PRO CEEDINGSInt er nat ional S ymposium on

THE OPE N
MI ND OFL AF C ADIOH EARNHI S S P I R I T
FROM T H E W E S T
TO T H E E AS T

JULY 5 –6 , 2 0 1 4
The Pl anning Commit t e e f or t he Me mor i a l E v e n ts in G r e e c e
to Commemor ate the 110th Anni v e rsa ry of L a f c a dio H e a r n ’s De at h

Ioni a n Blu e Hot e l
Lefkada, GreeceP ROC E E DI NG S
Internat ion a l Symp o sium on

THE OPEN
MIND OFL AFC ADIOHEARN
H IS SP IRIT
F ROM THE WEST
TO T HE EASTJULY 5–6, 2014
The Pl anning Commit tee for the Memorial E vents in Greece
to Commemor ate the 110th Anniversary of L afcadio Hearn’s Death

Ionia n Blue HotelL e fka da , G r e e c ewww.jpf.go.jp

www.osaka21.or.jp

Compiled by

SHI NGO NAGAOKAorganizer
The Planning Committee for the Memorial Events in Greece to Commemorate
the 110th Anniversary of Lafcadio Hearn’s Deathco-organizers
Embassy of Japan in Greece
Municipality of Lefkada
principal sponsors
The American College of Greece
Embassy of Greece in Japan
Embassy of Ireland in Athens
symposium coordinator
Shingo Nagaoka
symposium chair
Alan Rosen
simultaneous interpreters
Roula Stratou, Thetis Hatzi (English-Greek)
Yumi Mano, Masumi Horiuchi (English-Japanese)sponsors

www.lefkasculturalcenter.gr

www.mfa.gr/tokyo

www.gr.emb-japan.go.jp

www.embassyofireland.gr

www.kitchoan.co.jp

www.u-toyama.ac.jp

www.ionianblue.gr

www.komatsuelec.co.jp

www.city.kumamoto.jp www.city.matsue.shimane.jp

Proceedings Editorial Staff
editor-in-chief
Shingo Nagaoka
editors
Alan Rosen
Bon Koizumi
Shoko Koizumi
editorial designer
Kiyoharu Ishikawa

www.acg.edu

www.japan-greece-society.jp

www.city.shinjuku.lg.jp

www.city.yaizu.lg.jp
www.yakumokai.org

www.shimane-u.ac.jp

www.bss.jp

www.matsue-tourism.or.jp www.kytherianassociation.com.au

IKEDA MEMORIAL FOUNDATIONFor Sports and Culture
A Public Corporationwww.ikedaart.jp

www.eguchi-sakae.com

www.furyudo.jp

www.kobai.jp

www.u-shimane.ac.jp

www.sanin-japan-ireland.org

www.nippon-tea.co.jp

Rinzu Ayano
Kumamoto Hearn Society
Study Group of Lafcadio Hearn, Kumamoto University

The Japan Foundation
The Japan World Exposition 1970 Commemorative Fund

Published in Tokyo, December 2014,
by The Planning Committee for the Memorial Eventsin Greece to Commemorate the 110th Anniversary of
Lafcadio Hearn’s Death.
mailing address:
c/o Japan Greece Society
General Affairs Department
Sumitomo Life Insurance Company
7–18–24, Tsukiji, Chuo-ku,
Tokyo 104–8430, JapanThe Planning Committee would like to express its deepest gratitude to the persons, organizations and sponsors that supported the symposium.
Without their understanding and cooperation, the symposium would not have been possible.
Copyright © 2014 The Planning Committee for the Memorial Events in Greece to Commemorate the 110th Anniversary of Lafcadio Hearn’s Death

2

CON T E N T S

Welcome Messages 

6

BON KOIZUMIGreat-grandson of Lafcadio Hearn ; Chairman of the Planning Committee

COSTAS A. ARAVANIS

Mayor of Lefkada

MASUO NISHIBAYASHI

Ambassador of Japan to Greece

DAVID G. HORNER

President, The American College of Greece

NIKOLAOS TSA MADOS

Ambassador of Greece to JapanCHARLES SHEEHAN

Ambassador of Ireland to Greece

SHINGO NAGAOKA

Symposium Coordinator

Memorial Speech

The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: A Spiritual Odyssey from Greece to Japan 

