Reportage, Translation and Re-Told Stories in Lafcadio Hearn
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神戸市外国語大学 学術情報リポジトリ The spirit of no place : reportage, translation and re-told stories in Lafcadio Hearn 著者 難波江 仁美 journal or Monograph series in Foreign studies publication title number 54 page range 1-237 year 2014-03-01 URL http://id.nii.ac.jp/1085/00001679/ Creative Commons : 表示 - 非営利 - 改変禁止 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.ja The Spirit of No Place Reportage, Translation and Re-told Stories in Lafcadio Hearn Hitomi Nabae “A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.” Henry James, “Robert Louis Stevenson,” Century Magazine (April 1888) “We owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge.” Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) “I am in truth a spiritual exile, not because I have no friend, but because I lost somewhere a tradition and environment to which I think I should belong. And I hear the voice calling from a hidden world where more than one moon ever shine; alas, I do not know how to come there. Yone Noguchi, Through the Torii (1914) CONTENTS Introduction A Wandering Life 1 Chapter 1 Reportage into Story: Hearn’s America 1. Memory Speaks to a Ghostly Seafarer, “Civilized Nomad” 19 2. Let the Body Speak: Lafcadio Hearn’s Cincinnati Journalism 32 3. In Search of a Genius Loci and the Birth of a “Prose-Poet” 50 Chapter 2. Oceanic Reconstruction (1): Facts into Dream Vision 1. The Birth of a Story of Creolization 64 2. Chita (1890)—an Oceanic Human Comedy 78 Chapter 3. Oceanic Reconstruction (2): Facts into Legend 1. Voyage Out 97 2. New Ethics in “A Living God” (1897) 103 3. The Second Wave—Rewriting Hearn’s Tsunami Story 113 Chapter 4. Trans-Pacific Songs 1. My Song and Our Song: Demystifying Whitmanesque America 120 2. Insect Music: Lafcadio Hearn’s Orphean Song 143 3. Soul Song and Soul Dance: Hōïchi, the Genius and Dancing Girl as a Medium 158 Chapter 5. Translation, Re-translation, and Stories Twice-told 1. “Ghostly” Narrative: Translation and Re-telling in “Yuki-Onna” 176 2. Wandering Ghosts: “Inga-banashi” and “Oshidori” 192 Conclusion The Spirit of No Place 208 Acknowledgments 216 Selected Bibliography 217 Index 231 Introduction A Wandering Life Born, in 1850, of an Irish surgeon and his Greek wife, in Leucadia, Ionian Islands, Hearn had roamed far and wide -- in Ireland, England, France, and Spain, the United States of America and the French West Indies, --finding nowhere peace to his mind or to his body; and finally came to Japan to end his life in maturing the ideas he had gotten from his studies and travels. Nobushige Amenomori, “Lafcadio Hearn, the Man,” Atlantic Monthly, 1905 (523) The ghost of Lafcadio Hearn has returned, haunting the Trans-Pacific world. Best known as a Japanologist who traveled to Japan in 1890 and died a Japanese citizen in 1904, he is now being invoked in places where he was once a cultural icon. Lefcada News, a webzine from Lefkada, a Greek island where he was born and after which he was named, posted an article introducing him as a poet from Lefkada (30 December 2012). Greek World Reporter has similarly called him “the Greek National Poet of Japan” (18 September 2012) and The Irish Times, “Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn” (18 September 2012). Lyric FM, a radio station in Ireland where Hearn spent his teens, ran two one-hour programs (25 January and 1 February 2013), introducing his life-long journey from Greece to Japan, via Ireland, the US, and Martinique.1 With the publication of Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings in the American Library series in 2009, Hearn also has gained a place in American Literature. In an interview, Christopher Benfey, editor of the Hearn volume declares without hesitation that he is “completely convinced that Hearn’s time has come.” Though recognized more as an eccentric writer who was interested in the gruesome and the exotic and thus dismissed as an “oddball,” Benfey explains, Hearn “retained an incredible zest and 1 See “Ο Έλληνας απ’ τη Λευκάδα, Λευκάδιος Χέρν, είναι ένας εκ των εθνικών ποιητών της Ιαπωνίας” <http://www.kolivas.de/archives/128559>; “Lafcadio Hearn: The Greek National Poet of Japan” <http://world.greekreporter.com/2012/04/30/lafcadio-hearn-the-greek-national-poet-of-japan/>; “Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese descendant makes pilgrimage to Cong” < http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-33655556.html>. 