writings on America, in his French translations (such as ‘La mère sauvage’ of Maupassant [see Adventures]), in his writings on the West Indies and of course in his writings on Japan. Motherhood is discussed by Hearn in relation to evolution, to dreams, to reverie. It is a topic in his discussions on human society, in his writings on insects (on mother ants1) and in his fond descriptions of his cat. The word ‘mother’ itself is not one he avoids; it creeps into his language often, and in revealing conjunctions, as when he says in a letter that ‘passion was the inspiring breath of Greek art and the mother of language’ (Life and Letters I: 218). Hearn’s own mother was Greek. And it is the context of nostalgic Hellenism that most helps us in understanding his treatment of mother images. ‘Some of us,’ he says in Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, in 1904, ‘have often wished that it were

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possible to live for a season in the beautiful vanished world of Greek culture’ (15). In a rough word-count of the book I find seventy- three such occurrences of ‘Greek’ or ‘Greece.’ Hearn’s wish for a Greek world is set in the past tense (‘have often wished’) and expressed through uncertain verbs – subjunctives (‘wished that it were possible’) – or conditionals (‘If the wish could be realized . . .’). It is the wish of a dreaming scholar, who would like to enter the world of his own books. But it is also more than that: it precedes his studies. Hearn says that it ‘comes to us even before we are capable of imagining the true condition of [Greece].’ Hearn’s Hellenism is supported by his reading of anthropology,2 but it undoubtedly springs from personal identification, from the feeling that is an undercurrent throughout his writing, of his debt to his mother and his Greek origins. ‘Being of a meridional race myself, a Greek . . .’ he says in an early letter (Life and Letters 1:276). Writing to Pierre Loti, he says: ‘C’est un Hellène qui vous écrit, Ionien.’ (Gleanings of LH 2:3).3 ‘It is the mother who makes us,’ he told his brother in 1890, ‘makes at least all that makes the nobler man’ (Kneeland 27). He connected his mother with his success as an artist, and also with his deepest self, what he called his ‘dark race- soul’ (Kneeland 26). When Hearn talks of his own mother directly, he describes her as having a ‘dark and beautiful face’ and ‘large brown eyes like a wild deer’s’ (Kneeland 23). These are important associations which are echoed elsewhere, but we must be aware that he can have had no clear image of his mother on which to base such descriptions; his memories of her must have been extremely vague. He was fascinated by photographs and portraits, and longed to obtain one of her, but there was none available. Biographies tell us that Rosa Cassimati left the young Hearn in Ireland in 1854, before he was four years old. She may have tried to see him once after that; she may have tried to gain news of him – he certainly thought so. But he did not have a chance to see her after the age of three. He was not unlike the Japanese girl in one of his stories, who is given a mirror by her dying mother and told to look into it every day. She sees her own face, and thinks it to be that of her dead mother. Hearn says the story is near to ‘eternal truth’: ‘Surely that girl saw and spoke to her mother’s very soul’ (Out of the East 82–83). In the absence of Rosa Cassimati, Hearn had to turn hopefully to shadows in himself. And then he might turn to other women, to dark women in the United States, in the West Indies and Japan. To his

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Japanese wife he said that his Greek mother ‘was of little stature, with black hair and black eyes, like a Japanese woman’ (Life and Letters 1:8). Greek mother, then, and Japanese woman. This is a conjunction which has become familiar in recent writings on Hearn, and which can be justified in various ways. I want to look more widely than this single comparison, however, and try to ask in a general way what mothers are like throughout his writings. What are their characteristics and what are their functions? If the image of a mother is vital to Hearn’s work, if it stands behind his frequent comparisons of Greece and Japan, how exactly does this operate overall?

We can begin by trying to outline some general characteristics of mothers in Hearn’s works; and we might start by noting that they are often anonymous. In Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), for example, Hearn is taken sightseeing by a man who ‘calls himself “Cha”,’ (5), then by a student, who says: ‘Call me Akira’ (18). But the mothers Hearn meets as he does his sightseeing are unnamed, they are simply ‘smiling mothers,’ ‘forsaken’ mothers, ‘poor country mothers,’ or ‘humble mothers.’ Their role as mothers defines them, not their names. Hearn encounters a mother at what he calls ‘the Market of the Dead’: he admires her as a woman ‘with a most kindly face.’ He asks about her dead child ‘What was the name I saw on the tablet?’ (113). But he does not ask the mother’s own name. The mother in his story ‘The Temple of Amida,’ in Kokoro (1896), is given a name, ‘O-Toyo’; but as the story develops she loses both her child and her name. ‘People called her . . . The Nun of the Temple of Amida’ (83). Nameless mothers: or loss of names. Not that Hearn is uninterested in women’s names. He has a whole chapter devoted to the subject of Japanese women’s names in Shadowings (1900). And in Two Years in the French West Indies (1890) he names the young women there as ‘Finotte, Pauline, Médelle .. . with Ti-Clé trotting behind . . . Here come Cyrillia and Zabette, and Féfé and Dodotte and Fevriette’ (117). It is particularly mother’s names that are often problematic. In the novella, Chita, the child’s mother may have been called ‘Adèle,’ but she has died and nothing is certain. It is a time,

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we read, ‘when memories were strained almost to madness in research of names, dates, incidents – for the evocations of dead words, resurrection of vanished days, recollection of dear promises ...’ (111). The name of the individual mother slides into an uncertain world of memory and ‘dead words.’4 We might note next that, rather surprisingly, some important mothers in Hearn are substitute mothers.5 I find this surprising because Hearn’s own experiences of a substitute for Rosa Cassimati were so unhappy that he was relieved to be sent away to boarding school. But in all his writings on Louisiana and the French West Indies, Hearn has something of an obsession with the dark women who nurse young Creole children, and who become their substitute mothers. It is, for example, the theme of his novel Youma, and it comes up in Two Years in the French West Indies and Fantastics, where he explains: ‘Doubtless for a time she [the child] believes the dark woman her mother’ (117). The novella Chita is also about an adoptive mother. And, in one of his early pieces of American journalism, Dolly of ‘Dolly, an Idyl of the Levee’ adopts a small boy (American Miscellany 1:174). The child in ‘Before the Supreme Court,’ in A Japanese Miscellany switches parents. What seems to be important to Hearn, what he almost always emphasizes, is that the substitute mothers are dark – like his own mother, and like himself. They are thus unlike his recollection of his father’s second wife, a lady ‘all white-robed, with very bright hair’ (Kneeland 24). In his explanation in Youma he says: ‘. . . the Creole child has two mothers: the aristocratic white mother who gave him birth; the dark bond-mother who gave him all care, – who nursed him, bathed him .. .’ (1–2). (It is significant that the story of Youma is about a Creole girl: but Hearn has somehow changed the personal pronoun, and slipped into talking about the relation between the dark mother and ‘him,’ a boy.) The dark bond- mother becomes in effect the real mother, and a reflection of Hearn’s own images and vague recollections. Mothers are associated by Hearn, very often, with death – particularly with the death of children. This again appears as an interesting reversal. We might expect Hearn to be more concerned with children who have lost their parents – like himself – but his texts return rather to the feelings of the mother who has lost her child. It is as if he put himself in the place of women like Rosa Cassimati. At times, there is an opposition between the two conditions. In Chita, for example, we start off with a mother whose

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child is dead: ‘She had tried to become resigned, – not to think. But the [dead] child would come back night after night [in dreams]’ (74–5). And then a few pages later, we have the opposite: thrown up out of the storm, comes: ‘A living child; – a lifeless mother’ (84). ‘.. . the frail creature bound to the mother’s corpse with a silken scarf ...’ (87). The relationship between mother and child is described not through happy moments of play or joint experience, but through absence: it is always assumed that there is a deep relationship, but one of the couple is very often not there.6 Mothers in general, Hearn thinks, share a feeling which links them to the past, to the dead thousands of generations of children that lie behind them. It is a concept of motherhood which obviously owes a great deal to nineteenth-century theories of human evolution. The situation in which Hearn sees it most clearly is that of a mother mourning for her dead children. ‘All the foregoing is addressed to the spirit of the dead child’ he explains in a note to ‘A Woman’s Diary’ (Kottō 117). And elsewhere ‘The young mother who loses her first child may at least pray that it will come back to her out of the night of death’ (Glimpses 610). In his essay called ‘Revery’ he connects death directly with the birth cries of the child entering the world. With a very revealing turn of phrase, he talks of ‘the worth of mother-love, the whole dead world of human tenderness, with its sacrifices, hopes, memories . . . its countless passionate prayers to countless vanished gods’ (Kottō 212). (Why is mother-love put in apposition with, equated with, a ‘dead world,’ we might ask. And we note again the conjunction of mothers, passion, death and vanished gods.) The feelings of mothers concerning death and absence call up, it seems, shared feelings in Hearn himself. He believes in what he calls ‘universal mother-love’ (Glimpses 98), but he sees the reflection, or echo of this, in his own emotions. In Youma, the narrator talks of ‘a voice calling her name, – faintly, as from a great distance, a voice remembered as in a dream one holds remembrance of dreams gone before’ (130). The sudden shift to ‘one’ here is significant: Hearn, as it were, looks in the mirror at his own self, dreaming. In meeting the Japanese mother who is mourning the loss of her child at the market of the dead, he says, even more directly, that he has become aware ‘of something dimly astir in the mystery of my own life, – vaguely, indefinably familiar, like a memory ancestral, like the revival of a sensation forgotten two thousand years’ (113). Nameless and anonymous mothers: death and absence in relation

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to mothers. The image of the mother in Hearn’s work, we might say, is in certain ways blocked. When he thinks about mothers he is not led to think of the future, of the growing child, of the problems of education or adolescence.7 He thinks backwards, about dreams and memory, about our ability to call up ‘the forgotten joy of myriad millions of buried mothers’ (Exotics 224). Sometimes we find simply the dream of the mother about her absent child (as in Chita): sometimes the dream of the child about an absent mother (as in Youma). Certain motifs recur in these dreams: they contain voices and story-telling: the ‘fancy of a voice calling her name’ (Youma 130); dark faces: ‘the face of a beautiful brown woman looking at her with black soft eyes’ (Youma 130), ‘the memory of that kind swart face’ (Fantastics 117); and the sensation, a dreamlike one, of the touch of a mother’s hand: ‘the guiding of her mother’s hand’ (Youma 131). Talking in his own voice, Hearn describes a dream he had in Japan containing a woman who at first seemed Japanese. She sings a Japanese song which becomes like memories of a Celtic lullaby, then ‘she loosed with one hand her long black hair, till it fell coiling upon the stones.’ The hair falls, and turns blue, and melts into the sea. ‘There was only the sea, blue-billowing to the verge of heaven’ (Glimpses 524). The image of the mother is thus also connected, as Bernadette Lemoine pointed out, with the poetic of the sea – Hearn’s mothers and children often lose each other at sea, like the characters in Shakespeare’s last plays.8 The image of the mother may be vague, then, uncertain – but it is associated above all with memory. Memory of the child: memory of the mother. Motherhood is a ‘memory of some long-dead morning’ (Youma 130). And for himself, Hearn says: ‘I have memory of a place and a magical time in which the Sun and the Moon were larger and brighter than now.’ ‘And all that country and time were softly ruled by One who thought only of ways to make me happy’ (Out of the East 21–22). Such links of memory and mothers apply even to the animal world, as we see in the interesting example of Hearn’s cat. He describes how, when his cat loses her kittens, she searches for them again and again, makes him open all the cupboards in the house, until at last she is convinced they are gone. ‘But,’ he adds, even then, ‘she plays with them in dream, and coos to them, and catches for them small shadowy things . . .,’ which she brings to them ‘through some dim window of memory’ (Kottō 223). A ‘dim window of

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memory,’ we might say, is the constant association of motherhood in Hearn’s work.9 Mothers suffer in Hearn: they suffer the loss of children, poverty, abandonment, even the egotism of children,10 but they themselves are not – with a couple of notable exceptions – cruel. They are responsible, moral, deeply attached to their children, loyal to their families, obedient to their elders. They will, if necessary (as in Youma),die for their children.They represent‘supreme unselfishness, the hope for the future of mankind.’ ‘Even the least believing of us’ Hearn says, knows ‘of nothing else, in all the range of human experience, so sacred as mother-love, – nothing so well deserving the name of divine’(Kottō 210). The two cases I have come cross of non-divine, cruel motherhood in Hearn are interesting because they are exceptional. One is a woman in America, possibly Irish, who lives in a slum, is alcoholic and beats her children. ‘To the listener,’ Hearn says – that is to himself – ‘it seemed that the whipping would never end’ (American Miscellany 1: 223). The other example is not from Hearn’s own writings, but from Mrs Hearn’s reminiscences. She describes how one of their cats ate its kitten. It is not unusual for a cat, she says, but Hearn hearing of it, grew angry, insisted that the cat be brought before him and said: ‘You are bad; and you inherited such a wicked thought from countless generations which went before you. I cannot keep you here with us.’ He had the cat thrown out of the house, though Mrs Hearn adds: ‘I suspected afterward in that night, however, he was crying, thinking of the cat .. .’ (Noguchi 69).11 These are exceptional cases, however; they horrify Hearn. They horrify him because motherhood is privileged: mothers both are, and should be, responsible and long-suffering: they are not open to modified approval or to criticism.

III

To understand how Hearn came to accord such importance to motherhood in his writings, we must, I think, remember the context of late-nineteenth-century literature. Hearn was after all a man with a library, a man of books. He was working at a time when women characters formed a topic of great interest for male writers, particularly the suffering women who stand at the centre of the

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fiction of the late century: Gervaise in Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), the Goncourt’s Germinie Lacerteux (1864), Flaubert’s Félicité in ‘Un coeur simple’ (1877), Jeanne in Maupassant’s Une Vie (1883), Kate in George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife (1885), Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). Hearn’s work stands squarely in such a tradition, in its focus on suffering women; but – a little unlike the others – his women are above all mothers, and their motherhood makes them, for him, beyond the reach of criticism.

We may recall here one of the most famous and most discussed passages of Japan an Interpretation, the paean of praise that Hearn offers to Japanese womanhood. ‘For it has well been said,’ he begins ‘that the most wonderful aesthetic products of Japan are not its ivories, nor its bronzes, nor its porcelains, nor its swords, nor any of its marvels in metal nor lacquer – but its women’(361). Hearn’s Japanese woman is a woman seen within a household – woman as mother and daughter-in-law. She is: ‘A being working only for others, thinking only for others, happy only in making pleasure for others, – a being incapable of unkindness, incapable of selfishness, incapable of acting contrary to her own inherited sense of right, – and in spite of this softness and gentleness ready, at any moment, to lay down her life, to sacrifice everything at the call of duty’ (365–6). This hyperbolic praise has always annoyed some readers. F. Hadland Davis complained in 1910 about writers who ‘lie prone upon the ground in hysterical worship’ of Japanese women.12 Some modern Japanese feminists distrust it. Naoko Fuwa Thornton accuses Hearn of being ‘an accomplice in the internal colonization of the Japanese woman by glorifying the life of self-sacrifice and dependence forced upon her by the patriarchal society’(235). Perhaps: we might note that companionate marriage of intellectual equals was not highly valued in Japan at that time, and this suited Hearn almost too well.13 Moreover, he enjoyed the way in which Japanese wives often assume a motherly role towards their spouses: though his wife found him ‘almost unbearable’ in his dependence on her in his later years, when, she says, he ‘returned to babyhood’ (Noguchi 58). But whatever context we call up here, we must be aware of the complex of ideological assumptions that lie behind Hearn’s lyrical praise. He is rejecting the view (a very common

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one) that Japan is to be judged by its artefacts, and offering instead its women as its chief representatives. This is a human thing to do: yet at the same time Hearn has idealized these women in an extreme way, making them inhumanly, impossibly perfect. Moreover he tells us that such women are ‘doomed to disappear.’ Japanese woman is a type that will not appear again for ‘a hundred thousand years.’ She is like the ghostly feudal samurai who inhabit the world of his folk tales. She is also like the dark substitute mothers of the West Indies, who will die out with the death of slavery. She has what he calls the ‘charm of a vanished world’ (362). And she is praised by him in constant comparison or contrast with the wished-for world of ancient Greece. She is like Greek vases; she has not quite Greek grace; she is compared to ‘the Greek type of noble woman, – to Antigone, to Alcestis’(366).14 I do not wish to perform a psychoanalysis of Hearn – and it is not really necessary at this point – since it must be very obvious that there is a remarkable misfit between all his praise of mother figures and the actuality of a mother who left him at the age of three. We can have no idea of exactly why she behaved as she did, and she may have had excellent reasons; but at first sight it must seem that she did not sacrifice herself for him, did not care enough to do so – was not at all like his ideal of motherhood. If it looks like that at first sight, however, Hearn refuses to allow such a conclusion. To his brother, he admits he ‘used to wonder at’ his mother’s action. But, he adds, he was told: ‘Don’t believe anything unkind about your mother; she loved you all as much as any mother could do; she could not help herself.’ Her new husband prevented her from contacting him. Moreover, when in Ireland she was, he says, ‘in a strange country, without means, unable to speak a word of English’ (25). He ‘could not blame her’ he says, twice. ‘Neither could I blame her, or cease to love her, were I to hear she had committed any fault. Her circumstances were very peculiar and cruel, and her nature probably intensely confiding and impulsive . . .’ (26). In other words, Hearn has put his memory of his mother (that vague, almost non-existent memory) in a very privileged space – beyond criticism, beyond argument. It is a place where he can imagine a deep, inexplicable, relationship – something that survives distance, neglect, the passing of time, or lack of communication. In this space, his mother, as he says ‘loved [her children] as much as any mother could do, she could not help herself.’ He does not imagine her, like W. B. Yeats’s mothers in ‘Among School Children,’ re-

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thinking the betrayal of motherhood, or wondering whether the grown child was ‘A compensation for the pang of his birth, /Or the uncertainty of his setting forth.’ Hearn’s mothers worship images of their children and continue to worship them. They themselves are also objects of worship and unassailable in their ‘universal mother- love.’ Hearn has thus created a privileged space for his own history, a privileged space connected with Greece – and we may suggest that he later transfers his sense of such a space, first to the West Indies, then, more confidently, to Japan. People within such spaces are not rootless, like Hearn himself, or should not be made rootless. Japanese woman, he says, cannot be transplanted to another culture, cannot be known elsewhere. ‘The Japanese woman can be known only in her own country’ (Japan 362). She should not be challenged as Rosa Cassimati was ‘in a strange country.’ Her life is as different from modern life, Hearn says, as the ‘life depicted upon old Greek vases’ (362).

Hearn’s great contribution to writing about Japan is that he refuses to judge Japan with the Western standards used by other writers in his day. He refuses conventional analysis – he considers we must be open first to sympathetic understanding. This is not something he can achieve all the time: as he openly admits, he is an unstable character, liable sometimes to share all the prejudices and resentments of the average foreign visitor. But what makes him continuously interesting is his attempt to break through prejudice. And what I am suggesting here is that the use of the mother image, the role of the mother figure, can be connected directly to his refusal to make conventional judgements. The privileged space Hearn has made for her is also a creative space: it is one in which criticism is rejected: sympathy, love, praise and sensitivity are what motivate his best descriptive prose. It is, of course, the tragedy of Hearn’s life that he lost his own position in the privileged space of the vanished world of his Greek mother. It was his joy that, perhaps rather precariously, perhaps to the surprise of his wife, he could create an echo of the lost private space, an evanescent shadow of the vanished world of ancient Greece, in the world in which he actually came to live, in Japan.

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Not all of us would want to lay such emphasis on motherhood in describing cultures. But mothers have a function for Hearn as writer – those nameless, absent mothers, mothers of dead children, mothers in dreams, mothers in relation to the sea, mothers who suffer. They allow him to articulate his response to foreign cultures in deeply personal terms – which is what, as a fin de siècle writer, he had always fundamentally set out to do.