10

BON KOIZUMI

Presentations

Lafcadio Hearn’s Open Mind in the Classroom: Findings from Hearn’s Kumamoto Lectures 

16

MARI CHRISTINE

Early Influences on Lafcadio Hearn 

22

JOHN MORANLafcadio Hearn’s Imagined Greece 

28

SOTIRIS CHALIKIAS  The Contribution of Hearn’s Literature to Present Times: Learning from the Retold Tales of the World of Kwaidan 

32

At Home in the World: Transnational Hearn 

36

MASAYUKI IKEDA

HARICLEA ZENGOS

Lafcadio Hearn and Buddhism 

40

DEMETRIOS TH. VASSILIADES

Exoticism and Cross-Culturality: On Lafcadio Hearn’s Fantastic Tales 

46

LOUIS SOLO MARTINELGreek, Irish and/or British?: Hearn’s Immigration to America and His Cultural Identities 

52

SHINGO NAGAOKA

Gothic Horror: The Dublin Haunting of Lafcadio Hearn 

56

PAUL MURRAY
Concluding Remarks 62

ALAN ROSEN

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

3

4

P RO G R A M

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Sunday, July 6, 2014

9:00—10:00

Reception

9:00—10:00

10:00—10:30

Opening

Session 2“DEVELOPMENTS OF THE OPEN MIND”

Organizer’s Speech by BON KOIZUMIReception

Guest Speeches

Mr. MASUO NISHIBAYASHI	Ambassador of Japan, Greece

Mr. COSTAS A. ARAVANIS	Mayor of Lefkada

Dr. DAVID G. HORNER	President of The American College of Greece

Mr. LUKE FEENEY

Deputy Head of Mission of the Embassy of Ireland, Greece

10:30—11:10

Memorial Speech

BON KOIZUMI	Japan/Ireland/Greece | Professor, University of Shimane; Greatgrandson of Lafcadio Hearn

	The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn:
A Spiritual Odyssey from Greece to Japan

Session 1“REDISCOVERIES OF THE OPEN MIND”

10:10—10:10

Introduction by the Chairperson

10:10—10:30

HARICLEA ZENGOS	Greece | Professor, The American College of Greece	At Home in the World: Transnational Hearn
10:30—10:50

DEMETRIOS TH. VASSILIADES	Greece | Professor, University of Athens	Lafcadio Hearn and Buddhism
10:50—11:10

LOUIS SOLO MARTINEL	France/Martinique | Lecturer, University of Tokyo & Waseda
University

	Exoticism and Cross-Culturality:
On Lafcadio Hearn’s Fantastic Tales
11:10—11:40

Coffee Break

11:40—12:00

SHINGO NAGAOKA	Japan | Professor, Shimane University	
Greek, Irish and/or British?: Hearn’s Immigration to
America and His Cultural Identities
12:00—12:20

PAUL MURRAY	Ireland | Hearn Biographer

11:10—11:20

Introduction by the Chairperson

11:20—11:40

MARI CHRISTINE	Japan/USA | Inter-Cultural Interpreter; Hearn Library Researcher,
Toyama University	Lafcadio Hearn’s Open Mind in the Classroom:
Findings from Hearn’s Kumamoto Lectures
11:40—12:00

12:20—12:50

Discussion

12:50—13:10

Summary & Concluding Remarksby ALAN ROSEN

JOHN MORAN	Ireland | Journalist, the Irish Times	Early Influences on Lafcadio Hearn
12:00—12:30

Coffee Break

12:30—12:50

SOTIRIS CHALIKIAS  

coordinator

SHINGO NAGAOKAJapan | Professor, Shimane University

	Greece | Translator and Writer	Lafcadio Hearn’s Imagined Greece
12:50—13:10

Gothic Horror:
The Dublin Haunting of Lafcadio Hearn

MASAYUKI IKEDA

chairperson

ALAN ROSEN

Japan/USA | Former Professor, Kumamoto University	Japan | Professor, Waseda University

	The Contribution of Hearn’s Literature to Present
Times: Learning from the Retold Tales of the Worldof Kwaidan
13:10—13:40