1 openness for new experiences and places.”2 In fact, the twenty-first century accelerated Hearn scholarship as well as worldwide interest in “Hearn, the man” who traveled and wrote, and was influential in his own way. Primarily known as a Japanologist who introduced traditional Japanese culture and translations of Japanese stories, a lesser known fact remains that his Japan: an Interpretation (1904) influenced American General Bonner Fellers and lead him to propose to the Occupation forces the importance of keeping the Emperor in place in post World War II Japan. Subsequently, Fellers’ report convinced General MacArthur to decide that there would no criminal prosecution of the Emperor. This story was recently reworked for the Hollywood film, Emperor (2012), produced by a Japanese mother and son team, Yoko Narahashi and Eugene Nomura with British director Peter Webber. Although the film does not refer to Hearn explicitly, it is not too much to say that his writings were influential enough to change the course of modern history.3 Hearn indeed was a nomad writer who was a product of British imperialistic expansion and a witness to American imperialistic economic expansions as well as the birth of imperialism in the Orient, Japan. What is it that has sparked present day readers’ interest in Hearn? Benfey, in the above interview adds, “what Hearn was really interested in was the astonishing variety of human life” (1). Indeed, he was always attracted by something different—be it lifestyles, foods, clothing, songs, stories, dance, and ways of worship. Moreover, he transcended the boundaries of nation, race and even religious belief beyond any cosmopolitan traveler of his time. And today in our ever changing world, it is most appropriate to call him a “global soul,” to borrow Pico Iyer’s book title, with his openness and interest in “varieties of human life.” At the foundation of Hearn’s racial, linguistical and national border-crossing lay Hearn’s search for a borderless homeland with global access extending to his fellow modern nomads. For Hearn, such a homeland did not require a specific geographical place; rather, it was to be a place, or “no place,” that could be constantly lost and found wherever a “global soul” like Hearn happened to be. What I phrase “a spirit of no place” revises a 2 “The Library of America Interviews Christopher Benfey about Lafcadio Hearn.” The Library of America e-Newsletter, 2009. PDF file. 1. Significantly, he American Library edition of his American Writings calls attention to his American period (1870-1890) which highlights his keen observations of American social realities that were often overlooked—people of color, women, immigrants and criminals. It is, therefore, not that he was only interested in the exotic and the Orient but that he wrote and pursued his goal to become a writer, maintaining his journalist as well as ethnologist spirit. 3 See Tetsuro Kato, “Hahn mania no joho shoko Bonaa Feraazu” [Hearnmania, Information General Bonner Fellers,” Hahn no Hito to Shuhen: Koza Koizumi Yakumo I [Hearn, the Man and His Environs: Koizumi Yakumo Encyclopedia] (2009), 597-607. See also, Suhekiro Hirakawa, Koizumi Yakumo to Kamigami no Sekai [Koizumi Yakumo and the World of Gods] (1988). 2 spirit of the place, or genius loci, that is place bound and belongs to a specific racial and ethnic group. Hearn in his stories tries to free genius loci from such geographical confines and creates a sense of the past and nostalgia that can be shared by all people of foreign births and backgrounds. Using local stories and legends, he re-wrote them by framing them in a larger context of the globalizing world of his time and reviving them as modern allegories to be shared with multi-cultural and multi-racial readers. His achievement as a writer with a “global soul” is thus worthy of examination in our incessantly hybridizing world of today when it has become difficult to specify, along Hearn’s trajectory, the increasingly irrelevant notion of one’s “homeland.” I first encountered Hearn’s ghost stories at the age of ten. The book I borrowed from my elementary school library was written by “Koizumi Yakumo.” Only later did I learn that this was actually Hearn’s Japanese name. Indeed, I thought I was reading Japanese stories written by a Japanese author. While I was not able to express it at the time, I somehow felt something in the stories to be not entirely Japanese. It was only when I was preparing my doctoral dissertation in American literature at Stanford University that I began to read Hearn in his original English. I thought that his transpacific ghost stories might be fruitfully compared to transatlantic ghost stories of his contemporaries such as Henry James and Edith Wharton. As I read more about the person Hearn, I learned that he had once considered sending his son to the US to study at Stanford University. In 1903, after 13 years in Japan, he resumed correspondence with his old friend, Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) with whom Hearn had become acquainted in New Orleans and who later became an editor for the Cosmopolitan, and he asked her to look for places where he might lecture on Japan. I was then impressed when I found in the university archive a letter by the then Stanford President, David Starr Jordan’s, saying that he would welcome Hearn as a lecturer.