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he Publisher’s foreword to the 1973 Tuttle Edition of The TRomance of the Milky Way announces that ‘Lafcadio Hearn is almost as Japanese as haiku. Both are an art form, an institution in Japan.’ If appreciations of this kind have long been familiar among admirers of Hearn, we do not have to look far to find opposed and hostile views. The opposition to Hearn is not limited to those who fell out with him personally during his lifetime (though he was undoubtedly a combative and excitable person who had problems in sustaining friendships and made many enemies). It is widespread among modern commentators on Japan, and is almost a defining feature of modern travel-writing in English and modern academic commentary. A recent account of an academic’s stay in Japan symp- tomatically dismisses Hearn, in passing, as ‘the quintessential minor, provincial writer.’1 Many of those who attack Hearn assume that he had a simple stable view of Japan, that he flattered Japanese people, ignoring or distorting aspects of Japanese culture which were unpleasant or discriminatory. It does not require much reading in Hearn’s published work on Japan, or through his letters, to realize that this

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is far from adequate as a general view of his work. There are, of course, times when Hearn writes in a way that leaves him open to such criticism; but it is not difficult to find counter-examples where he expresses himself differently. Hearn indeed emphasized that his opinions about Japan were constantly in flux. ‘Truly,’ he wrote to Chamberlain ‘we have not permanent opinions until our mental growth is done’ (JLetters 346). He described his own mind as constantly leading him in different directions – to the love of large cities, for example, and then to the love of isolation; to conservatism and then to a Nihilism, ‘deserving Siberia.’ His mental life was, he said ‘troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America’ (Gleanings 92–3). An important part of the problem we face as modern readers must be, then, how to make sense of an oeuvre like Hearn’s, beset by such contradictions. I wish to suggest here that, rather than attempting to find a single set of coherent ideas about Japan that we can attribute to Hearn, it is more convincing to read his work as a development of (and variations on) a basic travel-writing scenario, which he imagined for himself before coming to Japan. This scenario did not determine what he went on to write in Japan: that was determined by his life experience, his ability to do research, his academic career, his various friendships. But an originating, basic scenario was nonetheless there, providing frequent points of reference for him when he sat down to write. A ‘scenario’ in the sense I am using here – borrowed from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics – is a structured sequence of events, a narrative pattern, of the kind we all use when we talk of ‘eating at a restaurant,’ or ‘graduating from Harvard,’ or ‘visiting Tokyo.’ Using scenarios of this kind in conversation we do not have to go into details about, for example, entering the restaurant, walking to the table, pulling back the chair and signalling to the waiter. The narrative pattern is familiar to us, it is something we hold in mind, shaping our discussion of the food, or the service, or the prices, when we ‘ate at the restaurant’ (Gibbs 327–30). The travel-writing scenario Hearn adopted was one of an entry and total immersion into the life of a foreign culture, so that he could interpret the culture through ‘vivid sensation given to the reader.’ This scenario (which is by no means the same thing as what he actually did in Japan) is articulated in a letter to William Patten, Art Editor for Harper’s Bazaar, sent when Hearn was planning to go to Japan in 1889. Hearn explained that he did not expect to discover

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new things in Japan, ‘but only to consider things in a totally new way.’ He said he would not attempt to write essays, but consider subjects ‘solely in the relation of personal experiences’ the aim being to communicate ‘a vivid impression of living in Japan.’ Living in Japan was to be ‘not simply as an observer but as one taking part in the daily existence of the common people and thinking with their thoughts’ (Tinker 330). It is important that he sees himself as ‘taking part’ in daily existence with Japanese people. But it is perhaps crucial that he also hopes actually to think with Japanese people: he underlines the phrase ‘thinking with their thoughts.’ This is not how most foreigners in Japan see themselves – even those who decide to make great efforts to study the language and culture, or who hope to enjoy relationships with Japanese people based on equality and mutual understanding. It is indeed more common for writers to aim for a certain detachment or objectivity – an aim which Hearn’s scenario totally ignores. Hearn, moreover, distrusted claims to objectivity from ‘those who seem to stand on a sort of philosophical Eiffel Tower, from where looking down, the land and its people seem . . . most absurdly small’ (Gleanings of LH 2: 84). The travel-writing scenario adopted by Hearn provided him with points of reference throughout his time in Japan. I use the phrase ‘points of reference’ here to indicate that there are times when he forcefully reacts against it. Sometimes it all seems a waste of effort to him, and he feels that he does not share, or cannot possibly share, the thoughts of Japanese people. Looking at a mother and child in a train, he describes a feeling of ‘the unspeakable absence of sympathy . . . of all absence of comprehension,’ which is ‘a veritable torture’ to him (JLetters 359). Between a foreign teacher and a Japanese student he says at one point ‘sympathetic understanding . . . is next to impossible’ (JLetters 433). In Japan: An Interpretation he maintains that Japan is at a different stage of evolution from the West ‘psychologically much farther away from us’ than the Ancient Greeks (17). The importance Hearn attaches to such feelings stems from the kind of scenario he has adopted. Hearn’s scenario is one of complete entry; it imagines a successful immersion; so that when it is not working he takes up extreme positions. In a letter to Elizabeth Bisland he insists suddenly ‘I am quite sure that I do not know anything about Japanese art, or literature, or ethnology, or politics or history . . . At present I have no acquaintance even with the Japanese language . . . I have learned about Japan

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only enough to convince me that I know nothing about Japan’ (Life and Letters 2: 486). The significance of Hearn’s originating scenario can be seen throughout his letters written in Japan – letters which remain one of the great resources for those who wish to map the intellectual life of the fin de siècle period. But it can also be traced in the complex and often highly wrought surface of his travel-writings in Japan. It is represented in various ways in the rhetorical strategies he uses – we must not make the common modern mistake of thinking that Hearn was a naïve or unconsidered stylist. The scenario also provides Hearn with a logic for a critique, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, of the industrial, Christianized and imperialist West, seen from a Japanese point of view. Understanding Hearn’s relation to his scenario thus gives us, I would maintain, a clearer understanding of what he achieved in his writings. It helps us understand why his writing still provokes controversy, still polarizes readers into positions of endorsement and admiration, or distrust and dislike.

The significance of Hearn’s scenario stems from the fact that his basic self-concept in Japan is that of a travel-writer.2 Travel-writing, we may say, is a genre that has a long history within the Western tradition. It can be traced back to the accounts of pilgrimages in the late Roman empire. In English, it shifts from large published collections of voyage narratives, like Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, & Discoveries of the English Nation (1598–1600), to the simplicity and readability of William Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World (1697). It is the travel-writing genre that gives us many accounts of the Grand Tour round Europe in the eighteenth century and of traveller-explorers in the nineteenth century. Hearn was keenly interested in the style and methods of contemporary travel-writing – particularly that of Pierre Loti (some of whose work he had translated for American newspapers) and, later, Rudyard Kipling. He had himself already established a reputation as a travel-writer, before coming to Japan, with his work on the West Indies, and he knew enough of what he could do to be able to provide William Patten with a plan of some of the things he would write about. His list of subjects was, in the

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event, remarkably close to what he did cover in his subsequent writings: First impressions: climate and scenery; the poetry of nature in Japan. City life to the foreigner. Art in everyday life: effect of foreign influences on art products. The new civilization. Amusements. The Guéchas (dancing girls) and their profession. The new Educational system, – child life – child games, etc. Home life and popular domestic religion. Public cults – Temple ceremonies and the duties of worshippers. Curiosities of Legends and superstitions. Woman’s life in Japan. Old popular melodies and songs. The Old masters in Japan – in the arts: their influence as a survival or a memory; their powers or value as reflectors of the life and nature of the country. Curiosities of popular speech, – singularities of verbal usage in everyday life. The social organism, – political and military conditions. Japan as a place to settle in; the situation of the foreign element, etc. (Tinker 329). This list is, we might say, unsystematic, even wildly eclectic. How could he think he would come to know so much about Japan, even before he had visited the place? It assumes an ability to come to grips with the language (which in the event proved more difficult than Hearn had expected); to look at traditions as well as modern society; to look at foreigners’ life in Japan as well as that of Japanese people. But it is all based on the assumption of an immersion – of a life in Japan. Such a book, he says ‘would . . . be essentially a volume of Sketches for the most part – each one reflecting a peculiar phase of life.’ It is not travel-writing as literary tourism – there is no tour of the country or of famous places contemplated. ‘A subject would be considered solely in the relation of personal experiences bearing upon it . . . The studied aim would be to create, in the minds of the readers, a vivid impression of living in Japan.’ Travel-writing in general takes place we may say, following Mary Louise Pratt’s term, in a ‘contact zone’ between cultures. It is constantly torn between two distinct methods – as was already obvious in the contrast between Tobias Smollett’s Travels Through

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France and Italy (1766) and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). Smollett wrote unashamedly as the British observer abroad, reacting to what he saw with comic complaints and barely disguised contempt. From the British point of view, he found the French dirty – ‘They have not even the implements of cleanliness in this country’ (33). He thought their customs laughable or repellent, and ‘nothing can be more absurd, than to plead difference of custom in different countries’ (33). He had no patience with those who try to explain things in the terms of the culture in which they occur: ‘There is nothing so vile or repugnant to nature, but you may plead prescription for it, in the customs of some nation or other’ (34). Sterne, however, takes entirely the opposite view, and calls Smollett ‘The learned SMELL- FUNGUS.’ He sees Smollett as someone who starts out with prejudices – ‘spleen and jaundice’ – and thus makes everything he comes to ‘discoloured and distorted.’ ‘All the world [is barren] to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers’ (549). Sterne emphasizes shared humanity and the possibility of shared feelings with French people: he is, by his own description, a ‘sentimental traveller.’ His book plays throughout with its famous opening statement: ‘ – They order, said I, this matter better in France – ’ (529). Modern travel-writers still shift between these two methods of recording foreign cultures: on the one hand, detachment from the culture, complaint and ironic disdain; on the other hand, sympathetic identification. In his account of living at Nara, Pico Iyer, the representative post-modern travel-writer, manages to jump from one to the other and back without commitment to either; but they are both there in his text, and easily recognizable. It is most common for writers in English to assume that central humane views of society are those enshrined in Western culture, and to use them to provide a critique of Japan. To start off by attempting to adopt Japanese value systems and points of view is to risk the charge that one is besotted with the place, or, as D. J. Enright says of Hearn, ‘incorrigibly romantic’; but this is exactly what Hearn’s scenario encourages him to do.

III

How are these problems represented in a text by Hearn? I would like to look briefly at them through Hearn’s first book about Japan:

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Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. And I would like to focus on one of the most famous essays in the book, ‘Bon-Odori.’ Glimpses was published in 1894 when Hearn was at Kumamoto, and it was the book that established his name as a writer on Japan. It was a great success, and admired by readers who knew Japan, like B. H. Chamberlain. It is an interesting transitional volume. In style it has much in common with Hearn’s earlier travel-writings – with his volumes on Martinique, for example – but it contains chapters which have come to seem quintessential Japanese Hearn: ‘My First Day in the Orient,’ ‘From the Diary of an English Teacher,’ an account of Hearn’s travels round islands where he hopes no Westerner has been before ‘From Ho¯ki to Oki’ (a chapter title that Chamberlain thought he ought to change, as the rhyme sounded silly). It has chapters on souls, and ghosts; on Matsue ‘The Chief City of the Province of the Gods’; a famous one on ‘The Japanese Smile.’ There are twenty-seven chapters in all, duly classified by Hearn as ‘sketches.’ The logic of the way the volume is constructed is not obvious. It does start with Hearn’s first day in Japan, and ends with a chapter entitled ‘Sayo¯nara’ – but it seems odd that there should be a chapter on ‘Kitzuki: The Most Ancient Shrine in Japan,’ then two chapters on the ‘Cave of Children’s Ghosts’ and ‘At Mionoseki,’ and then suddenly one called ‘Notes on Kitzuki.’ The travel-writings of Hearn’s predecessors and contemporaries are rather different – they tend to be linked together by accounts of their tours through Japan. Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, or Mrs Hugh Fraser’s A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan, or the American John La Farge’s An Artist’s Letters from Japan use a series of letters to unnamed corre- spondents to construct a journal of their stay in Japan – a technique which could be said to derive from Smollett. Other writers use the essay form, and blend their journey to Japan with a single theme, like Christopher Dresser in his important book of 1882, Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures. It is a distinctive feature of Hearn’s book that it contains such an odd, eclectic mixture and does not conform to such patterns. We could say, of course, that this is because Hearn is reprinting bits and pieces he had written for publication in journals – but, as we have seen above, this eclecticism was envisaged by Hearn from the start. It became part of a distinctive style that he was to develop in later books. Hearn is not simply recording sketches of what he has observed. As Denise Brahimi points out in her introduction to the French

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translation of Kwaidan, Hearn’s Japan is not ‘presented as mysterious or irrational, in the sense that it escapes the kind of laws of function that are accessible to European readers.’ ‘On the contrary,’ she says, it is ‘interpretable’ – borrowing a term used by Hearn in the title of his book Japan: An Attempt at an Interpretation (my trans. 11). A difference from other writers is that the interpretations, we might say, try to take as their frequent point of reference the emotions or feelings of those inside the culture. The chapter on ‘Bon-Odori’ describes a journey, Hearn says ‘of four days by kuruma with strong runners,’ ‘over the mountains to Izumo’ (120). It is a journey through the countryside until Hearn stays at a small village where there is a ‘bon-odori’ going on – Hearn calls it the Dance of the Souls – and he gives a wonderfully poetic account of the procession of women and girls that comes out of the shadow of a temple into moonlight in a way that reminds him of Greek or Etruscan art – and begins he says ‘a dance, an astonishment.’ It is a slow, weird ‘processional movement [that] changes into a great round, circling about the moonlit court and around the voiceless crowd of spectators’ (133). It seems to him a symbol of immemorial things ‘whereof the meaning has been forgotten for innumerable years’ (134). It is an enchantment, he is ‘bewitched, by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic glide of feet, above all by the flitting of the marvelous sleeves’ (135). It gives him the sense of being haunted – and thus looks forward to the ghost stories which were to occupy his later years in Japan. ‘[How] explain the emotion evoked by a primitive chant totally unlike anything in Western melody,’ he asks. It is ‘something infinitely more old than I, – something not of only one place or time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the universal sun’ (138). Obviously Hearn is not solely explaining from the inside, from the Japanese view, otherwise he would not bring in Greeks, Etruscans and primitive chants. But this account conforms to the pattern of his basic scenario in that, like so many of Hearn’s important pieces, it is a journey to the interior, an attempt to get to the real Japan. The search for an inner or real Japan was not, of course, unique to Hearn; a contemporary like Isabella Bird was excited by the idea that ‘no English lady has yet travelled alone through the interior’ (18). But Hearn’s journey has its own characteristics which distinguish his work from other travel-writers. Other writers in Japan have a tendency to frame and situate such

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pieces in a social world which relates to that of their foreign readers. They start off such pieces with a few words about the Embassy and the problem of passports, and bring in their grander foreign friends and contacts – like Sir Edwin Arnold, who has a chapter called ‘Rural Japan’ that starts off: ‘The Emperor being still indisposed, and the garden party at the Palace, by consequence, deferred, we took advantage of the interval to visit Nikko’ (206). Or Douglas Sladen, who calls one of the chapters of his book ‘Down the rapids with the Duke of Connaught’ (242). Even the post-modern Pico Iyer lets us know that (despite living in Nara for the time being) he is a journalist who went to an excellent English public school, and a top class American university, and he gets up early every day to send off his faxes to his publishers in the United States. Hearn’s contemporaries often explain their relation to Japanese society through the figure of what Isabella Bird calls the Japanese ‘servant interpreter.’ Mrs Bird hires one who is, she says, ‘the most stupid-looking Japanese that I have seen’ and whose only virtue is that he can understand her English (16–17). Hearn does have someone with him he calls Akira – described in earlier chapters as a student, but also a guide. Hearn appears to treat him as an equal rather than a servant. Other writers like to give us information about where exactly the things they describe are: Hearn largely cuts out the names of places; he doesn’t help us much with the topography. (The route taken in this Bon-Odori chapter is still not known to Hearn specialists.) Although much of what he writes is description – description of the countryside – Hearn is clever enough to make all his descriptions into a kind of narrative. He doesn’t describe the countryside so much as himself moving through the countryside. For instance when he starts a sentence: ‘No more great towns: only thatched villages nestling in the folds of the hills, each with its Buddhist temple . . .’ (121), the phrase at the start ‘No more’ makes us see this countryside as he has experienced it on his journey. If he gives his descriptions as a narrative of his journey, however, unlike most of his contemporaries, he gives the account in the present tense. ‘The air is lukewarm and windless,’ he tells us – ‘The weather is more than warm, rendering clothing oppressive, and as we pass through the little villages I see much healthy cleanly nudity’ (123). This technique of relating things in the present tense has become familiar in contemporary English novels, though it is quite difficult to sustain – and it was certainly not common at the time Hearn

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wrote. The effect is to bring the journey alive, into the present, but it is also to make sure that we travel with Hearn. Readers are not allowed to be detached observers looking at the countryside; we are not just being given factual information; we are in there with Hearn, in his kuruma, watching the road unwind, being stared at by the country people, wondering what it is that we can see. The effect is both charming and involving – and for some readers, perhaps, oppressive. We can say, at any rate, that Hearn is quite carefully and deliberately making us see things his way. Moreover, ‘see’ is not quite adequate. Hearn does not so much construct pictures for us, he uses his senses – he smells things, people touch him, the landscape is experienced as large shapes, darkness, huge trees, ‘sombre foliage so dense that one can distinguish nothing overhead but branchings lost in shadow’ (121). Hearn does not just avoid the detached objective view, one of the things he constantly implies is a criticism of the Western world of the majority of his readers. An undercurrent of the piece – of the whole book indeed – is that Hearn is using his account of Japan as a way of criticizing the West, particularly modern industrialized Western society. It is easy to spot this when, for example, he talks about lacquer and porcelain, and says that wherever you see ‘something totally uninteresting . . . something commonplace and ugly’ or ‘detestable,’ that is because it has been ‘shaped under foreign influence’ (129). But the critique of the West is also there, for example, when Hearn praises the ‘healthy cleanly nudity’ he sees in the countryside. Public nudity was not a Western habit in his period. Isabella Bird was shocked by the lack of clothing in rural areas: ‘.. . this is a new Japan to me . . . and it is not fairyland. The men may be said to wear nothing . . . [The women’s] short petticoat is truly barbarous looking, and when a woman has a nude baby on her back or in her arms, and stands staring vacantly at the foreigner, I can hardly believe myself in – civilized – Japan’ (83). In Hearn’s own Catholic childhood a horror of nudity had been commonplace. He wrote of his enjoyment in Ireland of a book of Greek mythology, and of the ‘nakedness of the gods’ – but the book was discovered by his guardians, and censored as improper. Female breasts were ‘excised’ from the illustrations, and ‘drawers had been put upon the gods . . . large baggy bathing-drawers, woven with cross-strokes of a quill-pen’ (Life and Letters 1:30). Hearn thinks that Japan has got it right and the West has got it wrong: he sees ‘healthy cleanly nudity: pretty naked children’ (123).3

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An attack is constantly implied on the assumption that habits of behaviour in the West are normal or necessary. Hearn points to the gentle kind faces in Japan, to the gentle-heartedness of the people, to the fact that ‘never yet have I heard a voice raised in anger, nor observed an unkindly act’ (123). These are the kind of statements that infuriate some commentators. They insist that Hearn is naïve: you can after all find angry people in Japan and cruelty in Japan, if you look; and people can be unkind in Japan as they can elsewhere. When Hearn says he has ‘never’ heard a voice raised in anger, one might say that he is ignoring the problems of repression. (Though he does in fact deal exactly with the problem of repression, in his chapter on ‘Official Education’ in Japan: An Interpretation.) Criticisms of this kind, in general, miss the point of Hearn’s work. He has come to Japan after experience of Western societies which have not been happy for him – after family and religious problems in Ireland, after seeing violence, poverty and racial conflict in the United States. Most Western people feel that their own societies are natural, that this is how things ‘really are.’ Hearn’s travel-writing, with its scenario assuming a possible entry into a new culture, tells us that we cannot take our original society as a benchmark of normality, to be applied everywhere else. You can, it seems, have societies without public displays of violence. Hearn thus criticizes the West for its violence, cruelty, unkindness and hypocrisy – and uses Japan as the ground from which to do so. His travel-writing scenario not only assumes that there are major differences in cultural practices, it also assumes – since it assumes entry to the foreign culture – that it will become possible to share its values. This also implies the possibility, as he feels when he sees the Bon-Odori, that we share some immemorial history. We do hear perhaps the same ancient song of the emotions, unbound by local prejudices, by considerations of place or time. Those who write like Hearn cannot expect to get away without controversy. What many readers want from travel-writing is a kind of confirmation that their own homes are best. They do not want criticism to be thrust at them. They would like a bit of exoticism – but they do not want their own value systems undermined. Travel- writing is, after all, armchair travel – it is not something we normally expect to challenge us. Hearn does exactly that: he challenges us. I do not think Hearn was a romantic who was besotted with Japan. I think he knew what he was doing when he used Japan for a social critique of the West.

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Hearn’s viewpoint is not the viewpoint of the objective anthropologist or social scientist – he does not offer statistics or solutions to the problems of society, or economic arguments. He relies often on impressions – as at the end of Glimpses, when he talks of the sound of ‘the temple bell from the cedar groves; songs of children at play; afternoon shadows upon many-tinted streets; .. . the dancing of the moon upon the lake’ (693). Through a build-up of such impressions he can also offer a critique of Western society. It is not the critique of social science, but a critique that relies, as I have been attempting to demonstrate, on a basic travel-writing scenario. Through that scenario readers may gain the intense and lived experience of someone who has entered a different kind of society, who has at least glimpsed the way in which a different kind of society may be seen to work. If Hearn is not really ‘as Japanese as haiku,’ the travel- writing scenario lies behind a sustained attempt to be almost there, almost fully immersed in Japan.

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Robert Nichols and Lafcadio Hearn: Cultural Politics and English Professors at the University of Tokyo George Hughes

he young English poet Robert Nichols arrived in Tokyo in T1921, to take up a post teaching English Literature in the Faculty of Letters at the Imperial University of Tokyo. He had no academic qualifications whatsoever, and it is difficult now to imagine how anyone could ever have thought him suitable for the post. He stayed only until 1925 (when he resigned to go off to Hollywood and work for Douglas Fairbanks Sr.), but he was the first in a line of English poets invited to teach in Japanese universities: he would be followed in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan by Edmund Blunden, William Empson, William Plomer, Ralph Hodgson, George Barker, D. J. Enright, James Kirkup, Anthony Thwaite and Jon Silkin. A great deal of thought had gone into the recruitment of Nichols, and the professor from Tokyo who recruited him, Sanki Ichikawa (collector of Hearn first editions and editor of Lafcadio Hearn’s writings), explained

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that he hoped Nichols would have the same impact on subsequent generations of Japanese students of literature as Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn had taught at the university from 1896 to 1903, and although he moved to Waseda University in the last few months of his life, he remained – and indeed remains today – the most important and influential foreigner to have taught at the University of Tokyo. There was a gap of eighteen years between the departure of Hearn and the appointment of Nichols, and other foreigners had been employed to teach the English language and linguistics between the two; but in principle it may be said that Nichols was recruited as the successor to Hearn: he certainly boasted to his father that he was now ‘the occupier of the most famous of the foreign chairs [in the University of Tokyo], Lafcadio Hearn’s.’1 I should like to argue here that Hearn and Nichols, insofar as they were foreign teachers in a Japanese university, represent significant aspects of modern cultural politics. These are two men who embodied in different ways, whether they liked it or not, the cultural politics of the West; but they are also men who were caught up in and used within the very different cultural politics that operated in Japan. If we hope to take seriously the problems raised by the idea of cultural exchange between East and West, especially in relation to the problems of cultural imperialism and ‘Orientalism,’ then it must surely be through an understanding of the role of men like these two.