Discussion

13:40—13:50

Summary by ALAN ROSEN

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

5I

t is to my great pleasure that the event
commemorating the 110th anniversary of Lafcadio
Hearn’s death is being held at the birth place ofmy great grandfather.
Born in Lefkada 164 years ago, Hearn developed his‘Open Mind’ in his one-way journey to Japan, locatedon the other side of the world. I live in Matsue City,
Shimane Prefecture, one of the places Hearn loved
most in his life. Hearn was attracted by the scenery oflake Shinji, a brackish lake whose color is ‘gentle as thelight of a dream’ and the honesty of the local people,
who were in awe of nature and spirit.
On my way back from Lefkada, which I visited lastSeptember for meetings, I had an opportunity to eat
perch and eel in a small town, Aitoliko, facing the
Ionian Sea. These fish are also actually part of the local
cuisine of Matsue. The scenery of the lagoons of the
Ionian Sea and the spirit of ancient Greece harmonize
with the Japanese scenery and the spiritual culture that
Hearn loved. Therefore, it is a great honor to be able tohold this symposium, where we discuss his open mind
searching for its utilization in the modern world, inLefkada. I hope the result of the symposium willcontribute to a sustainable and convivial society.
As Hearn’s great grandson and on behalf of the
Planning Committee for the Memorial Events in
Greece to Commemorate the 110th Anniversary of
Lafcadio Hearn’s Death, I would like to express mydeepest appreciation to Mr. Aravanis, Mayor of thecity of Lefkada, His Excellencey Mr. Nishibayashi,
Japanese ambassador to Greece, The President of The
American College of Greece Dr. Horner, the panelists
and coordinators of the symposium, and all those who
supported this project.

This year one hundred and ten years arecompleted since the death of a global
personality, Lafcadio Hearn, who was bornin Lefkada.
Lefkada is paying a tribute to him by participatingin the organization of the International ScientificSymposium titled “The Open Mind of Lafcadio
Hearn — his Spirit from the West to the East” andother commemorative events which include reciting
texts, Japanese puppetry and tea ceremony.
The highlight of the event is the inauguration of the“Lafcadio Hearn Historical Center” because Lafcadio
Hearn returns to his hometown, acquires a rightfulplace at the Cultural Center of the Municipality ofLefkada and joins with his universality Japan with
Europe and America.
On behalf of the Municipal Authority and myself I
would like to express my deep satisfaction for all our
cooperation with the Organizing Committee of theevents in Greece to commemorate the 110 years since
the death of Lafcadio Hearn, the Japanese Embassy in
Greece, the Municipalities of Matsue, Kumamoto,Shinjuku, Yaizu and the University of Toyama.
I wish every success in the entire organizationand look forward to future joint cultural activities
from the starting point of the “Lafcadio Hearn
Historical Center”.

Costas A. Aravanis
Mayor of Lefkada

Bon Koizumi
Great-grandson of Lafcadio Hearn
Chairman of the Planning Committee

6

Welcome Messages

On the occasion of celebrating the 110th
anniversary of the death of Lafcadio Hearn,
I would like to congratulate and praise anumber of people who devoted themselves to hold theInternational Symposium “The Open Mind of
Lafcadio Hearn — His Spirit from the West to theEast —.” Without their dedication, the symposium
would not have been realized. It is my great pleasure toparticipate in the symposium on Lafcadio Hearn at hisbirthplace, Lefcada.
While Lafcadio Hearn passed away 110 years ago, I
strongly feel that Hearn is still alive among many
Japanese people’s souls. Most of the Japanese citizens
including myself enjoy reading his ghost stories basedon Japanese folktales. Compared to Japan,
unfortunately, Hearn has not been popular among
Greek people. However, thanks to some advocators of
Hearn, he becomes better known these days and his
spirit of “open mind” is slowly but steadily prevailingin Greece. Without doubt Hearn makes an important
contribution to cultural and interpersonal exchanges
between Greece and Japan. We are lucky to have aperson like Hearn, who plays a role of bridge between
our two countries.
One of the purposes of the symposium is toanalyze and interpret Lafcadio Hearn from various
perspectives. Hearn’s spirit of “open mind” is not dead.
I sincerely hope that we may apply Hearn’s spirit to ourdaily life. I also hope that this symposium gives an
excellent opportunity to deepen and strengthen ties
and friendship between Greece and Japan.
I cordially wish a great success of the symposium
as well as a series of other events on Lafcadio Hearn.

