00 Prelims LH:Layout 1 12/2/07 12:46 Page i 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 © Global Oriental Ltd 2007 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 v 00 Prelims LH:Layout 1 12/2/07 12:46 Page vi Contents 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 vi 00 Prelims LH:Layout 1 12/2/07 12:46 Page vii Preface Sukehiro Hirakawa 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 vii 00 Prelims LH:Layout 1 12/2/07 12:46 Page viii Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives 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, viii 00 Prelims LH:Layout 1 14/2/07 09:47 Page ix Preface 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.