We might ask first how Hearn and Nichols came to be employed to teach English literature at the University of Tokyo and what they did there. Neither of them had the kind of curriculum vitae that would impress an appointments board today. The trajectory of Hearn’s career is complex, and he found his way to Tokyo almost unwillingly. Like Nichols he was unqualified in formal terms. He had received a disciplined secondary education at a Catholic school in Britain, and had been an enthusiastic autodidact while working as a journalist in the United States, but he had no university education, and was perhaps not even entirely honest about his secondary education.

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He claimed to have been partly educated in France, but it has proved difficult for biographers to confirm that he really was. Hearn had arrived in Japan in 1890, aged forty, with no money and with projects for writing about the country. He had found work teaching in schools at Matsue and Kumamoto, and then returned to journalism in Kobe. But when the offer of a university job teaching English literature in Tokyo came to him through the mediation of B. H. Chamberlain, it was something of a life-saver. He accepted, rather oddly announcing to friends that he preferred French literature to English. He had published one major collection of travel writings on Japan by this time (Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan), and another shorter collection of essays, Kokoro, came out just as he took up the post in Tokyo. For the next six years, however, he produced one book a year on Japan until at the end of his time in the University of Tokyo he published the book that established him as a kind of Hans Christian Andersen of Japan, Kwaidan. Hearn never published anything himself which directly stemmed from his teaching career at the university, but his work on English literature in his Tokyo years certainly had a deep influence on his own writing. In his lectures, for example, he talked about Kipling’s work, explaining how Kipling selects certain key details for description: Kipling ‘never uses more adjectives than he can help, and never uses a weak one.2 What he says is obviously relevant to changes in his own style, and to the intensity he achieved in Kwaidan. Hearn carried tiny notebooks to his classes and then improvised lectures on the basis of his notes: students were expected to take them down exactly as he spoke, punctuation and all. There is no mention of classes where students would give their own opinions on texts, though Hearn did say that his lectures were ‘adapted, by long experience, to the Japanese student’s way of thinking and feeling, and are put in the simplest possible language.’3 The students valued the notes enough to have them all collected and published after his death. Hearn was not sent by any Western governmental institution to Japan, he was recruited by a Japanese national university on its own initiative, so he was not directly any part of a specific Western national cultural politics. It has been suggested, however, that since he was a Westerner teaching English literature, he must have been complicit with Western ideology which insists on its own cultural

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centrality and superiority. Carl Dawson has argued that ‘the lectures on British literature imply, with peculiar variants, an acceptance of that literature as normative and superior’.4 But this does not do justice to Hearn. In essays like ‘A Conservative,’5 Hearn had shown that he was strongly aware of the problems posed to Japan and Japanese culture by Western cultural imperialism. In that essay, based on the life of Amenomori Nobushige,6 but also reflecting in various ways his own experiences as teacher and traveller, he demonstrated a profound understanding of cultural negotiations within an individual life. And his lectures at the university constantly approach cultural problems from an unexpected angle. In his lecture on ‘Modern English Criticism’ he starts off with a long account of French criticism and the celebrated critical ‘method of Sainte-Beuve.’ Hearn insists that Sainte-Beuve showed how, in criticism, ‘.. . our minds must be free from . . . from religious prejudices, from the prejudice of ignorance, from national prejudice, from race prejudice, from social prejudice, from class prejudice, from philosophical prejudice.’7 Of course this is difficult, he says, but when English critics like Macaulay used to insist on regarding everything from an English standpoint, ‘the result was narrowness and dryness of soul.’ French criticism has created ‘a new spirit of literary tolerance and generosity.’8 And ‘even now in Europe, the influence of Oriental literature, especially from India is beginning to show itself, to exercise a new power in Westem thought.’9 He thinks that the same kind of cross-fertilization could work in Japanese literature. There is no sense here of the appropriation of an Asian literature by the West: he talks of enablement and exchange, and an acknowledgement of the potential and ‘power’ of Indian thought. Hearn does of course embody a Western cultural politics when he teaches English literature in English, but his is a cultural politics that attempts to situate itself outside any specific national interest.

III

When we turn from Hearn to Robert Nichols, we find a very different background. Nichols had attended Winchester College for his secondary education and had been requested to leave early. He had been briefly to Oxford University, before he was thrown

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out for consistently failing university examinations. He had then volunteered for the army, and was briefly on the front line in the First World War in 1915, but he suffered shell-shock and was repatriated to England. Nichols was only twenty-eight, but he had already published seven slim volumes of poetry by the time he arrived in Japan in 1921. He had thrown in his lot with the group of anti-war poets, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and Wilfred Owen, and he had briefly become well known on the London literary scene. He was not modest about his own abilities, and he was never self- effacing. Aldous Huxley said that Nichols could not ‘remain in any company of people for five minutes without telling them (a) that he is a poet, (b) that he is extremely successful in his profession and (c) that he knows everybody in England who is worth knowing.’10 One episode in Nichols’s career presumably suggested to friends that he was suitable for a teaching post in Tokyo. He had been sent by the British Foreign Office on a lecture tour of the United States in 1918, to ‘try and show that we appreciate the American effort.’11 In the States he was taken up by J. B. Pinker’s agency, and offered, according to his biographers, two to three thousand dollars for a ten weeks’ lecture tour. It must have been this tour that persuaded Charles Whibley, a London literary journalist and critic, to give Nichols’s name to Sanki Ichikawa. Nichols badly needed money, and was happy to accept Ichikawa’s offer of a job: he boasted that he was now going to be ‘Prof. of English Literature’ in Japan.12 Once installed in his post he explained proudly to his father that he was the ‘only substantive representative of my country in the University.13 But if Nichols had already been involved in national cultural politics before he went to Japan, and if he had always a rather inflated sense of his own self-importance, he was recruited through Japanese cultural politics, and had no option but to work along with Japanese professors and students in the Japanese university system. The result was a massive culture shock. He may have been proud to be called professor there, but the University of Tokyo was, he said, an ‘Imperial Lunatic Asylum.’14 Nichols in fact loathed at first sight everything he encountered in Japan. He wrote to friends in England that the people in Tokyo were so ugly he could not look at them (‘I have to turn my eyes to the ground: they revolt me so’).15 He protested that there was

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no privacy in Japan and that nobody would take any decisions (‘persons? - they are all like eunuchs!’).16 He found the climate frightful. He decided that the students were ‘ignorant snobs’ and that nobody among students or colleagues could speak English.17 Even when he had to admit that his colleagues had been generous to him, he quickly went on to complain about his contract: ‘I have been deceived.’18 He considered that women in Japan were treated as slaves or concubines (‘they do a great deal of copulation’),19 and when he thought about bringing his fiancée, Norah Denny, to the country it gave him ‘the horrors.’ His first year was in general a ‘year of horror . . . climate & people & job altogether beyond my strength & from the intellectual point of view an absolute waste of time – hack-schoolmasters’ work.’20 The students found his lectures hard to follow because he spoke so fast, and Professor Ichikawa sat in on them to take notes for the students – but Nichols insisted to the end of his life that it was a kind of spying: he was ‘never suffered to lecture without the presence of a Japanese professor,’ in order to ensure that he did not ‘undermine the purity of Japanese morals.’21 The extent of Nichols’s culture shock has only recently become apparent with the publication of his biography by Anne and William Charlton, and it is certainly a history of an unusually dramatic cultural encounter. If he is known for nothing else in the future, Nichols must surely be cited as a classic example of someone who was quite unable to adjust to the differences between European and Asian culture. He had been given the job because he was a poet, but he wrote no poetry about Japan except for some unpublished verses that begin ‘Asama’s crater slowly fills,’ and go on to talk of being watched by ‘A single idiot alien face/ More hideous than a cankered flower.’22 This cannot have been quite what Professor Ichikawa expected of him. Nichols complained that ‘the Japs provide me with no art material that I can use.’23 On his home leave in 1922, however, Nichols married Norah Denny, and when he returned with her Japan seemed to have improved. Norah was more open to new experience, and she liked the house they were to live in. She wrote: ‘I felt so happy there that tears came into my eyes. I would have a dwarf tree of plum-blossom in my sitting room; I would slide back the walls, let in the sun, sit myself on a purple cushion on that floor of golden straw . . .’24 Nichols toned down his hostility and began to

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appreciate Japanese art forms, particularly Japanese music and the Japanese theatre. He decided to try to get to know some of the important writers in Japan, and hoped to start something like the Oxford Union at the university. With his usual lack of modesty, he now claimed ‘I have the ear of the most powerful Minister in the present cabinet.’25 In the aftermath of the Tokyo earthquake (which he was lucky enough to miss because he was on leave) he made strenuous efforts to obtain government and private funds from British and American sources for the restocking of the university library. Even if he was not part of any official British political initiative, he liked to act as though he were: he sent off a long letter reporting on the library fund to the British ambassador. After he had left Japan, in October 1924, Nichols complained to H. W. Nevinson about an article in the Baltimore Sun: ‘You say that I gave up the Tokyo post because I didn’t like the Japanese. That’s a damned lie. On the contrary as far as it is possible to like a people as a whole I rather like the Japanese.’ 26 He certainly made use of his career in Japan: although he was only there for four years, he continued throughout his life to sign himself ‘formerly Professor of English Literature in the Imperial University Tokyo.’And he started several times to write books on Japan, taking Hearn’s Japan: An Attempt at an Interpretation as his model. He worked for many years on a play based on his experiences in Japan, which was finally performed in London at the Arts Theatre after his death. Some of the students in Tokyo obviously liked Nichols: they reported that they found his successor, Edmund Blunden, stiff and dull by comparison. There was a brief fashion for a Nichols-style brash sincerity among them, and several wrote to him after he had left for Hollywood, complaining of the ‘cold’ Professor Ichikawa. But the resentment and hostility that Nichols had felt about Japan at first were never far from the surface. During the Second World War he wrote newspaper articles explaining that the Japanese were ‘the most conceited people on earth,’and that ‘Japan’s Westernization is only superficial.’27 Nichols always automatically assumed his own cultural superiority and authority.

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Hearn and Nichols, then, represent different aspects of Western cultural politics, one determinedly open-minded, the other firmly entrenched in nationalism and prejudice. But their politics do not operate in a vacuum: they were both after all faced with the problem of dealing with Japanese cultural politics, and we cannot cut off this side of the equation as we consider their work in Japan. Neither of them was happy about the conditions under which they were employed at the University of Tokyo: they felt they had been unfairly treated over their contracts. They were well paid by the standards of the time, but they were treated as temporary employees outside the permanent structure of the university and subject to Japanese authority. No attempt was made to draw them into decision-making processes. They did nonetheless comment on the teaching situation and give their views. Hearn wrote a report in 1897, stating ‘The undersigned does not feel satisfied with the results of his work during the past academic year.’ 28 He complained about the large mixed classes and the irregular attendance of the students – problems still endemic in Japan. There is no record that his complaints had any result. Nichols complained to Professor Ichikawa that he was not able to share a conversation with his students and said he wanted more of a ‘personal touch.’ Ichikawa responded by apologizing that teaching in Japan had not emphasized the spoken language. He said he would arrange the classes so that only advanced students could attend, ‘and if others should wish to come, let them be admitted only as “hearers,” like ladies.’ He said he did not want Nichols to spend his time correcting the student’s English conversation, any ‘man in the street’ could do that. In an important statement of what he did expect from a foreign teacher in the department, he went on to explain: There are indeed many after the position of Professor of English Literature in our University – I mean among foreign residents here. But we don’t want a man who has not so long breathed his native air, who has lost touch with your literary atmosphere – in short who is neither Japanese nor English, whom, if they go back, the place will know no more. (There are many such Japanese in England!) But we want a man who, fresh from England, would be able to breathe the spirit of English Literature, who can make his

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influence felt in the short space of time allowed him. We are susceptible enough of influences & though you may not see your work bearing fruit before your very eyes it will do so years after- wards when you go away. And though one and all may not be swayed by your influence, yet if you can get hold of one really good man, is it not worth leaving the ninety-nine to go after him? That man will be like a grain of mustard-seed who in turn influences his future generations & I am sure you will find more than one of this sort. The seed L. Hearn sowed is just now beginning to flower all over the country through some of his select pupils . . . You must consider yourself appointed a literary ambassador and do your best in the cause of English literature, with the hope that your work within the four walls of the University will some day bear fruit an hundredfold.29

Ichikawa had forgotten here that Lafcadio Hearn was far from being a man‘fresh from England’when recruited by the University, but as far as Nichols was concerned, he had a clear view of what was wanted from him.It was not conventional pedagogy:Ichikawa wanted English freshness and an aura of the English literary world. He wanted Nichols to carry round his foreignness with him as he went, and he expected that foreignness to work on the students through a form of ‘influence.’ The letter is plainly and openly elitist: there is a radical rejection of the needs of the majority of ordinary Japanese students and of any ‘ladies.’ Perhaps more significantly, there is no suggestion of anything approaching cultural exchange. The foreign teacher is to be purely instrumental in the education of Japanese students. In Ichikawa’s concept of the post there is a bargain set up. One side (the teacher) gives fresh literary atmosphere and foreign influence: the other side (the nation state and its subjects) profits intellectually – though of course paying a handsome salary for the intellectual goods received. The foreign teacher is not invited to stay long: he has a ‘short space of time allowed’ him. There is a certain coherence in all this, but it would not have applied to Hearn, who stayed in Japan until he died; and the example of Nichols shows if nothing else that Ichikawa had set up an inherently unstable arrangement.Culture is not after all portable baggage; and intellectual goods are not exportable and transferable in the way Ichikawa imagined. Culture involves people. Learning about a foreign culture will simply be the appropriation of static

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and mechanical knowledge unless it involves dialogue and exchange. There was a lesson that could have been learnt from the difference between Hearn and Nichols, from their adjustment, or lack of adjustment, to the Japanese cultural politics that confronted them. The lesson is one that needs to be understood still in the cultural exchanges that take place in modern Japanese universities. Hearn, for all his many oddities as a personality, grasped intellectually what cultural dialogue involves. Even if his lectures were delivered to an audience that did not speak back directly, they were adapted to what he saw as the needs and interests of his students. They were shaped by the same concerns as his books on Japan, by a need to re-examine conventional literary forms and cross national literary boundaries – by a constant need to reconsider his own basic ideas. Hearn’s best readers have accordingly never accepted all he has to say uncritically, they have involved themselves in his problems, have seen their own reading of him as a kind of dialogue – ‘an attempt at interpretation.’ Hearn’s cultural politics are after all the cultural politics of openness: they acknowledge the reality of the nation state, but they go beyond its limits. That is why Hearn has retained, for all the problems that surround his work, a certain living voice in the Japanese intellectual world – while Nichols has become, like many of the lecturers who followed him, simply an interesting, and rather sad, case-history.

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The Enduring Value of Lafcadio Hearn’s Tokyo Lectures Joan Blythe

rawing primarily on the second and revised edition of Lafcadio DHearn’s History of English Literature (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1930), I focus here on the merits of this undeservedly neglected work for students and teachers of English literature in Japan and elsewhere as well as for scholars and admirers of Hearn.1 During his seven years’ lectureship at the Imperial University of Tokyo, Hearn gave two series of lectures, each covering three academic years, on the History of English Literature. After Hearn’s death his devoted students collated the notes they had transcribed word-for-word from the second series given from September 1900 to March 1903. Some of Hearn’s lectures are available in volumes such as Appreciations of Poetry (1916), Life and Literature (1922), Interpretations of Literature (1924),and OnArt,Literature,and Philosophy (1941). But it is only by reading through the nearly one thousand pages of his History of English Literature that we obtain a full sense of Hearn’s seminal role as a professor of‘absolutely unparalleled value.’2 We also gain an enhanced understanding of the aspects of literature that were most important to Hearn and of why he was so loved by his students, many of whom themselves went on to become

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teachers and scholars of English literature as well as noted writers. Hearn’s lectures on literature deserve a more prominent standing in his oeuvre not only because of their influence on students and their vibrant evocation of Hearn the man, but also because they are richly insightful and beautifully crafted works of art that we should read today. I shall first give examples both of Hearn’s style as a teacher and of the values he emphasized in his lectures, values similar to those prominent throughout his writings. I then describe his responses to three of his favourite authors: John Milton, best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost; Lord Byron, most piquant in word and life of the early nineteenth-century Romantic poets; and John Ruskin, the great Victorian cultural critic. Hearn himself was like Milton in the perfection of his word choice and in his loss of physical vision, like Byron in his worldwide reputation and in the passion and freedom he brought to his life and writing, and like Ruskin in his beautifully-crafted romantic prose style and social values. Finally, I shall argue that students, teachers and all lovers of literature can still benefit from reading Hearn’s lectures. Hearn said he ‘taught literature as the expression of emotion and sentiment’ and ‘as the representation of life.’3 He consistently celebrates authors who exercised freedom, imagination and independence of judgement,authors who evoked beauty in thought and language and were not constrained by slavish conformity to the status quo and existing norms of literary style or cultural opinion.Like Milton,Hearn knew that true freedom can only arise from discipline and hard work. He told his students they could not ‘make progress without some monotonous study’ (292) and cited Ruskin’s dictum that ‘life without effort is crime’ (814). Hearn’s passionate devotion to literature had nothing of sloppy sentimentality. Rather, it was inseparable from his own lifetime of unbelievably arduous, disciplined and vast study,the kind of discipline and commitment he expected of his students.Accordingly,his lectures repeatedly include the words,‘you must’ as in, for example,‘You must remember,’‘You must read the best works,’‘Youmust make informed judgments,’‘You must work hard at texts.’ My favourite Hearn ‘must’ sums up a passionate plea for the importance of sustained reading.I quote from the passage at length because I feel it gives the life-pulse of Hearn’s own reading practice (and suggests by implication how he hoped his own writings would be read) and underlines the heart-centre of all his teaching:

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For the experienced critic, who has given the better part of a lifetime to the study and discovery of literary beauty, a single reading of a poet may be sufficient for the perception of the best in the book. A single reading may also have a small value for some student of extraordinary genius. But I think there can be no question that, to the ordinary student, a single reading of a great poem means just the same thing as no reading at all. In fact it means worse than no reading; because the student who thinks that he has read the poem after one perusal, will be a student so satisfied with his own judg- ment that he will never take the trouble to read the poem a second time. A perfect poem is something to be read fifty times, a hundred times; it can not be read too often. Remember that the single volume into which the work of any great poet may be collected represents the best thinking and the best experience of one exceptionally gifted human life. You can not learn much about the whole life of a great man by looking at a book for half an hour; – you must live with the book to get any benefit from it (733–34; italics added). Among other ‘musts’ Hearn told his students which editions of his various authors were the best available, which had been translated into Japanese, which they ‘must’ study. Hearn’s emphasis on the importance of editions of integrity is variously reflected in the history of Japanese translations of English literature. Hearn’s concern for proper literary editions is but one indication of his deep regard for serious scholarship and for the ‘value of exact learning.’4 A leitmotif throughout the lectures is that the highest examples of literary geniuses, such as Milton and Ruskin, were often also the greatest scholars. Hearn also encouraged the acquisition of a tremendous breadth of learning – each work of literature must be known in relation to all other works of its kind – and he insisted on knowledge of the technical aspects of poetry. Hearn admired enthusiasm in his authors. An enthusiastic tone pervades his own lectures. His recurrent adjectives – ‘astonishing,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘extraordinary,’ ‘magical,’ ‘brimful of life,’ and ‘amazing’ – piqued student interest in his favorite subjects. Hearn wanted his students of literature to develop a deep love of reading.They should especially value authors expressing the ‘true religion of feeling,’and ‘that which is most human.’ Therefore he insisted on the primacy of sympathy in a good reader as well as worthy writers and critics. ‘Really,’Hearn admonishes, ‘unless we can feel some sympathy with the people of the fiction that we read, we can get only small benefit from the reading’ (663). The ‘total absence of all sympathy’ in Maupasssant’s work Hearn deems ‘a terrible feature’ (858). A good

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critic requires not only ‘immense knowledge’ and ‘fine form of character’ but also ‘great capacities of sympathy, tolerance, and impartiality’ (874). We can have no doubts about Hearn’s sympathetic nature. Even phrases such as ‘Someday we shall study the rest together’ (606) or ‘some day I should like to read with you ...’(624) reveal Hearn’s emotional bond with his students. Overall, the values and concepts typical of Hearn’s writings on Japan are prominent as well in his lectures on literature. Often he tells stories to illustrate his points. His life-long passion for folklore lies behind his assertion that it comprises the root-strength of literature and culture. He continually praises passionate sincerity, beauty joined with strength, truth with courage, tenderness in human relationships, and kindness to animals. On this last Hearn, expressing empathy for Ruskin’s condemnation of recreational hunting, said ‘to kill any animal or bird for mere amusement seems to me just as wrong as to kill a man’ (900). Hearn’s tendency to characterize literary influence as the visitation of ghosts derives from his fondness for ghost stories which enable one to enjoy the pleasures and fears of having fantasies realized on the safe pages of a text (937). Hearn thus praises Browning with an unusual image: ‘It is as if we were walking with a magician, through all the cemeteries of Europe – and the magician were to strike grave after grave with his wand, calling up the ghosts of the dead to talk to us. And they talk so much as if they were really alive, that we forget they are ghosts’ (710). The ‘ghostly beauty’ of Shelley’s poetry is another matter since it ‘reminds us of the passionlessness attributed to disembodied spirits’ (736). Always, as in his Japanese tales, there is wonder and reverence before life and its mysteries. Hearn’s sensitivity to the spiritual is grounded in an appreciation for ‘healthy sensuousness’ (218) in literature. In nearly every lecture Hearn compares some aspect of his topic to Japanese life or uses it as a springboard to encourage new developments in Japanese literature. For example, he tells his students that the benefit of literary study is ‘enhanced thought, imagination, feeling, the source of enriching and strengthening Japanese literature of the future.’5 ‘I believe Japanese words can be made to sing in yet unknown ways,’Hearn proclaims (554). But the ‘great movement in Japanese creative work’ depends on being willing to learn from outside sources. Hearn reminds his students that English literature is great because it assimilated and adapted forms and ideas from many foreign literatures (926).