In 2009–10 The American College of Greece
sponsored an exhibition honoring “The Open
Mind of Lafcadio Hearn” as part of a series of
events marking the College’s 135th anniversary. Since
that time, the “Open Mind” theme has beencelebrated in Matsue ( Japan), New Orleans, New York
City, and, this year, in Lafcada (Greece).
Through its participation in these highly successful
events, ACG has been privileged to draw attention to
the life and legacy of Lafcadio Hearn, which embody
so abundantly the highest value of education in theAmerican tradition on which ACG is built: the freepursuit of truth in service of the common good.
I wish to acknowledge and to commend the visionand dedication of Bon and Shoko Koizumi as well as
their tireless collaborator, Takis Efstathiou, without
which these events would not have been possible.
Their efforts have attracted the support of individuals
and institutions around the world because “The OpenMind” is not only a testament to Lafcadio Hearn but
also a clarion call to understanding and peace so
deeply needed in our time.
The American College of Greece is pleased toendorse this call with our support of this Symposium.

David G. Horner, Ph.D.
President
The American College of Greece

Masuo Nishibayashi
Ambassador of Japan to Greece

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

7For generations, the impressionistic writings ofLafcadio Hearn have inspired a deep love andappreciation for the beauty of nature and thehuman condition. His enigmatic life has become abridge from the West to the East and an important
aspect of Japan-Greece relations. While most of his
years weren’t spent in either country, his happiest
certainly were. As a rosy-cheeked baby on his Greek
mother’s knee and with his beloved Japanese family in
his later years, Lafcadio Hearn observed the world in afabulously unique way. Fortunately for us, hedocumented these open-minded, poetic observations
and left them for posterity. As we endeavor to fully
understand his life, through his writings, his identity
remains somewhat elusive. Who was Lafcadio Hearn?
Was he Greek? Irish? Japanese? He was all of these andthe perfect example of the whole being greater than
the sum of its parts. Lafcadio Hearn was truly a global
citizen, and his fresh, unbiased outlook on life is truly
worthy of continued study. As we attempt tocomprehend his prosaic interpretation of the world, all
we need do is open our eyes to the beauty around us.
His time on this earth, bookended by Greece andJapan, has left an indelible mark on history and his
legacy will undoubtedly live on, as we venture to see
the world through the lens of his open mind.

Nikolaos Tsamados
Ambassador of Greece to JapanO

n behalf of the Embassy of Ireland, I extend
my best wishes to the Symposium on “TheOpen Mind of Lafcadio Hearn — His Spirit
from the West to the East”. Born 110 years ago in Lefkada
of an Irish father and Greek mother, Lafcadio Hearn — or
Koizumi Yakumo — is one of the most admired western
figures to live within Japanese culture.
During his own lifetime, Lafcadio Hearn became theforemost Western interpreter of Japanese life, its culture
and traditions. In recent decades, Irish people havebecome aware of Lafcadio Hearn and he has helped tocreate a cultural bond between Greece, Ireland and Japan.
Hearn said of himself that he had two souls: one sensitiveand impulsive like his Greek mother and the otherstubborn and proud like his Irish father. The first resident
Ambassador of Ireland to Greece, the late Seán Ronan,
was instrumental in promoting Irish interest in Lafcadio
Hearn, subsequently becoming our Ambassador in Tokyo.
I warmly congratulate the organisers of thisSymposium, and in particular Takis Efstathiou andShoko Koizumi, for their work in promoting the study ofLafcadio Hearn in his birthplace and internationally. I
commend the people of Lefkada for the honour which
they have shown to their island’s famous son through theinauguration of a new museum dedicated to Hearn
which has benefitted greatly from the talents of Maria
Genitsariou from the Bank of Greece Museum.
We in Ireland are delighted that a Koizumi Yakumo
Memorial Garden is being laid out in the town ofTramore where Lafcadio Hearn spent many childhood
holidays. Ms. Agnes Aylward has been instrumental indelivering that project. You will have the pleasure ofhearing from the two of Ireland’s foremost Lafcadio
Hearn experts during this symposium. Mr. Paul Murray,
formerly Deputy Head of our Embassy in Tokyo, wrote
the definitive history of Hearn: ‘A fantastic journey: thelife and literature of Lafcadio Hearn’, which has beentranslated into Japanese and I understand is now evenavailable on Kindle. Mr. John Moran of the Irish Times
has written extensively on Lafcadio Hearn’s life in Ireland.
Next year, it will be 125 years since Hearn arrived inJapan and found the subject of his finest writings. We
hope that his insights into the Japanese spirit willcontinue to inform western understanding ofcontemporary Japan and strengthen Ireland’s excellent
relations with his birthplace and his adopted home.