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Hearn continually makes analogies between aspects of English literature and phenomena within his students’ ken and criticizes the teaching of English literature that fails to build on the experiences and knowledge that Japanese students bring to class. For example, Hearn strongly objects to the widespread school use in Japan of Dickens’s ‘Cricket on the Hearth’ since ‘every paragraph in that little story treats of matters which do not exist in this country’ such as the English kitchen (638). Railroad stories would be better. Hearn seems to enjoy his Japanese analogies and references. One senses they reflect his own responses to nature and culture in his adopted country. Literary movements are like great Japanese waves or mountain ranges. Shakespeare rises to heights like Mount Fuji (182). Hearn loves the poems of James Thomson for ‘the ghostly vagueness which enwraps the subject like some beautiful mist of spring’ (354). Classical literature was affected by something ‘like the south wind in Japan’ and broke into ‘beautiful blossoms of Romanticism’ (875). Hearn wants to read to his students a moving poem about a Greek Tree Spirit because ‘it will remind you of some old Japanese legends about tree-spirits, which are quite as beautiful and quite as sad as the Greek story’ (619). Hearn admires samurai virtues.Thus Beowulf’s faithful retainers have the loyalty of samurai warriors and Kingsley’s Hereward has ‘nearly all those fine qualities which belong in Japanese romance to the samurai; and the few weaknesses of the hero only serve to make him appear more human and less impossible’ (818). Students will like Jane Austen’s ‘studies of really sweet characters’ because they ‘remind you of Japanese girls’ (663). To engage his students in Keats’s ‘new note of pathos’ in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ Hearn invokes an image of Japanese pathos: ‘Let us suppose that there is placed before you a little Japanese painting, painted four hundred years ago – some little picture of men, women and children engaged in some pleasant pursuit . . . The hand that painted them is dust . . . and the world has so much changed since then that the dresses and the attitude seem very strange. Strange, yet beautiful – you are peeping at the vision of dead happiness’ (602). To explain the ‘whole spirit’ of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus Hearn cites a ‘Buddhist proverb to the effect that even from that which is not true, truth may be learned’ (679). Ruskin’s ideals of ‘brotherhood’ and ‘brotherly feeling’ between workers and employers and between different social classes, Hearn wonderfully illuminates when he says they should be understood ‘in the Japanese meaning, implying the duties between the elder and the younger brothers’ (898).

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To illustrate a point about surprising signs of Western acculturation, Hearn mentions in passing that European muffs were coming into style in Tokyo (769). Hearn, fretful on a deeper level about the wholesaleWesternization of Japan,is critical of his students when they go overboard in taking up narrow versions of Western preoccupations. He is concerned and sad that too many students scorn imaginative literature and prefer to study what they deem Western-style ‘serious things,’ i.e. ‘history, biology, science’ (924).To counter this mode of thinking, Hearn celebrates the dynamic benefits of reading the kinds of texts he is teaching:‘The power to create is the special power which the study of literature should cultivate,and the power to create can scarcely be developed without a love for both poetry and fiction.’ Hearn thinks his students recognize this truth in regard to‘studies of Japanese literature’but he wants them to extend that understanding to foreign authors (925). Hearn reminds them that all great figures inWestern literary history – Milton, Byron and Ruskin are prime examples – gave themselves from childhood on to imaginative literature. Living with the tragic loss of sight in his left eye and having painful difficulty reading with his right, Hearn may have felt a special affinity with Milton who in his forties went completely blind, yet undaunted went on to write his most famous works. Hearn names Milton ‘the greatest English epic poet’ (276) and ‘the prince of poets’ (277) who wrote ‘by far the most perfect verse in the English language’ (279). Students thus will find it ‘an education to study him – an education in all the values attaching to verses – whether of force, color, hardness, sonority, or anything else’ (279). Milton’s poetry also glows with a ‘very warm sense of beauty, an artistic sensualism or sensuousness’ (282). When judging later poets, such as Wordsworth for example, who was ‘captivated by Milton’ (556), Hearn uses Milton as a touchstone of ‘majestic’ writing and of ‘superiority.’ Earlier, Edward Young had turned his back on Pope, then took Milton as a model and produced ‘wonderful work’ (352). Hearn’s most frequent epithet for Milton is ‘great.’ Paul Murray claims that ‘the poetry which had the most profound impact [upon Hearn] was that of Milton: he read Paradise Lost as a child and was carried away by its tremendous imagination.’6 Hearn’s language in all his writings, Murray asserts, bears the imprint of Milton. Unsurprisingly, Hearn in the Tokyo lectures tells his students that Milton ‘enriched the language immensely’ (280). Ever engaged with authors’ lives, Hearn, perhaps influenced by Sainte-Beuve,

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insists that his students must know the ‘character’ of writers. Milton in his personal life and in the response of his public did not have an easy time of it. When Hearn said that Milton was ‘too passionate and sensitive to always be a good husband and father’ (277) and ‘was too advanced for his age,’ He may have had fellow feeling with his subject. Though Milton’s character was ‘not at all amiable’ he more than compensated by ‘fine things’: ‘courage, love of truth, sense of duty in all matters’ (277), qualities elsewhere Hearn associates with the old samurai virtues. As with Milton, Hearn probably felt on personal grounds a kinship with Byron. Both suffered from a physical handicap, both contracted problematic marriages which only lasted about a year but had protracted and unpleasant repercussions, both were enormously proud of their prowess in swimming, both were constant travellers, both ended their lives far from native places, and both were subject to a lifetime of slurs and misunderstandings. Hearn thought Byron ‘not fairly judged’ either in the poet’s era or in Hearn’s own. All those who take up recent sensationalized biographies of Byron should heed Hearn’s advice to his students: ‘Do not accept mere religious or social declarations about the character of the poet,’ he declares; ‘the deeper nature of Byron was essentially generous and sympathetic and when he follows the inspiration of his deeper nature he gives us the best of what he has.’7 Hearn makes a dramatic and heart-felt case for Byron as a model of passionate writing, independent thinking and freedom from social constraints. Byron, the most popular man of letters in his day, ‘brought into literature an entirely new element of feeling . . . a new spirit of revolt against conventions and against shams of every kind; and he compelled the world to sympathize with the struggles of great minds resisting the old conventional and social restraints’ and ‘obliged nations to think in a new way’ (584). Byron’s ability to get people to question the rightness of their received values shook ‘whole foundations’ of societies.‘And the world knew this and felt him’ (585), a tribute Hearn accords no other writer. For Hearn, Ruskin is the best exemplar of nineteenth-century English ‘romantic prose.’ He wrote the ‘most poetical style of the epoch,’the ‘most musical and beautiful English prose ever written.’ The ‘dazzling splendor’ of this prose is filled with ‘mystery and ghostly beauty.’ ‘See how Ruskin does it!’ exclaims Hearn with admiration; ‘he gets the whole of it in half a page.’ To achieve this (as Hearn often does himself) ‘complete knowledge must be

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acquired.’8 Because of the richness of what Ruskin as a stylist has to offer, Hearn said that ‘one might lecture on Ruskin a whole year without exhausting the subject – the subject is almost too large’ (886). Of no other writer does Hearn say this. He describes Ruskin as the first and greatest of English writers on art, but on nearly all topics Ruskin, the ‘Romantic of Romantics,’ was ‘totally original’ (889). Ruskin also prompts Hearn to one of his lengthiest sustained warnings about the dangers threatening Japanese traditional culture (894–98). Hearn worries about the evils of competitive business standards imported from the West, whereby, in Ruskin’s phrasing, ‘the art of becoming rich is the art of making your neighbor poor.’ Ruskin thought commercial life – business – should be founded on principles of cooperation instead of competition. One learns to love the good and the beautiful by doing good and beautiful things oneself. Ruskin’s code, Hearn explains to his Japanese students, ‘harmonizes with the old ethical teaching of your own country’ (900). In her introduction to Re-Echo, the volume of memoirs by Hearn’s son Kazuo Hearn Koizumi, Nancy Jane Fellers refers to Hearn’s History of English Literature as‘among the best interpretations of English literature available today.’9 ‘Today’ for Mrs Fellers was 1957, but were the History ‘available’ today – which sadly it is not – I believe her opinion would still hold true.Robert Gale,writing in his 2002 Lafcadio Hearn Companion,would agree: ‘Tothis day,’he writes, ‘Hearn’s subjective literary criticism is undervalued.’10 Ten years prior, Carl Dawson in his Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan also praised Hearn’s lectures:‘Writing at a time when the “profession of English literature” floundered in its inauspicious infancy, when Oxford and Cambridge universities were moving slowly and reluctantly to an acceptance of nonphilological approaches to an English curriculum, Hearn offered a rich and informative history of British Literature.’11 Regarding Hearn’s Tokyo lectures, we cannot overemphasize one point: they reveal wonderfully Hearn’s real love of literature, his passionate, life-long love of reading. ‘Any lover of English literature should read the best works over and over many times,’he said.And he was such a ‘lover.’ Although in his lectures Hearn at times drew upon the Victorian critic and man of letters, George Saintsbury, he cautioned his students that ‘Mr. Saintsbury will not teach you how to love the book and the man that wrote it’ (913). Carl Dawson compares Hearn’s two-volume Interpretations of Literature favourably with Saintsbury’s A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature (1896

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and 1901), but the style, tone and character of the writers are vastly different. Saintsbury’s evaluations, though learned and judicious, generally lack that quality Hearn found so essential – sympathy – to say nothing of warmth. Compare the quotes given above from Hearn on Byron with the following from Saintsbury’s Short History of English Literature: ‘No one denies Byron’s power of appeal and excitement; nor, now that time has disinfected his work, as usual, is there much necessity for any complaint against him on the score of morality.’12 Very opposite from Hearn as teacher and parent, Saintsbury ‘never really liked boys’ including his students (one of whom he deafened by boxing him in the ears with a book) and his two sons in whom he took no interest and failed to educate.13 Although Hearn at home was at times no doubt as difficult to live with and as monomaniacal about work as Milton and had testy times with colleagues and employers, his whole being and thus what comes across in his lectures on literature was very far from the Saintsbury type. Hearn had a deep love for his Japanese family as well as for his students, many of whom loved him passionately in return.When Hearn was asked to leave his post at Tokyo University his students rose up in arms.‘Who in Japan is able to teach literature as Mr. Hearn,’ they asked, and risked dismissal in their attempts to have him re-instated.14 Yoné Noguchi summed up their feelings: ‘The existence of the Imperial university of Tokyo is only known to foreigners on account of Lafcadio Hearn the writer. What has the university to be proud of if he goes?The university is nothing.’15 Hearn had inspired his students with a passion for literature, a passion reflected in the ardent and widespread study of English literature all over Japan.After Professor John Clubbe gave a lecture on Byron recently at Meisei University, a student asked him earnestly, ‘What are your favourite poems by Byron?’ That is a Hearn-like question, the right one: it means, ‘What do you love?’ Affection, John Ruskin taught, should be the great social bond. Learning is best achieved when students love the subject at hand. Great teachers can inspire that love, a love that once kindled grows stronger through sustained discipline and study. Unfortunately, in too many American departments of literature today professors do not base their teaching and scholarship on a love of literature. How many teachers would be (as was Hearn) moved to tears by ‘the best student paper’ and reward it (as Hearn did) with money from their own pocket?16 Hearn told his students that ‘to be a critic of literature today, one

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must be both a very learned man and a very remarkable man’ (908) and that ‘the greatest genius is the greatest teacher.’17 Both these statements I feel describe Hearn himself. We are perhaps accustomed to experience Hearn’s genius throughout the great books he wrote about Japan, but reading his Tokyo lectures we also experience that genius. Like Byron reflecting on the as yet unsung merits of what would be his greatest poem, Don Juan, Hearn demands of us as we read his lectures and all his writings, ‘Is it not life?’18

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Bibliography

Arnold, Sir Edwin. Seas and Lands. (1891) London: Longmans, Green, 1899. Bacon, Alice Mabel. Japanese Girls and Women (1891). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919. Balzac, Honoré de. Illusions Perdues (1843) Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Lafont, 1980. Bird, Isabella L. Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. (1880) London: John Murray, 1888. Bisland, E. The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906. —— (editor) The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn. London: Constable, 1911. Bloom, Clive, ed. Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Brahimi, Denise. Présentation de Kwaïdan: Histoires étranges. Paris: Minerve, 1988. Bronner, Simon J. Introduction. Lafcadio Hearn’s America: Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials. Lexington KY: UP of Kentucky, 2002. Carter, Angela. Black Venus. Burning, pp. 231–244.

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—— Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (1995). London: Penguin, 1997). —— The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works. Ed. Mark Bell. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996. —— Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings. London: Chatto and Windus, 1997. Clapp, Susannah. E-mail. 16 July, 2004. Cowley, Malcolm. Introduction. The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Ed. Henry Goodman. New York: Citadel, 1949. Crofts, Charlotte. ‘Anagrams of Desire’: Angela Carter’s Writing for Radio, Film and Television. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Davis, F. Hadland. The Land of the Yellow Spring. London: Herbert and Daniel, 1910. Dresser, Christopher. Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures. London: Longmans, Green, 1882. Fraser, Mrs Hugh. A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan. London: Hutchinson, 1904. Frost, O. W. Young Hearn. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1958. Gerster, Robin. Legless in Ginza. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999. Gibbs, Raymond W. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hasegawa, Yoji. A Walk in Kumamoto: The Life and Times of Setsu Koizumi – Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Wife. Folkestone: Global Oriental, 1997. Hearn, Lafcadio. Adventures of Walter Schnaffs and Other Stories By Guy de Maupassant translated by Lafcadio Hearn (ed. Albert Mordell). Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1931. —— A Japanese Miscellany (1901). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922. —— An American Miscellany. Ed. Albert Mordell). New York: Dodd, Mead, 1924. —— Chita: A Memory of Last Island. New York: Harper, 1889. —— Fantastics and Other Fancies. Ed. Charles Woodward Hutson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914. —— Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897). Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1971. —— Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1976. —— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904). Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1959.

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Bibliography

—— Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896). Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972. —— Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, With Sundry Cobwebs (1902). Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1971. —— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1971. —— Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (1895). Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972. —— Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Ed. Henry Goodman. New York: Citadel, 1949. —— Shadowings (1900). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922. —— Some Chinese Ghosts (1887). New York Modern Library, 1927. —— Stray Leaves from Strange Literature (1884). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912. —— Two Years in the French West Indies (1900). New York: Harper, 1923. —— Youma:the Story of aWest-Indian Slave. NewYork:Harper,1890. Hearn Society (editors). Gleanings of the Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. 2 vols. Tokyo: Yushodo, 1990. Hirakawa, Sukehiro (editor). Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn: Japanese Legends, Life and Culture. Folkestone: Global Oriental, 1997. Iyer, Pico. The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Kennard, Nina H. Lafcadio Hearn. New York: D. Appleton, 1912. Kneeland, H. T. ‘Lafcadio Hearn’s Brother’ Atlantic Monthly, CXXXI (Jan. 1923) 20–27. La Farge, John. An Artist’s Letters from Japan. New York: The Century, 1897. Lemoine, Bernadette. Exotisme spirituel et esthétique dans la vie et l’oeuvre de Lafcadio Hearn. Poitier: Didier Erudition, 1988. MacNeice, Louis. Collected Poems. Ed. E. R. Dodds. London: Faber, 1966. Noguchi, Yone. Lafcadio Hearn in Japan.Tokyo: ‘Ars’ Bookshop. 1923. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Robert, Marcel. Lafcadio Hearn. 2 vols. Tokyo: Hokuseido. 1950. Sladen, Douglas. The Japs at Home. London: Hutchinson, 1894. Smet, Joseph de. Lafcadio Hearn, l’Homme et l’Oeuvre. Paris: Mercure de France, 1911. Smollett, Tobias. Travels Through France and Italy (1766). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

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Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950. Thornton, Naoko Fuwa. ‘The Japanese Woman as a Representation of the Nation: Lafcadio Hearn’s Ironic Colonialism,’ Hikaku Bungaku: Journal of Comparative Literature. 38 (1995). Tinker, Edward L. Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1924. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. London: Macmillan, 1983.

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Preface 1. As for Hearn’s centennial celebration at the Komaba campus of Tokyo University, see Ralph Cassell’s detailed article ‘Hundreds gather to fete Hearn a century after his death’ in the Asahi Shimbun, Saturday-Sunday, 2-3 October 2004, p. 38. 2. Basil Hall Chamberlain writes in his posthumous edition of Things Japanese (1939, p. 296): ‘His (Hearn’s) life was a succession of dreams which ended in nightmare.’ 3. It was George M. Gould who successfully propagated the notion of Hearn’s ‘morbidity’ by publishing Concerning Lafcadio Hearn (Philadelphia: Jacobs, 1908). 4. As for Christian missionaries’ general attitude towards native religions of the Orient, Captain L. L. Janes’ letters to Ise (Yokoi Tokio) are most revealing. See F. G. Notehelfer: American Samurai (Princeton: Princeton University Press), chapter 11. 5. The literary critic Nakano Yoshio’s total condemnation of Hearn’s writings immediately after WWII is a representative example of the kind. He later modified his view. See Nakano Yoshio ‘kaisetsu’ to Koizumi Yakumo shū in the series Meiji bungaku zenshū, (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1970).

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6. The episode is vividly described in the introductory chapter of Saeki Shōichi: Shintō no kokoro (Tokyo: Nihon kyōbunsha, 1989).

Chapter 1 1. Muriel Détrie, ‘Victor Segalen et Lafcadio Hearn, deux exotes en Extrême-Orient, in Victor Segalen: Actes du Colloque de Brest, p. 105. 2. There are many books and articles that deal with the problem of ‘otherness’. See, for example, Todorov, Nous et les autres (Paris, Seuil, 1989). 3. Denise Brahimi, borrowing this expression of exote from Segalen, used it for Hearn in her introduction to a new French translation of Kokoro (Paris: Minerve, 1987). According to Brahimi ‘la meilleure définition de Lafcadio Hearn au Japon, c’est Victor Segalen qui nous la fournit, dans ses variations sur le thème de “exote”.’ 4. Segalen was celebrated not only in France where a colloqué was held in his native port-city of Brest but also in China where an international conference on comparative literature was held in Beijing University in 2001 under the general title of ‘Esthétique du Divers’, notion derived from Segalen, Essai sur l’Exotisme, une esthétique du divers (Fontfroide: Bibliothèque & Littéraire, 1995). 5. The publication in English of Hirakawa ed., Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn (Folkestone, Kent: Global Books, 1997) and the publication in Japanese of Hirakawa ed., Koizumi Yakumo jiten (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2000) show the level of Japanese interest in Hearn. 6. See ‘Victor Segalen et Lafcadio Hearn’ by Détrie, p. 111. 7. Stephen Snyder treats skilfully Nagai Kafū and his reading and application of Pierre Loti in Snyder, Fictions of Desire (University of Hawaii Press, 2000). Snyder, however, skips Kafū’s admiration for Hearn. 8. As for Japanese writers’ appreciation of Hearn, see Hayakawa Kazuo’s articles on them in Hirakawa ed., Koizumi Yakumo jiten (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2000). 9. A picture of Chamberlain’s ‘girl’ was taken by Percival Lowell and discovered by Miyazaki Masaaki, Japanese translator of Lowell, Noto, an unexplored corner of Japan. 10. Chamberlain’s Letter to Hearn dated 26 Aug. 1891.

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11. Arthur Kunst, Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), p. 126. 12. Emile Legouis & Louis Cazamian, History of English Literature, (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926), p. 1267. 13. It was George Gould who by writing a book Concerning Lafcadio Hearn (1908) started a critical attack against Hearn and his morbidity. 14. The Okakura Tensin’s Complete Works (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 231-234. 15. For example Mori Ryō writes ‘Rafukadio Hān to Nihon no kokoro’ in his Koizumi Yakumo no bungaku (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 1980) pp. 59-82. 16. The philosphy scholar Tokunaga Makoto of Osaka University found in Adorno’s archives the unpublished manuscripts of the young Adorno. 17. There are two ‘En Voyage’ by the same author. The piece in question is in Maupassant, Contes et Nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), Vol 1 de la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, p. 810. 18. This introduction, later renamed ‘Lafcadio Herun-san’, is included in Malcom Cowley, A Many-Windowed House (1970). 19. Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956). 20. As for ‘Lafcadio Hearn: towards an Irish interpretation’, see my introduction to Paul Murray, A Fantastic Journey, the Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (Folkestone, Kent: Japan Library, 1993), pp. 1-12. 21. Lafcadio Hearn, Two Years in the French West Indies (Interlink publishers, 2001), Foreword ‘Lafcadio Hearn: The Magnificent Traveler’ by Raphaël Confiant. 22. Paul Claudel, probably under Hearn’s influence, showed a remarkable understanding of the religious atmosphere of Japan in some chapters of his l’Oiseau Noir dans le Soleil Levant, now in Paul Claudel, Œuvres en Prose (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).

Chapter 2 All quotations of works of Lafcadio Hearn, except his lectures and some letters, are from The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn in sixteen volumes, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1922). Pages refer to those of the volumes of this edition or those of the Tuttle paperback edition that is a reprint of the former.