Charles SheehanAmbassador of Ireland to Greece

8

Welcome Messages

T

he seed of this symposium was a sharedunderstanding that Lafcadio Hearn
represented a certain open-mindedness for histime, and still does in our age, and probably will in the
future. We began by asking our panelists two simple
questions: First, how can we illustrate Hearn’s openmindedness? Second, how do we reconsider his openmindedness in a contemporary global context? Herein Lefkada, the speakers and panelists finally gather,from various parts of the world, with their own
answers and observations in hand, to ask, discuss andshare again.
The speakers, panelists, and the rest of us were
mostly strangers to one another, and most of us havenot met in person before. But now we gather here on asymbolic island where a transoceanic traveller was born.
He grew up and lived, in our respective countries, often
in less open-minded environments, yet came to havecross-cultural curiosity and trans-cultural mobility.
Now we may know that the open mind of
Lafcadio Hearn is also an open door that Hearn madevisible. We gather here respectively through this open
door, guided by the words of Patrick Lafcadio Yakumo
Koizumi Hearn. In this way, we ourselves demonstratehere a form of open mind. Our gathering tells that it isalways nice to have something to share, beyond
differences or distant seas of language, culture,nationality, ethnicity, education, gender, and class. I
hope you will find that you too are transoceanic atheart. Please enjoy the two-day symposium.

Shingo Nagaoka
Symposium Coordinator

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

9

BON KoizumiΜπον Κοϊζούμι
小泉凡

Japan/Ireland/Greece | Professor, University of Shimane; Great-grandson of Lafcadio HearnΙαπωνία/Ιρλανδία/Ελλάδα | Καθηγητής στο Πανεπιστήμιο Σιμάνε και δισέγγονος του Λευκάδιου Χερν

日本／アイルランド／ギリシャ｜島根県立大学教授、小泉八雲曾孫

The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn:
A Spiritual Odyssey from Greece to JapanΤο ανοιχτό πνεύμα του Λευκάδιου Χερν:Πνευματική Οδύσσεια από την Ελλάδα στην Ιαπωνία
オープン・マインド・オブ・ラフカディオ・ハーン――ギリシャから日本への魂の遍歴

In the essay titled “Ghost” Hearn wrote, “Perhaps
the man who never wanders away from the placeof his birth may pass all his life without knowing
ghosts; but the nomad is more than likely to maketheir acquaintance.” He said the impulse for roving is“Ghost” and Lefkada is the starting point of his journeyof Ghost. We don’t know how clear his memory ofLafkada was but we can imagine the scenery ofLefkada 160 years ago from the passage in “The Dreamof a Summer Day” he wrote in 1894.
I remember, too, that the days — and thatevery day there were new wonders and newpleasures for me. And all that country and time
were softly ruled by One who taught 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 night before
moonrise, she would tell me stories that made me
tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I havenever heard any other stories half so beautiful.
And when the pleasure became too great, shewould sing a weird little song which always
brought sleep.
Rich nature of Ionian Sea and slow-moving time.
The spiritual stories which might have included Greek
myth that Hearn’s mother Rosa narrated to him
should be the base of his journey searching for Ghost.
When he was two, Hearn moved to Dublin where
his father Charles Bush Hearn’s house was located.

10

The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn

Since his mother became ill and went back to Greecedue to the difference of climate and culture, hedeparted his mother at the age of four. His mother was
the person Hearn loved most through his life. He used
to tell his family that he was ready to pay all his
fortune to get his mother’s portrait. But his dreamnever came true while he was alive. Four years ago, I
received a wonderful present from Mr. Mitsumasa
Anno, who is a noted artist born in Shimane. He
visited Kithira Island and painted a portrait of Rosa
based on the descriptions by three elderly locals who
have seen Rosa’s photo. Mr. Anno gave it to me when
he came back to Japan. As a descendant of Hearn, it
was the best present I have ever received. I am very
pleased to donate the replica of the portrait to themuseum this time.
Later in his life, Hearn was attracted by a
Kwaidan that has been handed down in Daioji
Temple in Matsue.
It is a story of pregnant woman who was buried
and gave a birth to a baby in the tomb, and brought it
up with mizu-ame, the amber-tinted syrup, she wentout to buy from there.
Hearn concluded the re-told story with a phrase,“love being stronger than death.”
While this last paragraph shows his strong
affection to his own mother, I believe he understood it
as the truth that this Kwaidan depicted. When I
visited Ishinomaki where the largest number of people
fell victims to the East Japan Great Earthquake in 2011,
I heard one story from a local person. One month after
the Earthquake, they found a body of a woman
holding a baby in her hands under the rubble. Those