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1. Lafcadio Hearn was born of an Anglo-Irish father and Greek mother on 27 June 1850. His nationality was at first British. He married a Japanese, Koizumi Setsuko, and in 1896 became a naturalized Japanese under the name of Koizumi Yakumo. However, as a writer he mainly wrote for American readers. As the word ‘multi-national writer’ is not yet in common usage, to simplify the matter, I call Hearn an American writer. His English spellings are generally American, and when Hearn writes ‘we’, it means ‘we Westerners’. 2. In letters sent to Kawabata Yasunari immediately after WWII Mishima highly appreciated Lafcadio Hearn whom he read in Japanese translation. In his correspondence with Kawabata, Mishima also admired Takeyama Michio’s essay, ‘Girisha nite’ (In Greece) and expressed his wish to visit Greece one day. That wish was fulfilled in 1952 and Mishima’s Greek fever was at its peak in 1953. In June 1954 Mishima published Shiosai (The Sound of Waves, tr. by Meredith Weatherby, 1956), which as Mishima himself admitted, was based on Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe translated by Kure Shigeichi. By the way, it was Lafcadio Hearn who had highly recommended this Greek pastoral romance to a Japanese readership in one of his university lectures at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hearn read it in Amyot’s French translation. 3. A part of my Dublin lecture was printed as an Introduction to Paul Murray’s A Fantastic Journey (Japan Library, 1993) under the title ‘Lafcadio Hearn: Towards an Irish Interpretation’. 4. Hearn’s letter to his brother is quoted in many of his biographies. It was first published in Kneeland’s book pp. 26–27. The well-known passage is as follows: ‘Whatever there is of good in me – came from that dark race-soul of which we know so little. My love of right, my hate of wrong; my admiration for what is beautiful or true; – my capacity for faith in man or woman; – my sensitiveness to artistic things which give me whatever little success I have; – even that language power whose physical sign is in the large eyes of both of us, – came from Her. It is the mother who makes us.’ 5. ‘The Dream of a Summer Day’ is included in the volume Out of the East.Hearn’s recollection comes at the end of section IV of the travel sketch (The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. VII, p. 20). 6. It is interesting to note that Hearn’s first novel Chita deals with multi-lingual situations. The geographical setting is the Île

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Dernière off the Louisiana coast, and among the fishermen there are those who speak Italian and also Sicilian. Their conversations are often quoted in their original tongues. 7. Though Hearn’s knowledge of Japanese was poor, especially as to speaking and writing, Hearn’s ability as to listening and understanding should not be underestimated. It should be remembered that Hearn and his Japanese wife Setsuko always communicated in Japanese. 8. Youma, section II, The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. IV, p. 282. 9. ‘Some Strange Experience’, American Miscellany, ed. by A. Mordell p. 62. 10. As to literary analysis of these retold stories, see Hirakawa: Koizumi Yakumo – Seiyōdasshutsu no yume (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1980). 11. See Hirakawa: Koizumi Yakumo to kamigami no sekai (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 1988). 12. See Hirakawa: Orientaru na yume (Chikuma shobō, 1996). 13. To understand fully the subject ‘Hearn and Greece’, Hearn’s references to Greece and Greek literature should be examined not only in his writings but also in his lectures at Tokyo University. I refer to several representative examples in note 17. 14. In my introduction to Paul Murray: A Fantastic Journey I wrote as follows: ‘.. . what is interesting about the use of the adjective “Greek” by Hearn, and to a certain extent by Fustel de Coulanges himself, is that it often means “pre-Christian”. The French historian depicts European society before it was christianized or before ancient cults were eradicated and their gods expelled. In spite of his rather weak knowledge of things Greek, Hearn was easily able to empathize with the ‘Greek’ world as it was described by Fustel de Coulanges, because it was a world full of ghosts, and that world haunted by the spirits of the dead was in many ways similar to the Celtic world.’ 15. The Greek word used in the novel Chita is Πνεύμα, its meaning is given in English as ‘the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost or the Great Blue Soul of the Unknown.’(The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn vol, IV, p. 155). There are of course other Greek words quoted in Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation. 16. Hearn discusses Charles Kingsley in one of his lectures on The History of English Literature at Tokyo University. He tells there his own recollection of his childhood when he first read The Heroes or Greek Fairy Tales.

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17. Among his lectures most interesting for their references to Greek matters are ‘On Tree Spirits in Western Poetry’, ‘Some Poems about Insects’, ‘Poems on Night, the Moon and the Stars’ in Interpretation of Literature, and ‘Some Poems on Death’, ‘Some Fairy Literature’, ‘Ionica’, ‘Old Greek Fragments’ in Life and Literature, and ‘Insects and Greek Poetry’ in Some English Eccentrics, and ‘Some English Tree Poetry’, ‘Poems Old and New, Not English, in Relation to the Moon’ in On Poetry and Poets. 18. The story of Admetus and Alkestis is told by Hearn in section IV of ‘With Kyūshū Students’, which is included in Out of the East (The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. VII, pp. 56–58). 19. The list of books related with Greek literature, Mythology, History and Language preserved in the Hearn Library of Toyama University is as follows. The Tragedies of Aeschylus (tr. T.E. Buckley), The Plays of Euripides (tr. E. P. Coleridge), The Greek Anthology (tr. G. Burges), Anthologie Grecque (tr. Fr. Jacobs), The Greek Romances of Helodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius (tr. Rowland Smith), Herodotus (tr. H. Cary), Longus: Daphnis et Chloé. The Iliad of Homer (tr. A. Lang), The Odyssey of Homer (tr. S.H. Butcher), The Extant Odes of Pindar (tr. E. Meyers), The Odes of Pindar (tr. D. W. Turner), Sappho (tr. H. T. Wharton), Xenophon: The March of the Ten Thousand (tr. H. G. Dakyns); Aesop’s Fables; T. Keightley: The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy; J.B. Bury: A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, G. Grote: A History of Greece from the earliest Period to the Close of the Generation contemporary with Alexander the Great; Jules David: Méthode pour étudier la langue grecque moderne, 2e édition, Paris: Robée et Hingray, 1827. 20. According to the memoirs (Kaikyūroku, 1943, p 240) of Inoue Tetsujirō, the dean of the faculty of letters, who removed Hearn from the post of Professor of English for a new Japanese returnee from London, Natsume Sōseki, Raphael von Koeber sometimes told Hearn malicious jokes (giftiger Spass). 21. Kojiki was translated into English by B. H.Chamberlain in 1882. It is now available in Tuttle’s paperback edition. 22. The scene is described in section III of ‘The Chief City of the Province of the Gods’ included in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, (The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. V, pp. 141–143). 23. Hearn’s reference to ‘the drawing of some Greek or Etruscan artist’ appears in ‘Bon-Odori’ (Glimpses, p. 133), and another to

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‘the feet of figures painted on Greek vases’ in section V of ‘The Chief City of the Province of the Gods’(Glimpses, p. 145). 24. Japan: an Attempt at Interpretaion (The Writngs of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. XII, p. 9). 25. Ibid, p. 15. 26. Hearn writes in chapter III of Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation: ‘The evolutional history of ancestor-worship has been very much the same in all countries; and that of the Japanese cult offers remarkable evidence in support of Herbert Spencer’s exposition of the law of religious development.’ However, not only Herbert Spencer but also many philosophers of history such as Hegel, Guizot, Marx, Buckle, and also the Japanese thinker Fukuzawa under their influence, talked about the general law of development of history – development not only of religious aspect but also of many other aspects of mankind as well. 27. Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, p. 15. 28. Hearn seems to have read the book of Fustel de Coulanges before coming to Japan, as he gave the name de Coulanges to one of the venerable white men in his first novel Chita. La Cité Antique, édition Hachette 1898, now preserved in the Hearn Library, was apparently bought by Hearn after his second reading of this book in Kumamoto. The book was carefully read by Hearn: there are some thirty-eight underlines. 29. About Fustel de Coulanges’ profound influence on Japanese jurists, see Hirakawa: Koizumi Yakumo to kamigami no sekai, pp. 45–90. 30. This part derives from the episode of Izanagi-no-mikoto and Izanami-no-mikoto. 31. By the way, the first name of the French historian is Numa- Denis. The abbreviation of his family name should be Fustel and not de Coulanges as Hearn used to write. 32. Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation, pp. 26–29. 33. Fustel de Coulanges is known among French historians for his ‘véracité et la sévérité de sa méthode’(Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré). I am, however, wondering if the French historian was not influenced by his own observations of French peasant life with its latent animistic traditions, when he wrote La Cité Antique. 34. T. Doi: The Anatomy of Dependence, published by Kodansha international in 1973, is ‘perhaps the first book by a Japanese

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trained in psychiatry to have an impact on Western psychiatric thinking’. (Ezra Vogel). To those who are interested in the psychological problem Doi’s Understanding Amae: The Japanese Concept of Need-Love (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2005) is most helpful. 35. ‘My Guardian Angel’ is included in The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. XIII, p. 16. 36. Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation, p. 2. 37. After WWII North American Japanese studies were under the strong leadership of scholars such as Edwin Reischauer, brought up in the American School, Tokyo, and E. H. Norman, educated in the Canadian Academy, Kobe. 38. Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, p. 3. 39. About Nikolai and his evangelical work in Japan, see Nakamura Kennosuke: Senkyōshi Nikorai to Meiji Nippon (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1996). 40. Japanese Christians have never reached 1% of the total population. 41. Kinya Tsuruta, in his paper ‘A Pilgrimage to the West and Return’ published in the 1999 issue of the Mugendai, suspects that Tanizaki’s grandfather’s love of women had something to do with his conversion to Christianity from Nichiren Buddhism. He worshipped the image of the Virgin Mary every day. In his childhood, Tanizaki had a premonition that he might one day be like his grandfather. Here is a passage from his recollection of his childhood ‘Yōshō-jidai’: ‘The figure of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Christ was quite different from the family Buddhist altar my grandmother worshipped. The deep love and sympathy in Mary’s gaze inspired an indescribable sense of devotion within me, and I found it difficult to leave Mary’s image. I felt I understood, if vaguely, my grandfather’s feelings. On the one hand, I found the whole thing weird, but on the other I felt I would be like him one day.’ (Tanizaki Junichirō Zenshū, vol. 17, p. 64). The English translation is Tsuruta’s. Some people would not like this Mary ‘worship’ and criticize its sentimental mush. However, the reality of the religious life in early converts must have been like that. Chapter 3 1. Lafcadio Hearn: ‘Of the Eternal Feminine’ in Out of the East, The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.), p. 79.

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2. Among the recent publication that repeats the erroneous information is Jonathan Cott: Wandering Ghost (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 394. It says: On March 5. 1903, he was forced out of Tokyo University on the grounds that as a Japanese citizen, he was not entitled to a ‘foreigner’s salary’. 3. Hearn talked from his own experiences as a writer; that is the reason, for example, why Hearn appreciates the style of Rudyard Kipling who ‘never uses more adjectives than he can help, and never uses a weak one.’ See Lafcadio Hearn: On Art, Literature and Philosophy, (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1933), p. 378. 4. Hirakawa Sukehiro: Rafukadio Haan, (Kyoto: Mineruva shobō, 2004) pp. 279-313. 5. Chamberlain wrote this for the first time in the 1898 edition of his Things Japanese. It was in the article ‘Books on Japan,’ 3rd (1898), 4th (1902) and 5th (1905) editions and in the article ‘Lafcadio Hearn,’ 6th (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1939) edition. 6. Basil Hall Chamberlain: Things Japanese, 3rd (1898), 4th (1902) and 5th (1905) editions, article ‘books on Japan’. 7. A remarkable exception was Ernest Fenollosa. In comparing Hearn with Chamberlain, Fenollosa wrote ‘sympathy versus ridicule’. See Yamaguchi Seiichi: Fenorosa (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1982), vol. 2, p. 145. 8. For example, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, one of the Hearn paperbacks that Charles E. Tuttle Co. publishes, has the quoted passage printed on its back cover. 9. Koizumi Setsuko: Omoide no ki was included in Tanabe Ryūji’s biography of Hearn, Koizumi Yakumo published in 1914 (Tokyo: Waseda daigaku shuppanbu). Some parts of it were directly translated from the manuscript into English by Yone Noguchi in his Lafcadio Hearn in Japan (1910). It was translated also by Paul Kiyoshi Hisada (1918). The latter has been reissued by Folcroft Library Editions. Unfortunately Hisada’s translation contains many mistakes. 10. The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn with an introduction by Malcom Cowley (New York: The Citadel Press, 1949), p. 15. 11. It is only in this English version that the phrase exists: ‘He said they (Japanese ghost stories) reminded him of the legends he had heard in Ireland when he was young.’The Japanese version of Omoide no ki does not mention this, although the recollection referred to in this English version is most plausible.

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12. Narcissistic Japanese who believe that Hearn became Koizumi Yakumo, because he was a Japanophile are, I am afraid, mistaken. At that time Hearn felt a strong nostalgia for the West. In ‘A Conservative’ Hearn described with a rare precision the psychology of a Japanese intellectual’s ‘return to Japan.’ Hearn could sympathize with him, because he himself felt an irresistible desire to ‘return to the West’. Tokyo University gave him the chance to intellectually satiate his desire: Hearn read again with care Occidental literature, by preparing lectures on it. 13. The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, with an introduction by Malcom Cowley (New York: The Citadel Press, 1949), p. 15. 14. Thirty original Japanese texts of the ghost stories are reproduced in Hirakawa ed., Koizumi Yakumo: Kaidan, Kidan (Tokyo; Kōdansha, gakujutsubunko, 1990). 15. Koizumi Kazuo: Chichi Koizumi Yakumo, (Tokyo: Oyama shoten, 1950), p. 117. 16. H. C. Andersen: Fairy Tales from Hans Christian Andersen, tr. by Mrs E. Lucas & illustrated by T. C. & W.Robinson (London: J. M. Dent & Co. 1899). Hearn bought this book later in Tokyo, as he had given Andersen’s Stories for Household,of probably a different translator, to Yokogi 15 July 1891. 17. It was Makino Yōko who noticed the similarities of the impressions of the two stories’ endings in Makino Yōko: Rafukadio Haan (Tokyo: Chuōkōron-sha, 1992), pp. 78-79. 18. Hearn must have talked often of Andersen to his son at home. Koizumi Kazuo later chose Andersen as the topic of his graduation essay at the Department of English, Waseda University. It was, however, thirteen years after Hearn’s death. 19. The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn with an introduction by Malcom Cowley (New York: Citadell Press, 1949), p. 1.

Chapter 4 1. ‘Jizō’, in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, vol. 5 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (NewYork: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), pp. 57–58. 2. As for the Japanese version analysing ‘Jizō as seen by Hearn and Claudel’, see Hirakawa Sukehiro, ‘Hān to Kurōderu ga mita kami no kuni’ in Hikaku bungaku kenkyū, vol. 85 (Tokyo: Suzusawa shoten, 2005), pp. 4–37. 3. Koizumi Kazuo, Papa Yakumo o omou, (Tokyo: Keiseisha, 1931). This book was translated into English by Yoneko Yanagisawa

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as Kazuo Koizumi, Father and I, Memories of Lafcadio Hearn, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1935). In this chapter the English translations are Hirakawa’s, if not mentioned otherwise. 4. O. W. Frost, Young Hearn, (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1958), p. 47. The problem with this passage is that no source is mentioned. 5. Chita, Part I, section 2, vol. 4 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, pp. 149-150. 6. Letter to Page Baker quoted in Life and Letters 1, vol. 13 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, pp. 81–82. There is a sketch by Hearn of a Gentleman’s bathing-house reproduced on p. 81. 7. Chita, Part III, section 2, vol. 4 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, pp. 221–229. 8. Chita, Part III, section 2, vol. 4 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, pp. 231–232. 9. Chita, Part III, section 2, vol. 4 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, pp. 232–233. 10. Sembokuya Kōichi, Jinsei no kyōshi Rafukadio Hān (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 1996) 11. Hugo’s poem, translated into English by Jefferson Humphries in Lafcadio Hearn, Chita, ed., Delia Labarre (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), p. 2. I am the vast fray – Reptilian, for I am a wave; winged, For I am wind, – Force and flight, hatred and life, Immense swell, pursued And pursuing. 12. Koizumi Setsuko, ‘Omoide no ki’ in Hirakawa ed., Koizumi Yakumo, kaisō to kenkyū (Tokyo: Kōdansha gakujutsubunko, 1992) p. 32. All quotations from Koizumi Setsuko’s reminiscences are Hirakawa’s translations. 13. ‘Omoide no ki’ p. 33. 14. ‘Omoide no ki’ p. 33. 15. ‘Omoide no ki’ p. 58 and p. 68. 16. Tamura Toyohisa (1866-?) was a teacher at the Middle School of Matsue when Hearn revisited the city in the summer 1896. It was Tamura who recommended Hearn to go to Yaidzu for swimming.

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17. Koizumi Kazuo, Papa Yakumo o omou, pp. 282–283. 18. ‘Otokichi’s Daruma’ in Japanese Miscellany, vol. 10 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, pp. 380‒391. 19. Chita, Part III, section 2, vol. 4 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn,p.225. 20. Koizumi Kazuo, Papa Yakumo o omou, p. 280. Hearn said: ‘Anata umi o shirimashō; umi to tomodachi ni narimashō.’ in his Herun-san Japanese. 21. Koizumi Kazuo, Papa Yakumo o omou, p. 342. 22. Kazuo Koizumi, Father and I, pp. 99–100. 23. Koizumi Kazuo, Papa Yakumo o omou, pp. 410–411. 24. Letter to Minnie Atkinson, September 1, 1901, reproduced in Herun, Nr. 25 (Matsue: Yakumo-kai, 1988), pp. 116–117. 25. Koizumi Kazuo, Papa Yakumo o omou, p. 280. 26. Hearn’s letters written in Japanese are to be found in Muramatsu Shinichi, Reikon no tankyūsha Koizumi Yakumo (Shizuoka, Shizuoka shinbun-sha, 1994). 27. Chita, Part III, section 2, vol. 4 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, p. 231. I have changed a word: in the original it is ‘Chita’ instead of ‘you’.

Chapter 5 1. The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol.VI, p. 188. 2. Paul Murray, A Fantastic Journey, the Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (Folkestone, Kent: Japan Library, 1993), p. 35.

Chapter 6 1. ‘A Conservative’, in Kokoro, vol. 7 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), pp. 393–422. Page numbers shown in parenthesis refer to this edition. 2. ‘Japan’s Turn to the West’, chapter 7, in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. V, ed. by Marius Jansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3. The model is Amenomori Nobushige (1858–1906). His ‘notable contribution’ to the Atlantic Monthly are ‘the Japanese Spirit’ in October 1904 and ‘Lafcadio Hearn, the Man’ in October 1905. As for Amenomori, see Hirakawa S., Yaburareta Yūjō – Hān to Chenbaren no nihon rikai (Tokyo: Shinchō-sha, 1987), pp. 147–300. 4. First let me explain how I have earlier approached the problem and how I am going to deal with it in this chapter.

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Marius Jansen, the editor of the Cambridge History, named that part of the chapter ‘Return to Japan. I analysed the phenomenon as exemplarily described by Hearn. Although volume V of the Cambridge History of Japan was published in 1989, in order to meet the terms of my contract with the publisher, I had written that chapter as early as 1980. As I grew older, I kept on finding things new, so my interpretations have inevitably changed. I would like to take this opportunity to amend the shortcomings of my former views and to put the problem in a wider, dual-focus perspective. 5. Kanzō Uchimura, How I Became a Christian, Uchimura Kanzō zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1933), vol. 15. Uchimura’s reactions beginning from his first impressions of Christendom to his idealization of his homeland are extremely interesting. Uchimura’s autobiography is written in English. 6. About Natsume Sōseki’s ambivalent attitude towards the West, see Hirakawa S., Natsume Sōseki – hi-seiyō no kutō (Tokyo: Shinchō-sha, 1976). 7. About Takamura Kōtarō’s ambivalent attitude towards his father and the West, see Hirakawa S., Beikoku daitōryō eno tegami (Tokyo: Shinchō-sha, 1996), pp. 167–307. 8. As Ishihara Kikutarō, who was Hearn’s student at Matsue, was also a close friend of Ōgai’s, there is a possibility that Ōgai knew something about Hearn’s ‘A Conservative’ from Ishihara. 9. About Abe Jirō (1883–1959) and his return to Japan, see Hirakawa S., Wakon yōsai no keifu (Tokyo: Kawade- shobōshinsha, 1971), pp. 64–68. 10. About Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942) and his return to Japan, see Hagiwara, Nihon eno kaiki, first published in 1938 and especially ‘Shinpo shichō no handōsei’ in Mu karano kōsō, both in Hagiwara Sakutarō zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1975), vol. 10. 11. About Takeyama Michio (1903-1984) and his return to Japan, see‘watakushi no bunka henreki’,Takeyama Michio Chosakushū, (Tokyo: Fukutake-shoten, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 305–314. 12. 13 Hofmannsthal, H. von, Prosa II (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1959), pp. 104–107. 13. However, as I could not rewrite the section which I have quoted and the only thing I was allowed to do was to add a short footnote to the Cambridge History, indicating that for a

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detailed analysis of ‘A Conservative’, see Hirakawa Sukehiro, ‘Nihon kaiki no kiseki – uzumoreta shisōka, Amenomori Nobushige,’ Shinchō (April 1986), pp. 6–106. Moreover, I did not feel an absolute necessity to change what I had written, since the mental growth of Amenomori, as described by Hearn, fundamentally follows the track common to many Japanese intellectuals. Still, I would like to specify some newly found facts and newly opened views on this occasion. 14. As for Amenomori, see note 3, and also Yamashita Eiichi Gurifisu to Fukui (Griffis and Fukui, published by Fukuiken Kyōdoshi Konwakai). 15. Though the name of the work in question is not given in Amenomori’s ‘Lafcadio Hearn, the Man’, I guess it is ‘A Conservative’ to which Hearn refers in his letter quoted in Amenomori’s Atlantic Monthly article. 16. The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. 14, p. 205. 17. Ibid, p. 169. 18. Ibid, p. 187. 19. Ibid, p. 212. 20. Ibid, p. 197. 21. Ibid, p. 298. 22. Ibid, p. 268. 23. Ibid, p. 308. 24. Ibid, p. 313. 25. Ibid, p. 311. 26. Ibid, p. 321 27. Ibid, pp.331–332. 28. Yuzo Ota, ‘Lafcadio Hearn: Japan’s Problematic Interpreter’. Though I do not agree with Ota’s arguments, I included his article in Hirakawa ed., Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn (Folkestone, Kent: Global Books, 1997), as it represents a typical negative view on Hearn. 29. Ibid, p. 213. 30. Ibid. 31. As to the two kinds of reactions, see my analysis in Hirakawa, Wakon yōsai no keifu,pp. 28–31.

Chapter 7 1. Allan Massie, Byron’s Travels (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988) is a good study, divided into three parts of ‘The Adventurer,’ ‘The Exile’ and ‘The Hero.’

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2. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäum, frag. 247. 3. Ōgai zenshū, (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1973), vol. XIX, pp. 49–51. There is also a partial Chinese translation of Byron’s Manfred by Mori Ōgai. Ibid pp. 52–57. 4. Lafcadio Hearn, Interpretations of Literature, chapter IX Byron (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1916), p. 114. 5. Ibid. 6. E. G. Beck, ‘Letters of Lafcadio Hearn to His Brother,’ The English Journal, Vol. XX (1931), p. 288. 7. I personally prefer to ‘The Isles of Greece’ the sunset description from Don Juan which is quoted by Hearn in his lecture ‘Culling from Byron’ (Interpretations of Literature, Chapter X, pp. 129–130). It is about the time when Don Juan and the young Greek girl that had saved his life suddenly feel drawn to each other, and kiss: They looked up to the sky, whose floating glow Spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright; They gazed upon the glittering sea below, Whence the broad moon rose circling into sight; They heard the waves crash, and the wind so low, And saw each other’s dark eyes darting light Into each other. According to Hearn, ‘it would be the most beautiful of all Byron’s stanzas but for a slight defect of construction . . . It is the repetition of “each other” that spoils the perfection of the stanza. Tennyson would never have been guilty of such careless writing. But Tennyson could not have improved on the splendid use of simple adjective – every one like a flash of differently coloured light. How beautiful is the word ‘glittering’ here, as describing the dancing of the light upon the rippling sea – for glittering is a word that moves – not a stationary word like ‘shine.’ And the simple adjective ‘broad’ has only been used with equal power by one other English poet of that age; and that one poet happened to be Coleridge. But Coleridge applied it to the face of the setting sun. Byron first applied it with grand effect to the rising moon.’ In his lifetime Hearn seemed to have no idea of publishing his lectures at Tokyo University. His lectures, which were dictated to his students, were posthumously published, edited by Professor Erskine of Columbia University in collaboration with

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Hearn’s Japanese students who collated their notebooks. It is the more surprising that his lectures were so well made at the stage of dictation. According to his students Hearn came to the classroom without any written paper in hand except the quotations. 8. ‘Dream of a Summer’s Day,’ Out of the East, in Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1922), VII, pp. 17–18. Readers generally believe that this recollection of Hearn’s childhood is based on his memory. Is it not possible that Hearn’s reading of other writers’ works such as the stanza from Byron’s Don Juan with its ‘broad moon’ had exercised a certain influence on Hearn’s description of the magical time ‘in which the Sun and the Moon were larger and brighter than now’? 9. The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (The Citadel Press, 1949, reprinted from First Carol Publishing Group, 1991), pp. 1–2. 10. Lafcadio Hearn, Interpretations of Literature. Chapter IX Byron, p. 123. 11. Ibid. 12. Lafcadio Hearn, Interpretations of Literature. Chapter IX Byron, p. 116. 13. Edmund Gosse, Silhouettes, p. 226. 14. The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (The Citadel Press, reprinted from First Carol Publishing Group, 1991), p. 15. 15. Edmund Blunden, ‘Lafcadio Hearn, Teacher,’ Today’s Japan, January, 1959. 16. Lafcadio Hearn, Writings from Japan (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984) 17. Miyazaki Masaaki, Shirarezaru japanorojisuto, Rōeru no shōgai (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1999), p. 59. Miyazaki showed me another picture of ‘Chamberlain’s girl’ taken by Lowell, which is not in the book. It was Lowell who wrote who the girl was on the back of the picture. 18. Oscar Lewis, Hearn and His Biographers (San Francisco: The Westgate Press, 1930). The biographers in question are Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore, Henry Watkin, Milton Bronner, George Gould and others. 19. Lafcadio Hearn, ‘Culling from Byron’ Interpretations of Literature, Chapter X, pp. 130–131, and p. 135. 20. Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation, Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. XII, p. 4. 21. Lafcadio Hearn, Youma,Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. IV, p. 282.

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22. Leslie A. Marchand, relying on Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, describes Byron’s mother’s attitude towards the son as follows in Byron, A Portrait (John Murray, 1971), p. 11: She (Mrs. Byron) assuaged her passionate grief by a mingled hatred and love of the son who reminded her of him. ‘My mother,’ the poet recalled, ‘when she was in a rage with me, (and I gave her cause enough,) used to say, ‘Ah, you little dog, you are a Byron all over; you are as bad as your father!’ But the next morning she was covering him with kisses. It is difficult to know what Byron’s feelings were when he was a child. Anyway, he did not have an illusion of an infantile paradise.

Chapter 8 1. John Clubbe, Cincinnati Observed: Architecture and History (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. 130. 2. For further discussion, see Hirakawa ‘What Does His Greek Mother Mean to Hearn, the Japan Interpreter?’ in this volume. See also the essays by George Hughes and Makino Yo k o. 3. Letters from the Raven, ed. Milton Bronner (New York: Brentano’s, 1907), p. 133. 4. The Toyama University Hearn Collection, consisting of Hearn’s personal library, had (in 1927) 2435 volumes, of which 1352 were of English literature and 719 of French. 5. Bernadette Lemoine, Exotisme Spirituel et Esthétique dans la Vie et l’Œuvre de Lafcadio Hearn (Paris: Didier, 1988), pp. 86–98. 6. Paul Murray, A Fantastic Journey. The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (Folkestone, Kent: Japan Library, 1993), p. 12. A perspective such as Murray’s may be appropriate for an ex- ambassador – diplomats are after all not scholars from whom one likes to expect objectivity but paid advocates of a point of view favourable to the country they represent, preferably one designed to please or flatter nationals in the country in which they are stationed. However, such a basic distortion as Murray’s convinces few, identifies his biography as a propaganda piece, and fatally mars its subsequent credibility. For Murray everything in Hearn’s career leads to his culminating achievement as an interpreter of Japanese culture and to Hearn’s fourteen years in Japan he allots two-thirds of the biography. 7. ‘Foreword’ to Murray’s A Fantastic Journey, xiv. George Hughes,

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rightly more sceptical, smilingly refers to Murray as Hearn’s ‘recent, fervently nationalist biographer’ who claims him ‘as a true born Irishman’ (Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn, ed. Sukehiro Hirakawa (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 1997), p. 74. 8. ‘Introduction’ to A Fantastic Journey, p. 11 (‘a distinctly Irish imagination’), echoing Foster, xi. But more usually, as in the long introduction to Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn, Professor Hirakawa speaks of Hearn as an American-based writer (25) or, elsewhere, even as an ‘American writer’ (see note 1 of Hirakawa’s essay ‘What Does His Greek Mother Mean to Hearn, the Japan Interpreter?’ in this volume). Hearn himself, as Professor Hirakawa points out elsewhere, rarely concerned himself much with nationality or affiliation in literature. 9. Murray, A Fantastic Journey, p. 35. 10.In 1991 another Irish ambassador, Sean G. Ronan, edited with Toki Koizumi (Hearn’s grandson) a slim picture-book on Hearn – Lafcadio Hearn. His Life, Work and Irish Background, 1991) – advocating much the same position as Murray. Ronan subsequently put together Irish Writing on Lafcadio Hearn and Japan. Writer, Journalist & Teacher (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 1997), accurately billed as ‘an Irish contribution to Hearn studies’ (xix). Most of the essays it contains evade scholarly responsibility. Until the 1991 publication, there had never been a book published in Ireland about Hearn. 11. O. W. Frost, Young Hearn (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1958), p. 1. 12. Letters from the Raven, p. 124. 13.Ibid., p. 94. 14. ‘Hearn and Japan. An Attempt at Interpretation,’ in Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn, p. 70. 15. In ‘Recent American Novels’ (1881) Hearn asks for a broadening of American literature in the direction of realism, even naturalism (Lafcadio Hearn’s America. Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Lexington: U P of Kentucky, 2002), p. 221). 16. See Albert Mordell’s ‘Hearn’s Essays on American Literature,’ originally the introduction to the volume of the same name published by Hokuseido Press in 1929. The introduction is reprinted in Mordell’s Discoveries: Essays on Lafcadio Hearn (Tokyo: Orient/West, 1964). 17. Hearn’s ‘Notes on American Literature,’ given as lectures in

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1898, were printed as an addendum to his History of English Literature (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1930). 18.Frost, Young Hearn, p. 217. 19. Letters from the Raven, p. 58. 20. Cited from Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al, 3rd ed, revised (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 1071. 21. Kunst, Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Twayne, 1969), p. 37. 22. Literary History, ed. Spiller, p. 1072.

Chapter 9 This paper was read at ‘Conférences Internationales: Lafcadio Hearn, Itinéraire d’un Exote ‘ held in Martinique, on 2 May (Ville de Saint-Pierre, Maison de la Bourse) & 3 (Campus Schoelcher, Faculté des lettres, L’Université Antilles Guyane), 2002.

1. Adeline de Reynal, ‘Youma,’ Centenaire du Passage de Lafcadio Hearn aux Antilles: Regards sur un écrivain à la découverte de la Martinique, Edition du Centre d’Art Musée Paul Gauguin, Carbet, 1987. 2. The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. 4 (Boston: Houghton & Mifflin, 1922), p. 273 3. Ibid., pp. 285–286. 4. Ibid., p. 268. 5. Ibid., p. 268. 6. Ibid., p. 286. 7. Ibid., p. 287. 8. Ibid., p. 284. 9. The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. 7 (Out of the East), p. 17. 10. Ibid., p. 370. 11. Ibid., p. 283.

Chapter 10 This paper was read at the ‘Symposium Lafcadio Hearn: International Perspectives,’ commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the birth of Lafcadio Hearn, held on June 24, 2000, at Tokyo University (Hongō), Sanjō Kaikan, by the Embassy of Ireland, and the Department of English, Faculty of Letters, Tokyo University.

1. ‘My First Day in the Orient,’ Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co, 1976), p. 21.

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2. ‘In a Japanese Garden,’ ibid., p. 358. 3. ‘Jiu-Roku-Zakura,’ The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. 11 (Kyoto: Rinsen Book Co.), p. 245. 4. The Japanese original text of ‘Jiu-Roku-Zakura’ is reproduced at the end of Koizumi Yakumo meisaku senshū, Kaidan kidan (Tokyo: Kōdansha gakujutsu-bunko, 1990), p. 397. 5. A. B. Mitford, Tales of Old Japan, (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co, 1966), p. 375. 6. Basil Hall Chamberlain, ‘Harakiri,’ Things Japanese (Tokyo: Meicho-fukyūkai, 1985), p. 239. 7. Inazo Nitobe, Bushido – the Soul of Japan, in Nitobe Inazō Zenshū, vol. 12 (Tokyo: Kyōbunkan, 1969), p. 130. 8. Ibid., p. 92.

Chapter 11 This paper was read at ‘The International Symposium on Lafcadio Hearn – From Greece to Japan,’ celebrating the 100th anniversary of the establishment of formal relations between Greece and Japan, held on October 15, 1998 in Athens. ‘The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi,’ included in Lafcadio Hearn: Japan’s Great Interpreter–a new anthology of his writings: 1894–1904, ed. by Louis Allen, (Folkestone, Kent: Japan Library, 1992).

Chapter 12 This paper was read at the ‘International Symposium: Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives,’ commemorating the centennial of his death, held on the Komaba campus of Tokyo University on 25 Sept. 2004.

1. George Lawrence Gomme, Ethnology in Folklore (London: Kegan Paul, 1892), p. 7. 2. Kunio Yanagita, The Legends of Tono, translated, with an introduction, by Ronald A. Morse, (Tokyo: The Japan Foundation), 1975, p. 8. 3. Ibid., p. 7. 4. Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (C.E. Tuttle, 1976), p. 120. 5. Ibid., p. 130. 6. Ibid., p. 13. 7. Ibid., p. 16.

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Chapter 13 1. Complete Lectures on Poetry, ed., Ryuji Tanabé, T. Ochiai, and I. Nishizaki (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1934), p. 413. 2. Sections from The Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan were translated into Finnish as early as 1896, Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896) into German and Dutch in 1905, French and Polish in 1906, Italian and Spanish in 1907, and Hungarian in 1909. See Lafcadio Hearn: a Bibliography of His Writings, P. D. and Ione Perkins (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1934). 3. Appreciation of singing insects is a shared custom in both China and Japan. In China, during the Táng Dynasty (618–906) they began to keep crickets in order to enjoy their chirping and, under the Sung (960–1279), the sport of cricket fights was developed, although the latter custom did not root in Japan; see Berthold Laufer and Lafcadio Hearn, Insect Musicians & Cricket Champions: A Cultural History of Singing Insects in China and Japan, ed., Lisa Ryan Gail (San Francisco: China Books & Periodicals, 1996). 4. ‘Some Poems about Insects,’ p. 289. Hearn’s lectures were dictated by his students and were later collected and published; see ‘Tōdai kōgi [Tokyo University lectures],’ Koizumi Yakumo Jiten [Reader’s Guide to Lafcadio Hearn], comp. Hirakawa (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2000), pp. 399–400. 5. Paul Murray, A Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (Folkestone, Kent: Japan Library, 1993), p. 28. 6. The article is based on Hearn’s visit to Charles Dury Museum, Cincinnati; see ‘Afterword,’ Chōno Gensōo [Butterfly Fantasies], trans. Nagasawa Sumio (Tokyo: Tsukiji shoten, 1988), p. 277. 7. ‘Butterfly Fantasies,’ An American Miscellany, vol. 1, ed. Albert Mordell (New York: Dodd, 1924), pp. 191–2. 8. ‘Butterfly Fantasies,’ p. 192. 9. ‘Butterfly Fantasies,’ p. 192. 10. ‘Butterfly Fantasies,’ p. 193. 11. ‘Butterfly Fantasies,’ pp. 192–3. 12. Since Hearn’s knowledge of insects was such,not only Japanese literary writers but also scientists have shown great interest in his insect writings. Nagasawa Sumio who translated and edited Hearn’s stories and essays about insects is a scholar of ento- mology and agriculture. Konishi Masayasu, another well-known entomologist, wrote ‘Koizumi Yakumo to Mushi

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[KoizumiYakumo and Insects],’ Rekishi to Jinbutsu [History and Famous Figures] (Tokyo: Chūō-Kōron, 1975), pp. 24–6; he also refers to Hearn in his Mushi no Bunkashi [History of Insect Ethnography] (Tokyo: Asahi-Sensho, 1992). Ushimura Kei describes Hearn’s point of view as‘that of a scientist’;see‘Mushi Mezuru Haan [Insect Appreciating Hearn],’ Hikaku Bungaku Kenkyu [Studies in Comparative Literature], vol. 47 (1985), p. 162. 13. ‘News about Ants,’ Occidental Gleanings, vol. 2, ed., Albert Mordell (New York: Dodd, 1925), p. 51. 14. Hearn also refers to the ecology of insects as a model of an ethical community in his lecture ‘Beyond Man,’ Complete Lectures on Art, Literature and Philosophy, ed., Ryuji Tanabé, T. Ochiai and I. Nishizaki (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1932), pp. 237–44. 15. One article was published in the Times-Democrat, ‘Oriental Literature at the Exposition’ (24 Feb. 1885); four in the Harper’s Weekly, ‘The New Orleans Exposition: The Japanese Exhibit’ (31 Jan. 1885), ‘The East at New Orleans’ (7 March 1885), ‘Mexico at New Orleans,’ (14 March 1885), ‘Some Oriental Curiosities’ (28 March 1885), and ‘The Government Exhibit at New Orleans’ (11 April 1885); and another in the Harper’s Bazaar, ‘Notes of a Curiosity-Hunter’ (4 April 1885). 16. See ‘Oriental Literature at the Exposition,’ Oriental Articles, ed., Ichiro Nishizaki (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1939), p. 149. 17. ‘Some Oriental Curiosities,’ Occidental Gleanings, vol. 2, p. 227. In the same article, Hearn refers to a report on Japanese music written by Isawa Shūji whose investigations were conducted by order of the Japanese Minister of Education, Ōki Takatō. Hearn quotes from Isawa: ‘There is no scale in the Japanese classical or popular music which may not be found in Greek music’ (pp. 227–8). 18. ‘Some Oriental Curiosities,’ p. 212. 19. ‘Some Oriental Curiosities,’ p. 211. 20. ‘Some Oriental Curiosities,’ p. 116. 21. ‘Some Oriental Curiosities,’ p. 107. 22. ‘Old Greek Poetry about Insects,’ Complete Lectures on Poetry, p. 439. 23. ‘Insect-Musicians,’ Exotics and Retrospectives (Boston: Little, 1898) p. 107. 24. ‘Insect-Musicians,’ pp. 78–9. 25. ‘Insect-Musicians,’ p. 41. Hearn here observes that the Japanese listen to the chirping of the insect as if it were a language. In

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1978, an audiologist Tadanobu Tsunoda put forth a theory which would scientifically prove Hearn’s view. Based on his experimental data on brain dominance patterns of sound registration, Tsunoda categorizes the brain function in two patterns, ‘Japanese’ and ‘Western,’ and says that the ‘Japanese’ pattern processes the chirping of crickets as a verbal sound in the left brain, while the ‘Western’ one as a non-verbal sound in the right brain. He contends that the linguistic/cultural environment in the early stage of brain formation determines the pattern and that there is a correlation between brain and culture; see The Japanese Brain (Tokyo: Taishukan, 1985), pp. 74–86. 26. ‘Insect-Musicians,’ p. 80. 27. Hearn’s student at Matsue Otani Masanobu, his wife Setsuko, and an archivist at Tokyo University Minari Shigeyuki were the major providers of information about insects; see ‘Mushi,’ Koizumi Yakumo Jiten, p. 630. Hearn also asked his students to write English compositions under specific themes related to Japanese culture. 13 compositions by Otani in two covered Japanese bindings, Otani Masanobu hitsu Eisakubun Soko, ms. in 2 covered bindings [Otani Masanobu Composition Manuscripts by Otani Masanobu]), are owned by Kyoto University of Foreign Studies Library. In 2003, 98 photo plates of compositions by Otani and Tanabe Katsutarou, another student from Matsue, were discovered at Kumamoto Prefectural Library. At the Kumamoto session of ‘Koizumi Yakumo International Symposium Commemorating the 100th Year of his Death’ (3 Oct. 2004), Norio Nishikawa of Kumamoto University gave a paper on the significance of these compositions. He found twenty-five composition themes, including five insect related ones: ‘Fire-fly,’ ‘Centipede,’ ‘About the little insects which fly to the lamps at night and burn themselves to death,’ ‘Kamakiri [mantis],’ and ‘The Japanese Spider.’ An independent Hearn scholar Kaoru Sekita, at the same session, also supplemented a brief history of these photo plates which had been possibly made for publication by Professor Sanki Ichikawa. These photo plates are now preserved at Kumamoto Kindai Bungakukan. 28. Junko Umemoto, ‘The Liberation of Women in Works Retold by Lafcadio Hearn,’ Comparative Literature Studies, University Park, PA. 35.2. (1998) p. 247.

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29. ‘Some Poems about Insects,’ p. 395. 30. The poems used in his lecture were: ‘Fifine at the Fair’ by Robert Browning, ‘Arachne’ by a New England woman poet, Rose Terry Cooke, and ‘King Solomon and the Ants’ by John Greenleaf Whittier. 31. ‘Some Poems about Insects,’ p. 413. 32. ‘Some Poems about Insects,’ p. 434. 33. Hearn writes to his friend about Spencer: ‘I also discovered, for the first time, how to apply the little general knowledge I possessed. I also found unspeakable comfort in the sudden and, for me, eternal reopening of the Great Doubt, which renders pessimism ridiculous, and teaches a new reverence for all forms of faith. In short, from the day when I finished the “First Principles,” – a totally new intellectual life opened for me ....’; see ‘Letter to Krehbiel, New Orleans, 1886,’ Life and Letters vol. 1, ed., Elizabeth Bisland (Boston: Houghton, 1906), p. 374. 34. Hearn describes Spencer’s organic memory in his letter: ‘The sensations of that new experience in your own life were millions of years old! Far from simple is the commonest of our pleasures but a layer, infinitely multiple, of myriads of millions of ancestral impressions’; see ‘Letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, Kobe, April 1895,’ Life and Letters vol. 2, p. 230. 35. ‘On Love in English Poetry,’ Complete Lectures on Poetry, p. 296. 36. ‘Kusa-Hibari,’ Kotto: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs (New York: Macmillan 1902), p. 236. 37. ‘Kusa-Hibari,’ p. 237. Referring to the passage, ‘a song of organic memory,’ Sukehiro Hirakawa explains ‘organic memory’ as Hearn’s philosophy in which his ‘Buddhistic thanatopsis is coloured with evolutionary theory’; see Ch. 6 ‘The Song of Kusa-Hibari,’ Koizumi Yakumo: Seiyō Dasshutsu no Yume [Koizumi Yakumo: A Dream of Exodus from the Western World] (Tokyo: Shincho, 1981), p. 313. 38. ‘Kusa-Hibari,’ p. 237. 39. ‘Kusa-Hibari,’ p. 240. 40. ‘Kusa-Hibari,’ p. 241. 41. When he refers to the spiritual aspect of an insect in ‘Kusa- Hibari,’ Hearn first uses the word ‘soul,’ but thereafter he replaces it with ‘ghost.’ Sukehiro Hirakawa rightly argues that Hearn’s use of these words is deliberate, since he is aware that the idea of an insect having a ‘soul’ will invite scepticism from

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Christian readers for whom an insect is a mere ‘automaton,’ and ‘ghost’ in a sense of ‘Geist’ in German is used as a synonym; see ‘Haan no ‘Kusa-Hibari’ to Sōseki no ‘Buncho’ [Hearn’s ‘Kusa-Hibari’ and Sōseki’s ‘Bunchō],’ Lafukadio Haan: Shokuminchika, Kirisutokyōka, Bunmeikaika [Lafcadio Hearn: Colonialization, Christianization, Civilization-and-Enlightenment] (Kyoto: Minerva-Shobō, 2004), pp. 291–2, and also ‘Issun no mushi ni mo gobu no tamashii,’ Koizumi Yakumo to Kamigami no Sekai [Koizumi Yakumo and the Realm of Divinities] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1988) pp. 286–291. 42. Masahiko Nishi examines Hearn’s ‘ear’ and richly unfolds cultural and ethnographical geographies of Hearn and his contemporary Japan from an acoustic point of view in Lafukadio Haan no Mimi [Lafcadio Hearn’s Ear] (1993; Tokyo Iwanami, 1998). 43. The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. 1, ed., Elizabeth Bisland (Boston: Houghton, 1906), p. 523.

Chapter 14 1. Masaru Toda, ‘The Western Approach to Shinto: Lafcadio Hearn, Bruno Taut and André Malraux’, in Sukehiro Hirakawa ed., Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn (Folkstone, Kent: Global Oriental, 1997), pp. 223–41. 2. Strictly speaking, Shinto and the ancestor worship should be the separate subjects. Also, as for ‘the living human gods’, we should better distinguish between the traditional ritual cases of the Emperor or the high priests of some Shinto shrines and the modern popular cases of celebrities such as Hamaguchi. (Katō Genchi, Honchō Seishi no Kenkyū, Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 1985. Miyata Noboru, Ikigami Shinkō, Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō, 1981.) 3. ‘A Living God’ inWritings of Lafcadio Hearn, 8 (Boston and New Yo r k , 1922), pp. 5–8. 4. ‘Dragon-Flies’ in Writings, 10, p. 247. 5. ‘With Kyushu Students’ in Writings, 7, pp. 51–52. 6. ‘Kitzuki’ in Writings, 5, pp. 222–23. 7. Senge Takamune, Izumo Taisha (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1968). 8. Masuda Katumi, Higi no Shima (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1991), p. 67. 9. Yangagita Kunio, About Our Ancestors, (Tokyo: Japan Society for

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the Promotion of Science, 1970), or Teihon Yanagita Kunio Shū, vol. 10 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1969). 10. The collectiveness is the fundamental difference of the concept of the ancestral gods between Yanagita and Hearn. According to Yanagita, after having been cared for for thirty-three years, the dead is supposed to be purified and promoted to the collective status of the ancestral gods, losing his individuality and personality (tomuraiage). It is very interesting that Hearn, mentioning the feeble state of niibotoke (the soul of the recently dead), seemed to overlook the custom (‘Household Shrine’ in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan). Had he known it, he would have hated its ritual of destroying or discarding old tablets (ihai), and never liked the idea that the dead loses his individuality and personality after tomuraiage. Maeyama Takashi, one of the modern specialists on the subject and the translator of Smith’s book, however, criticized Yanagita’s theory for placing too much emphasis on the tomuraiage, saying that there is not much change in the people’s attitude towards the dead (Robert J. Smith, Gendai Nihon no Sosen Sūhai, Ochanomizu Shobō: Tokyo, 1996, p. 390). Smith in his Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1974) points out that the contemporary Japanese are transforming the ancestor worship into the memorialism of the dead, forgetting the collective guardian god of the household. Making no reference to Hearn, Smith quotes Chamberlain’s remarks on the subject from Things Japanese, which are obviously based on Hearn’s suggestions (Toda Masaru, ‘Shinkoku Nihon Kō,’ Hikaku Bungaku Kenkyū, 47, 1985, p. 33). It is very difficult to deal with Hearn’s writings in an academic study on Japan because of his way of Creolization and artistic imagination, but it is an undeniable fact that Hearn participated in the cult as the head of a samurai family and his writings are full of the evidence of his senses, which Chamberlain believed, and Smith could or should have utilized. 11. Hirakawa Sukehiro, Koizumi Yakumo, (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1981), p. 170. 12. ‘Gaki’ in Writings, 11, pp. 113–14. 13. ‘Noctilucae’ in Writings, 10, p. 141. 14. ‘About Ancestor-Worship’ in Writings, 7, p. 468. 15. ‘The Religion of the Home’ in Writings, 12, p. 45.

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Chapter 15 1. ‘A Ghost,’ in Karma (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918), pp. 59–60. 2. ‘A Ghost,’ Karma, pp. 64–65. 3. Quoted in Francis King, ed., Lafcadio Hearn: Writings from Japan. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984), p.9. 4. See Hirakawa Sukehiro, Orientaru na yume: Koizumi Yakumo to rei no sekai (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1996), chapter one, ‘Koizumi Yakumo to rei no sekai,’ pp. 5–40. 5. In Louis Allen and Jean Wilson, eds. Lafcadio Hearn: Japan’s Great Interpreter (Folkstone, Kent: Japan Library, 1992), p. 274. The letter was dated 14 December, 1893. 6. Ibid, p. 274. 7. Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Richard Howard, trans. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980 [1975]), p. 168. 8. ‘Vespertina Cognitio,’in Exotics and Retrospectives (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1898), p. 276. 9. ‘The Eternal Haunter,’ in Exotics and Retrospectives, p. 295. 10. Hirakawa Sukehiro, Orientaru na yume: Koizumi Yakumo to rei no sekai (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobô, 1996), pp. 15–16. 11. Quoted in Jonathan Cott, Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn (Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 1990), p. 330. 12. Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (Rutland, VT and Tokyo: Charles Tuttle, 1955 [first published by Macmillan in 1904]), p. 15. 13. Ibid, pp. 181–2. 14. ‘The Case of O-Dai,’in Francis King, ed. Writings from Japan, p. 350. Originally published in A Japanese Miscellany (1901). 15. ‘Some Thoughts About Ancestor Worship,’ in Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931 [1896]), p. 172. 16. Ibid, p. 187. 17.In Exotics and Retrospectives, p. 299. 18.In Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, vol. 2 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1894), p. 524. 19. Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 220. 20. Ibid, p. 221.

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21. ‘In the Cave of Children’s Ghosts,’ Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1896), vol. 1, p. 229. 22. ‘Food for the Soul’ (Tamashii no kate) in Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno. John Barrett, trans. Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Within and Without (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), p. 37. 23. ‘The Story of Kawshin Koji,’ reprinted in Francis King, ed., p. 357.

Chapter 16 1. Susannah Clapp, Carter’s literary executor, enquired on my behalf among former associates of Carter. Callil’s comment on Hearn is contained in an email message from Clapp. 2. See Crofts 76-78. 3. In a short piece entitled ‘The Quilt Maker’, written ten years after her sojourn in Japan, Carter made her awareness of these received ideas more explicit:

One day, once, .. . while I was earning a Sadie Thompsonesque living as a barmaid in the Orient, I found myself, on a free weekend, riding through a flowering grove on the other side of the world with a young man who said: ‘Me Butterfly, you Pinkerton.’ And, though I denied it hotly at the time, so it proved, except, when I went away, it was for good. (Burning 447)

Chapter 17 1. From Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (1939), translated by Angus Davidson, (London, England: Collins Press, 1966), p. 201. 2. Reprinted in Lafcadio Hearn: Writings from Japan, ed., Francis King, (London, England: Penguin Classics, 1984), p. 102. 3. From ‘Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn,’ by Sukehiro Hirakawa, in Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn, edited by Hirakawa, (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 1997), p. 44. 4. Brad Leithauser, Equal Distance (New York: Knopf, 1985). 5. Brad Leithauser, the review article of Wandering Ghost entitled ‘Alone and Extremely Alone,’ in The New Yorker on 22 April 1991, pp. 110–115.

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Chapter 18 1. Arthur Diósy, The New Far East (London: Cassell & Co., 1898), p. 1. 2. Ibid., p. 1, p. 3, p. 3. 3. Ibid., p. 12, p. 12, p. 18. 4. Ibid., p. 142. 5. Lafcadio Hearn, ‘The Policy of Interference’ in Lafcadio Hearn, Editorials from the Kobe Chronicle, edited with notes by Makoto Sangu¯ (To¯kyo: Hokuseido¯ Press, 1960), pp. 7–10 (9; 9). The editorial was first published in the Kobe Chronicle on 12 October 1894. 6. ‘Sympathy with China’ in ibid., pp. 65–68 (66–67). The editorial was first published in the Kobe Chronicle on November 1st 1894. 7. ‘A Triple Alliance in the Farther East’ in ibid., pp. 182–186, (185). The editorial was first published in the Kobe Chronicle on 12 December 1894. 8. Lafcadio Hearn, ‘After The War’ in Kokoro (New York: Tuttle, 1972), pp. 87–108 (89). First published Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896. 9. The Japan Weekly Mail, 22 September 1894 edition, p. 338. The foundation stones of the imperial headquarters can still be seen in front of Hiroshima Castle. 10. The Japan Weekly Mail, 29 September 1894 edition, p. 362. 11. Op. cit. pp. 101–2. 12. Op. cit. p.102. 13. Op. cit. pp. 107–108. 14. Op. cit. p. 96, p. 97, p. 97, p. 98. 15. Op. cit. pp. 89–90. 16. Op. cit. pp. 99–100. 17. ‘From remote time all my ancestors were in the army.’ Letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, 11 September 1894, in Japanese Letters, edited with an Introduction by Elizabeth Bisland, Vol. 16 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Kyo¯to: Rinsen 1988), pp. 255–258 (256). First published Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1922. 18. ‘The Policy of Interference’ in op cit., pp. 7–10 (9–10). 19. Donald Keene, ‘The Sino-Japanese War 1894–95 and Japanese Culture’ in Appreciations of Japanese Culture (To¯kyo: Ko¯dansha International, 2002), pp. 259–299, (263).

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20. G. B. Sansom The Western World and Japan (Tōkyo: Tuttle, 1977), p. 495. First published in 1950. 21. Yone Noguchi, Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, (Tōkyo: Ryokuyōsha, 1918). Preface un-paginated. First published 1910. 22. The Japan Weekly Mail, 1 June 1895 edition, p. 603.

Chapter 19 1. Kwaidan ‘Insect Studies: Ants,’ 227–231: ‘Around them [the mother ants] revolves the whole activity of the race: all its intelligence and toil and thrift are directed solely toward the well-being of these Mothers and of their children.’ 2. It has been frequently pointed out that he used Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique. Etude sur le culte, le droit, les institutions de la Grèce et Rome (1864). Hearn had read Fustel de Coulanges in the United States, and refers to his work in a letter of 1879 (Life and Letters 1: 202), as well as in Glimpses. He obviously bought a new edition, since his own library copy is dated 1898. Comparisons of Greece and Japan, whether or not inspired by his reading of Fustel de Coulanges, had been in his mind since his early days in Japan. In 1891 he wrote to his friend Chamberlain that ‘the Japanese are the happiest people in the world . . . It is the old Greek soul again.’(JLetters 10). 3. There is a possible echo here of Balzac’s Lucien of Illusions perdues. It is the young poet-journalist Lucien’s ‘esprit méridional’ which ‘parcourait si facilement le clavier des sentiments’ and ‘lui faisait prendre les résolutions les plus contraires’ (242). 4. We could perhaps relate this to the way in which Hearn describes himself as having been denied a name in childhood. ‘When about five years old I was condemned to sleep by myself in a certain isolated room, thereafter always called the Child’s Room. (At that time I was scarcely ever mentioned by name, but only referred to as ‘the Child.’) ‘Nightmare Touch’ (Shadowings 165). 5. See for example Youma, and writings on the ‘da’ in Two Years in the West Indies and Fantastics: ‘Doubtless for a time she [the child] believes the dark woman her mother’ (117). Chita is about an adoptive mother: Dolly in ‘Dolly, an Idyl of the Levee’ adopts a small boy (American Miscellany 1:174). The child in ‘Before the Supreme Court,’ in A Japanese Miscellany switches parents. 6. In the early Stray Leaves from Strange Literature there is a

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‘Buddhistic’ family in which the mother says, when she hears that her son has died, that a son receives ‘only a passing life’ from his parents. ‘He was only as a traveller halting at a tavern; the traveller rests and passes on; shall the tavern keeper restrain him? Such is indeed the relation of mother and son’ (110–11). 7. Marcel Robert points out that ‘Les rapports entre la mère at le fils furent en réalité beaucoup plus complexes que Hearn ne semble le croire ou le vouloir . . .’ (13). 8. Lemoine 209. Chita is a particularly striking example. We could cite in Japan ‘In the cave of the children’s ghosts,’ from Glimpses (211–229). It is interesting to note that Virginia Woolf, who also lost her mother when she was young, and who tried to explore her mother-image in To The Lighthouse, associates it with the sea and oceanic feelings. 9. We might note in passing, in connection with Greece and cats, that the modern Irish poet, Louis MacNeice, also liked cats, and wrote a very beautiful poem on the death of his cat in Athens. But MacNeice’s cat is ‘A dancer, incurably male, a clown,’ and he does not have memories. Hearn’s cats, by contrast, are female and seen in terms of their motherhood (Collected Poems 318–321). 10. In Hearn’s own case the memories associated with his mother include sensations of possible guilt, of Hearn himself refusing to be made happy (‘and that always caused her pain’ Out of the East 21); of the ‘rude things’ he did as a child (Life and Letters 1: 8); of the moment when a childish impulse came over him to slap his mother’s face ‘I slapped it – simply to see the result, perhaps’ (Kennard 13). 11. We could, perhaps, relate these two bad mothers to the description in ‘A Pilgrimage to Enoshima,’ where Hearn sees ‘the shrine of the Mother-of-Demons.’ He says ‘Her story is a legend of horror. For some sin committed in a previous birth, she was born a demon, devouring her own children. But being saved by the teaching of Buddha, she became a divine being . . .’ (Glimpses 97). 12. Davis 14. Joseph de Smet remarks that ‘ce serait comme si l’on voulait décrire le charme de sa soeur ou de sa mère’ (149). 13. He wrote to Ellwood Hendrick that ‘it doesn’t make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife – unless he marries for society. The less intellectual, the more lovable . . . For intellectual converse a man can’t have really with women: womanhood is

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antagonistic to it’ (Life and Letters 1: 99). On the other hand, he liked Alice Mabel Bacon’s book on Japanese girls and women (1891), which specifically points to the lack of a companionate relationship in marriage in Japan, and emphasizes that legislation is needed to produce more equal relations between men and women. 14. In a more general consideration of Hearn’s attitude to women it would be necessary to point out that his idealization is the other side to the coin of his fascination with prostitution and the threat of disease from women. I discuss this in ‘Lafcadio Hearn and the Fin de Siècle,’ Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn 91–3.

Chapter 20 1. Gerster ch. 3. See also ‘Lafcadio Hearn: Between Britain and Japan’ in Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn (72–82) which cites writers such as Wyndham Lewis, John Paris, D. J. Enright and William Plomer. It would be possible to add many names to the list of academic commentators, including hostile Japanese critics such as Yuzo Ota and Naoko Fuwa Thornton. 2. Obviously Hearn publishes writings in many other genres (as, for example, his re-told folk tales). My point here is that the style used for such writings also stems ultimately from his basic travel-writing scenario. 3. It should be pointed out that the view of nudity Hearn disliked was very much a nineteenth century one. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu visited Turkish baths in 1717, she was charmed by the ‘stark naked’ ladies, thought they had ‘majestic Grace’ and were not at all ‘wanton’ or ‘immodest.’ See Selected Letters, ed., Isobel Grundy (London: Penguin Books, 1997).

Chapter 21 1. 1923, Robert Nichols to his father, Charlton collection. 2. On Art, Literature and Philosophy, p. 378 3. Quoted Elizabeth Stevenson, Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Octagon Books, 1979), p. 289. 4. Carl Dawson, Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), p. 127. 5. Kokoro (1896). 6. See the analysis of ‘A Conservative’ in Hirakawa, Sukehiro Yaburareta Yu¯jo¯ (Tokyo: Shincho¯sha, 1987), pp. 145–300.

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7. Lafcadio Hearn, On Art, Literature and Philosophy. Ed. Ryuji Tanabe et al. (Tokyo: Hokuseido), p. 391. 8. On Art, Literature and Philosophy, p. 409. 9. On Art, Literature and Philosophy, p. 406. 10. Letters, ed. Grover Smith (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 154. 11. Anne and William Charlton, Putting Poetry First: A Life of Robert Nichols 1893–1944 (Norwich: Michael Russell, 2003), p. 85. 12. 10 Dec. 1920, to Wilfred Owen’s mother, Oxford English Faculty Library. 13. 1923, to his father, Charlton papers. 14 19 Feb. 1922 to Whitworth at Chatto and Windus, Reading Library, Charlton Papers, 118. 16. Charlton, 120. 17. Charlton, 120. 18. 29 July 1921 to Edmund Gosse, Brotherton Library. 19. Charlton, 120. 20. 15 April 1922 to Gilbert Murray, Bodleian. 21. Yamato Moto, ‘Nichols’ in Nihon no Eigaku Hyakunen: Taishōhen (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1968), p. 101. 22. Charlton, 119. 23. Charlton Papers. Charlton, 119. 24. Charlton, 124. 25. Nov. 1923 to Gilbert Murray, Bodleian. 26.Oct. 1924 to Nevinson, Bodleian. 27. The Star, April 6, 1942. 28. Some New Letters and Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Ed. Sanki Ichikawa (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 25), pp. 423–8. 29. 18 March 1921, Sanki Ichikawa to Robert Nichols, Charlton papers.

Chapter 22 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to this edition and appear in the text within parentheses. Examples of ‘neglect’ include the failure to discuss or even mention the published volumes of Hearn’s Tokyo lectures in general studies such as Arthur E. Kunst’s Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1969) and Paul Murray’s A Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (Folkestone, Kent: Japan Library, 1993).

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2. Robert Gale, A Lafcadio Hearn Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood press, 2002), p. 43. 3. Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, ed. Yoné Noguchi (Tokyo: The ‘Ars’ Book Shop, 1923), p. 129. 4. Ibid, p. 175. 5. Noguchi, p. 179. 6. Murray, p. 263. 7. On Art, Literature and Philosophy, ed. Ryuji Tanabé, Teisaburo Ochiai, and Ichiro Nishizaki (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1941), p. 289. 8. Ibid, p. 452. 9. Koizumi, Kazuo Hearn, Re-Echo, ed. Nancy Jane Fellers (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1957), p. 20. 10. A Lafcadio Hearn Companion, p. 43. Robert Gale’s intelligent appreciation of Hearn’s History of English Literature is in welcome contrast to the overall assessment given by Robert Francis Coyne in a 1969 Florida State University dissertation. Although Coyne praises Hearn’s ‘stylistic precision and thoughtful organization,’ he is wrong to claim Hearn ‘had no faith in reason’ and that the lectures are characterized by ‘naïve simplicity.’ Dissertation Abstracts (1969: 4940-A). 11. (Baltimore and London:Johns Hopkins University Press,1991), p. 117. 12. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1929), p. 668. 13. Dorothy Richardson Jones, ‘King of Critics’: George Saintsbury, 1845–1933, Critic, Journalist, Historian, Professor (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 46. Interestingly, Jones cites Hearn in Life and Literature who suggests there might be more to Saintsbury’s character than what many assumed: he ‘is never so simple as he appears’ (318). 14. Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, p. 139. 15. Ibid., p. 141. 16. Katsumi Kuroita, ‘Lafcadio Hearn in his Lecture Room’, in Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, p. 128. 17. Ibid., p. 139. 18. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973–1982) 6:232.

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List of Contributors

Joan BLYTHE Professor Emeritia, University of Kentucky, USA John CLUBBE Professor Emeritus, University of Kentucky, USA Susan FISHER University College of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, Canada Ted GOOSEN York University, Toronto, Canada Sukehiro HIRAKAWA Professor Emeritus, University of Tokyo, Japan George HUGHES Former Professor, University of Tokyo, Japan Peter MCIVOR Irish Foreign Service Yoko MAKINO Seijo¯ University, Tokyo, Japan

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Hiromi NABAE Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan Cody POULTON University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Masaru TODA Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

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Index (All printed matters are in italics)

Abe, Jiro¯, 67, 68, 257 Appreciations of Poetry, 227 Adèle, 196 Aria Marcella, 137 Adorno, Theodor, 12 Arnold, Sir Edwin, 213 affinities, 98 At a Railway Station, 171 After the War, 185–93 Atkinson, Minnie, 51, 255 Akira, 196, 213 Atlantic Monthly, 69, 187, 256, 257 Akutagawa, Ryu¯nosuke, 4, 5 l’Aurore, 31 Alcestis, 21, 24, 202 Austen, Jane, 231 Allen, Louis, 263, 270 amae, 26, 28, 92, 251 Baker, Page, 45, 254 Aménomori, Nobushigé, 49, 68, 69, Barker, George, 217 70, 71, 75, 220, 256, 257 basic trust, 29, 43, 92 American Ghosts and Old World Battle of Yalu, 189, 190, 192 Wonders, 171 Before the Supreme Court, 197, 274 American Miscellany, 197, 200, 248, 265, Beowulf, 231 274 Bird, Isabella, 87, 211, 212, 213, 214 American writer, 2, 3, 16, 62, 93–102, Bisland, Elizabeth, 207, 260, 267, 268, 181, 247, 261 273 ancestor-worship, 23, 59, 61, 125, 152, Bloody Chamber, The, 171 155, 157, 164, 165, 240, 250, 268, Blunden, Edmund, 8, 86, 217, 221, 223, 269, 270, 271 260 Andersen, Hans Christian, 14, 38, 39, Bon-Odori, 59, 133, 211, 212, 213, 215, 40, 85, 92, 219, 253, 254 250 animism, 15, 25, 55–61, 78, 150, 154, Brahimi, Denise, 211, 245 238, 239, 251 Brenane, Sarah, 98

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Bronner, Simon J., 170, 262 Concerning Lafcadio Hearn, 43, 246, 278 Buddhism, 23, 28, 42, 58, 59, 73, 251 Confiant, Raphaël, 14, 247 Buncho¯, 4, 5, 32, 268 conjugal cooperation, 40, 88 Bushido, 117, 263 Connaught, 14, 60, 83, 91, 98 Butterfly Fantasies, 141, 142, 144, 265 Conrad, Joseph, 162 By the Japanese Sea, 35, 59, 134, 165 Conservative, A, 3, 62–76, 220, 253, 256, Byron, 9, 52, 77–92, 228, 232, 233, 235, 257, 276 236, 258, 259, 260, 278 contact zone, 209 Cott, Jonathan, 252, 270 Cable, George Washington, 96, 100 Cowley, Malcom, 13, 14, 38, 40, 84, 85, Cambridge History of English Literature, 92, 170, 173, 177, 246, 253, 254 8, 86 Creole, 2, 14, 15, 19, 32, 49, 78, 91, 97, Cambridge History of Japan, 3, 62, 68, 103–11, 113, 171, 182, 197 69, 256, 257 cultural nationalism, 14, 30 Canadian Pacific Railway, 83 cultural politics, 217–26 Carlyle, Thomas, 231 Carter, Angela, 169–77, 271 da, 9, 19, 91, 104, 105, 106, 107, 182, Cassimati, Rosa, 7, 16, 18, 19, 82, 96, 274 179, 195, 197, 203 Danaher, Kevin, 61 Cavallini, Giovanni, 19 Dawson, Carl, 220, 234, 276 Cazamian, Louis, 7, 86, 246 Denny, Norah, 222 Celtic, 14, 25, 59, 91, 119, 134, 165, 180, Détrie, Muriel, 2, 245, 246 182, 199, 249 Detroit Times, 17 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 6, 7, 8, 18, 21, Dickens, Charles, 231 22, 32, 33, 34, 55, 56, 73, 74, 87, Diósy, Arthur, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 88, 89, 116, 117, 125, 161, 192, 206, 190, 193, 272 211, 219, 239, 246, 250, 252, 260, disillusionment, 8, 33, 168, 238 263, 267, 269, 270, 273, 278 Doi, Takeo, 26, 251 Chamberlain, Houston, 88 Dolly, an Idyll of the Levee, 197, 274 Childe Harold, 77 Don Juan, 236, 258, 259 Chita, 3, 5, 20, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, Dream of a Summer Day, The, 18, 42, 50, 109, 196, 197, 199, 248, 249, 109, 248 250, 254, 255, 274 Dresser, Christopher, 211 Chita, 45, 46, 47, 51, 53, 255 Dublin, 3, 14, 17, 19, 26, 42, 44, 60, 78, Cho¯sen, see Korea 82, 83, 98, 247 Cincinnati, 3, 5, 9, 19, 35, 43, 78, 89, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 113, 139, 140, Empson, William, 217 163, 171, 182, 165 En Voyage, 12, 246 Cincinnati Commercial, 141 Enquirer, 9, 89 Cité Antique, la, 22, 23, 24, 25, 91, 250, Enright, D.J., 210, 217, 275 251, 273 Eros, 179, 183 citizenship, 6, 8, 31, 33, 55, 87, 177, 238 esthétique du divers, 2, 245 Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Eternal Feminine, 20, 26, 265, 266, 252 Modernity in Meiji Japan, 166, 271 Ethnology in Folklore, 131, 264 civilized nomad, 2, 7, 43, 101, 159 euro-centrism, 2 ‘Claim made by a Negress’, 9, 89 exote, 2, 245, 262 Claudel, Paul, 15, 247, 254 exotic, 1, 2, 5, 99, 104, 112, 113, 121, 142, Complete Lectures on Poetry, 264, 266, 143, 149, 151, 160, 161, 162, 164, 267 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179, 184

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Index

Exotics, 199, 266, 270, 271 35, 59, 75, 83, 86, 103, 121, 130, exoticism, 1, 2, 19, 171, 174, 215 133, 134, 179, 196, 198, 199, 211, 216, 219, 250, 254, 263, 264, 269, Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature 271, 273, 274, 275 of Lafcadio Hearn, A, 246, 248, Gleanings of Lafcadio Hearn, 195, 206, 256, 261, 265, 277 207 Fantastics and Other Fancies, 173, 174, globalization, 1, 30, 80, 152 197, 199, 274 globe-trotter, 77 Father and I, Memories of Lafcadio go native, 6, 7, 43, 55, 87, 90, 238 Hearn, 43, 50, 53, 254, 255 Gomme, George Lawrence, 131, 137, Feliu, 46, 47, 50, 53 264 Fellers, Nancy Jane, 234, 277 Gosse, Edmund, 8, 85, 259, 276 Fenollosa, Ernest, 60, 87, 166, 252 Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Festival of the Dead (O-Bon), 59, 61, Poe to King and Beyond, 172 133 Gould, George, 43, 246, 260, 278 Figal, Gerald, 166, 167, 271 Grand Isle, see Grande Isle fin de siècle, 99, 134, 174, 204, 208, 275 Grande Isle, 44, 45, 49 Flaubert, Gustave, 57, 171, 176, 179, Greece, 6, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 201 28, 77–92, 94, 96, 97, 125, 128, Foley, Mattie (later Alethea Foley), 6, 143, 146, 161, 180, 182, 183, 195, 9, 19, 35, 83, 89, 91, 172, 182 196, 202, 203, 247, 248, 258, 263, folklore, 14, 60, 78, 85, 104, 110, 273, 274 112–19, 121, 127, 129–38, 155, Griffis, William Elliot, 69 230, 264 Grimm, brothers, 14, 38, 85, 92 Foster, Roy, 97, 261 Fountain Maiden, The, 20 Hagiwara, Sakutaro¯, 62, 67, 68, 257 Frank, Bernard, 30 half-caste, 41, 42 French West Indies, see West Indies Hamamura, 35, 179, 181 Frost, O.W., 44, 101, 254, 262 Hardy, Thomas, 201 Fuji, 71, 72, 231 Harper’s Bazaar, 206, 265 Fukui, 65, 69, 70 Harper’s Magazine, 71, 101, 159 Fukuzawa, Yukichi, 66, 250 Harper’s Weekly, 83, 139, 265 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa, 22, 24, 25, Hearn, Charles Bush, 16, 18, 82, 96 90, 91, 249, 250, 251, 273 Hearn, James Daniel, 26, 83 Hearn, Lian, 177 Gabriel, 104, 108, 109 Hellenism, 194, 195 Gaelic, 60, 182 Hendrick, Ellwood, 72, 73, 89, 275 Gale, Robert, 234, 277 Heroes or Greek Fairy Tales, The, 20, 125, Garnier, Charles-Louis, 31 249 Gauguin, Paul, 175, 262 Hinomisaki, 49 Gautier, Théophile, 5, 95, 137, 138, 141, Hirakawa, Sukehiro, 97, 101, 156, 161, 162, 179 163, 171, 173, 181, 246, 248, 251, Ghost, A, 101, 270 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, ghost story, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 26, 32, 260, 261, 264, 268, 270, 272, 276 34, 35, 38, 40, 56, 57, 60, 91, 98, Hirata, Atsutane, 23 120, 121, 123, 128, 152, 168, 173, Hodgson, Ralph, 217 174, 177, 212, 230, 239 History of English Literature, 7, 227, 234, Gide, André, 86 262, 277 Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 6, 21, 32, Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise, 86

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Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 4, 30, 68, karma, 123, 145, 157, 171, 270 85–6, 257 Kawabata, Yasunari, 5, 247 Ho¯ïchi, 34, 120–4, 125, 126–7, 128, Keats, John, 231 130, 136, 156, 173, 263 Keene, Donald, 192, 273 Howells, William Dean, 13, 95, 99 Kennard, Nina, 274 Hughes, George, 31, 87, 171, 172, 173, Kimiko, 10, 12 174, 260, 261 Kimiko, 10, 11, 12 Hugo, Victor, 48, 174 King, Francis, 87, 270, 271, 272 Kingsley, Charles, 249 Ichikawa, Sanki, 217, 221, 222, 223, Kipling, Rudyard, 162, 208, 219, 252 224, 225, 267, 276 Kirkup, James, 34, 217 In a Japanese Garden, 113, 263 Kitzuki, 48, 211, 269 In the Cave of Children’s Ghosts, 167, Kneeland, 195, 197 271, 274 Kobayashi, Masaki, 170 industrialization, 30, 83 Ko¯be, 3, 73, 74, 187, 189, 190, 219, 251, Inoue Tetsujiro¯, 250 267 insect-music, 139–51 Kobe Chronicle, 187, 272 Insect-Musicians, 145, 146, 147, 264, Kœber, Raphael von, 21, 25, 250 266 Koizumi, Kazuo, 35, 38, 43, 234, 253, Interpretations of Literature, 78, 227, 234, 254, 255, 277 258, 259, 260 Koizumi, Setsuko, 6, 19, 34, 72, 87, 89, interracial marriage, 6, 35, 83 238, 247, 253, 255 Ionian isles, 82 Koizumi, Yakumo, 4, 7, 17, 25, 30, 33, Ireland, 17, 34, 44, 51, 61, 78, 94, 96, 55, 83, 86, 87, 120, 178, 237, 246, 97, 98, 119, 161, 195, 202, 214, 215, 247, 248, 251, 253, 268, 270, 278 253, 262, 263 Koizumi Yakumo jiten (Reader’s Guide Iyer, Pico, 210, 213 to Lafcadio Hearn), 246, 264, 266 Izumi, Kyo¯ka, 160, 166, 168 Kojiki, 21, 23, 32, 125, 250 Kokoro, 11, 63, 68, 75, 88, 116, 165, 171, James, Henry, 5, 95, 99, 231 176, 188, 196, 219, 245, 256, 264, Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation, 22, 271, 272, 276 23, 24, 25, 27, 90, 130, 152, 164, Korea, 63, 70, 79, 191 194, 212, 223, 239, 249, 250, 251, Kotto¯, 198, 199, 200, 268 253, 260, 262, 270 Kumamoto, 3, 4, 21, 65, 71, 72, 73, 97, Japan Interpreter, 16–29, 33, 75, 260, 139, 187, 211, 219, 250, 267 261 Kumamoto Government College, 72 Japan’s turn to the West, 3, 62, 256 Kunst, Arthur, 7, 101, 246, 262 Japan Weekly Mail, The, 189, 193, 272, Kusa-Hibari, 5, 59, 147–51, 268 273 Kwaidan, 5, 12, 14, 19, 26, 34, 35, 40, Japanese Miscellany, A, 197, 255, 271, 274 57, 84, 103, 113, 114, 117, 120, 121, Japanologist, 140 123, 130, 136, 170, 173, 181, 212, Jiu-Roku-Zakura, 113, 114, 115, 116, 219, 239, 273 117, 118, 119, 263 Kyo¯ka, see Izumi, Kyo¯ka Jizo¯, 41, 42, 52, 53, 254 Kyu¯shu¯, 6, 72, 122

Kafu¯, see Nagai Kafu¯ Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, 26, 169–77, Kajitani, Yasuyuki, 40 253, 273, 277, 278 Kaka, 48, 167 Lafcadio Hearn’s America, 170, 262 Kanazawa, 166 Laufer, Berthold, 264

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Index

lectures, 17, 39, 81, 84, 148, 174, 220, Mishima, Yukio, 4, 5, 16, 247 221, 222, 230, 234, 235, 247, 258, missionaries, 15, 27, 28, 58, 63, 65, 67, 265, 267 69, 71, 90, 164, 239, 278 Lefcada, see Leucadia missionary prejudice, 27, 58, 90 Lefcadia, see Leucadia Mitford, A.B., 116, 263 Lefcas, see Leucadia Miyazaki, To¯ten, 66 Lefkada, see Leucadia Moore, George, 201 Legends of Tono, The, 130, 131, 134, 135, morbidity, 8, 43, 89, 238, 246, 278 136, 137, 160, 264 Mordell, Albert, 248, 262, 265 Legouis, Émile, 7, 86, 246 Mori, Arinori, 65 Leucadia, 16, 17, 77, 81, 82, 83, 160, 182 Mori, O¯ gai, 65, 67, 76, 79, 258 Levin, Harry, 7 Mo¯so¯, 65, 67, 76 Levkas, see Leucadia mother, 7, 16–29, 42, 43, 77, 82, 89, 90, Life and Letters, 194, 195, 196, 208, 214, 91, 92, 96, 98, 104, 125, 160, 161, 254, 267, 268, 273, 274, 275 179, 183, 194–204, 247, 248, 260, Life and Literature, 12, 227, 249, 256, 261, 274 261, 265, 277 mother-child relationship, 20, 29, 91, linear evolution of history, 22, 25, 91 102, 106 Little Match Girl, The, 38, 40, 92 Murray, Paul, 97, 232, 246, 248, 256, Living God, A, 153, 156, 157, 269 261, 265, 277 Logé, Marc, 24 muse, 163, 178–84 Loti, Pierre, 1, 5, 19, 83, 95, 175, 179, My Guardian Angel, 26, 56, 251 195, 208, 246 love-hate relationship, 9, 74, 75, 238 Nagai, Kafu¯, 4, 5, 246 Nagasawa, Sumio, 165 Macaulay, 220 Nakamura, Masanao, 65 McDonald, Mitchell, 49 Nanoriso, 76 Makino, Yoko, 171, 253, 254, 260 nationality, 6, 87, 93, 99, 247, 261 Manfred, 79, 258 Natsume, So¯seki, 4, 31, 66, 67, 250, 256 Manyemon, 6, 35, 189, 190, 191 Nerval, Gérard de, 174 Maori, 2 New Orleans, 3, 6, 18, 20, 43, 44, 78, Market of the Dead, The, 196, 198 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 129, 139, 173, Martinique, 9, 14, 15, 32, 43, 49, 58, 78, 182, 265 83, 97, 103, 104, 108, 110, 113, 119, New Orleans World Exposition 129, 139, 162, 182, 211, 237, 262 Nichols, Robert, 217–26, 276 Masuda, Katsumi, 155, 269 nightmare, 7, 30–40, 55, 92, 95, 278 Matsue, 3, 21, 35, 39, 49, 72, 73, 78, 83, Nihon to shitashiku natta hanashi, 67 97, 113 134, 139, 211, 219, 237, Niishima Jo¯ (Joseph Neesima), 65 255, 257, 266, 267 Nikolai (Ioan Kasatkin), 28, 29, 251 Matsushima, 186, 189, 190, 192, 193 Nishida Sentaro¯, 48, 72 Maupassant, Guy de, 12, 194, 246 Nishizaki Ichiro, 264, 265, 277 Mayotte, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109 Nitobe Inazo, 65, 117, 263 Meiji Restoration, 10, 58, 63, 69, 193 No¯ play, 60 Melville, Herman, 162 Noctilucae, 156, 157, 270 Michelet, Jules, 143 Noguchi, Yoné, 26, 192, 193, 200, 201, Milton, John, 27, 228, 229, 232, 233, 235, 253, 273, 277 235 Norris, Frank, 13, 95 Miner, Earl, 99 Mionoseki, 49, 211 Ohno, Kazuo, 168, 271

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Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives

Okakura, Kakuzo¯ (Tenshin), 5, 9, 65, Said, Edward, 174, 175 246 Sainte-Beuve, 220, 232 Oki, 21, 211 Saintsbury, George, 234, 235, 277 Omoide no ki, 48, 253, 255 Sansho¯ the Baliff, 180–1 On Art, Literature and Philosophy, 227, Sansom, George, 56 252, 265, 276, 277 Santa Maura, see Leucadia Oriental woman, 7, 35, 89 Sappho, 81, 82, 249 Orientalism, 163, 174, 175, 178, 218 Sato¯, Haruo, 4, 5 Orikuchi, Shinobu, 161 Satow, Ernest, 56, 58, 87 Orpheus, 120–8 sea, 18, 41–54, 59, 82, 106, 108, 109, Orthodox (Church, religion), 20, 27, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 148, 156, 28, 29, 81, 98, 183, 184 165, 179, 180, 181, 182, 190, 191, Oshidori, 57, 171 199, 204, 258, 259, 274 Ota, Yuzo, 75, 258, 275 Segalen, Victor, 2, 245, 246 otherworld, 127, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, 13, 138, 159–68 38, 84, 85, 253, 254, 259 Otokichi, see Yamaguchi, Otokichi self-control, 65, 84, 85, 92 Out of the East, 88, 187, 195, 199, 248, self-help, 47 249, 252, 259, 263, 274 Sembokuya, Koichi, 47, 254 Senge, Takanori, 155 Papa Yakumo-o omou, 43, 254, 255 Setsuko, see Koizumi, Setsuko Patrick, 7, 16, 17, 18, 26, 41, 44, 60, 81, Shadowings, 156, 196, 274 83, 96, 99, 160 Shakespeare, William, 79, 80, 231 Patten, William, 206, 208 Shiga, Shigetaka, 67 Plomer, William, 217, 275 Shimazaki, To¯son, 67 Poe, Edgar Allan, 9, 99, 172 Shinto, 15, 16, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 32, 58, Porter, Katherine Anne, 101 59, 61, 67, 83, 90, 152–8, 165, 177, Pound, Ezra, 60 239, 240, 268 Praz, Mario, 179, 272 Shinto shrines, 58, 113, 125, 153, 155, Pulvers, Roger, 57 156, 157, 269 Silkin, Jon, 217 Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn, 57, 237, Sino-Japanese War, 185, 186, 188, 191, 246, 258, 261, 262, 268, 272, 275 193, 273 Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn, 34 Sladen, Douglas, 213 retold story, 19, 20, 34, 38, 56, 57, 103, Smet, Joseph de, 275 104, 110, 114, 118, 127, 130, 136, Smollett, Tobias, 209, 210, 211 181, 248 Snyder, Stephen, 5, 246 return to Japan, 62–76, 191, 253, 256, Some Chinese Ghosts, 171, 173, 174 257 So¯seki, see Natsume, So¯seki Revery, 29, 198 soul of a tree, see tree-spirit Robert, Marcel, 274 Spencer, Herbert, 8, 84, 148, 149, 161, romans géographique, 1 164, 171, 250, 267 Romance of the Milky Way, The, 205 Sterne, Laurence, 210 Rosa, see Cassimati, Rosa Stevenson, Robert Louis, 162 round-the-world trip, 2, 83 Story of Ito¯ Norisuké, The, 20 Rubinstein, Gillian, 177 Story of Kwashin Koji, The, 168 Ruskin, John, 163, 228, 229, 230, 231, Story of Mimi-nashi-Ho¯ïchi, The, 34, 233, 234, 235 120, 128, 130, 136, 156, 173, 263 Russia, 63, 69, 162, 190, 191, 193 Story of Ming-Y, The, 20

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Index

Story of O-Tei, The, 5, 20, 173 Ushaw, 20, 83 Story of the Futon of Tottori, The, 35–8, 40 Value of the Supernatural in Fiction, The, storyteller, 13, 15, 19, 26, 28, 34, 57, 85, 137 91, 105 Vespertina Cognitio, 165, 270 Strangeness and Charm, 22, 164 Violent Cremation, 5, 171 Stray Leaves from Strange Literature, 274 Virgin Mary, 26, 27, 28, 29, 91, 105, Street Singer, A, 75 251, 252 Sunzi (Sonshi), 65 swimming, 44, 46–54, 126, 148, 153, Wagner, Richard, 32, 88 154, 233, 255 Wales, 17, 44 sympathetic understanding, 13, 14, 27, Waley, Arthur, 13, 14, 56, 246 58, 163, 167, 203, 207, 239 Watkin, Henry, 98, 260 weird beauty, 169–77 Takamura, Ko¯taro¯, 66, 256 West Indies, 3, 9, 15, 17, 19, 32, 48, 58, Takeyama, Michio, 68, 247, 257 78, 194, 195, 197, 202, 203, 208 Tale of Genji, The, 56 Western World and Japan, The, 3, 56, 273 Tales of Old Japan, 263, 116 Westernization, 6, 30, 32, 62, 76, 146, Tanizaki Junichiro¯, 28, 251, 252 232 Temple of Amida, The, 126, 196 Whibley, Charles, 221 Thornton, Naoko Fuwa, 201, 275 Wish Fulfilled, A, 187 Things Japanese, 7, 32, 33, 55, 56, 87, 88, Woman’s Diary, A, 198 116–17, 252, 263, 270, 278 World War II, 3, 8, 17, 23, 58, 90, 94, Thomson, James, 231 96, 223, 239 Thwaite, Anthony, 217 Writings from Japan, 87, 260, 270, 271, Times-Democrat, 45, 265 272 Tinker, Edward Larocque, 207, 209 Todorov, Tsvetan, 2, 162, 245, 270 Yaidzu, 49, 51, 52, 53, 255 Tokutomi, Soho¯, 66 Yalu, 185, 186 Tokyo, 3, 8, 33, 34, 49, 52, 70, 77, 78, Yamaguchi, Otokichi, 49, 52, 53, 255 88, 97, 100, 104, 133, 139, 173, Yanagita, Kunio, 129–38, 155, 157, 166, 174, 175, 176, 206, 232, 237, 251, 264, 269 253 Year in Ireland, The, 61 Tokyo University, 4, 8, 10, 12, 21, 31, Yeats, William Butler, 14, 59, 60, 78, 98, 39, 47, 53, 69, 81, 86, 87, 125, 137, 202 139, 142, 145, 217–26, 235, 237, Yokohama, 17, 41, 49, 63, 64, 65, 69, 248, 249, 252, 253, 259 70, 71, 112 Tono, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137 Youma, 3, 5, 15, 19, 83, 103–11, 182, Toqueville, Alexis de, 100 197, 198, 199, 200, 248, 260, 262, tourist-writer, 1 274 travelling companion, 6, 35 Youma, 9, 19, 91, 104, 105, 106, 107, travel-writing, 32, 35, 71, 78, 83, 103, 108, 109,111 113, 114, 121, 125, 127, 130, 171, Yuan Mei, 13, 56, 246 205–16, 219, 248, 275 tree-spirit, 59, 112–19, 231, 249 Zola, Émile, 201 Two Years in the French West Indies, 14, 83, 103, 107, 108, 139, 196, 197, 247, 274

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