who were there were moved to tears.
I thought the message in the Daioji Kwaidan has
universality across time and space. For the first time I
understood from my own experience what Hearn
meant when he wrote, “There is also truth in thelegend” and “There is a kind of truth in the literatureof the supernatural.”After Rosa went back to Kythira Island where she
was born, she remarried to John Kavarini and passed
away on December 1882 in the psychiatric hospital on
Corfu, diagnosed as “mental disorder caused byreligious enthusiasm.” I had been wondering why she
moved from Kythira which is located the most southof the Ionian Island to Corfu located to the most
north until I met Dr. Ionias when I visited thepsychiatric hospital on Corfu.
He said, “The hospital was founded in 1832 and it
was one of few mental hospitals in those days. Actually
it was the only one on the Vulcan Peninsula andpatients not only from Greece but all surrounding
countries who were suffering from mental diseases
were admitted here.”Now we know why Rosa moved to Corfu. But
there are still many mysteries about Rosa’s personality
and her life.
Separated from his mother and raised by his grandaunt Sarah Brenane, Hearn spent his lonely childhood
with his nanny, Catherine Costello, in Dublin. Hereagain, spiritual environment was waiting for Hearn.
Catherine was from Connaught District in thewestern Ireland, which maintains tradition of Celts.
Her mother language was not English but Irish. In
summer, Hearn stayed alone with Catherine at places
such as Tramore beach in the South, Cong in the Westand Bangor in Wales. Catherine used to tell him a lotof ghost stories and fairy tales at that time.
In Ireland, Druid, ancient religion of Celt is
widely penetrating.
This tree is Hawthorn and called Fairy tree. It is asacred tree and it is prohibited to cut it out without
permission. Near the fairy trees, there are normallystone circles called Fairy Fort or Fairy Ring, where
they believe fairies dance in a ring during the night.
Hearn recollected the time when he searched for a
fairy ring in Cong Village in the west with his cousin
Robert in “Kwaidan” he wrote in his later life.
In Japan, especially in the Matsue and Izumo
District, faith toward trees still remains. Many villages

enshrine guardian God called “Kojin,” most of which
are trees. This is a famous Kojin Tree in Matsue.
Hearn showed a great interest in this faith similar toanimism. He wrote,“That trees, at least Japanese trees, have souls,
cannot seem an unnatural fancy to one who has
seen the blossoming of the umenoki ( Japanese
apricot)and the sakuranoki. (cherry tree) This is
a popular belief in Izumo and elsewhere. It is not
Buddhist philosophy, and yet in a certain sense it
strikes one as being much closer to cosmic truth
than the old Western orthodox notion of trees as“things created for the use of man.” (“In aJapanese Garden”)
Hearn’s ghostly trip reached its climax when he
was in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the U.S. and on the
Island of Martinique in the Caribbean Sea.
In New Orleans, he got a job as a newspaper
journalist and conducted a research of the tropical
town with Creole culture to the full extent. New
Orleans is a town established under the direction of a
French person named Bienville in 1718.
Feeling the humidity exudes from earth, rocks andwooden parts of houses as mysterious and inexplicable
as a ghost, Hearn was absolutely charmed by apolaustic
and magical atmosphere of the town located in the
moist place.
Hearn soon became interested in Voodoo andlocal ghost stories. Voodoo is a religion that was bornwhen the spiritual religion of Fon, one of the Western
African tribes was combined with Catholic when it
was brought to Middle America in the colonial days.
It is a religion that is widely followed in Haiti and
New Orleans. Hearn used to visit Mary Labor who
entrenched Voodoo as its culture in New Orleans sofrequently that there was even a rumor that he was herlover. From her, he collected its superstitions andwrote short articles on newspaper as well as
publishing a proverb dictionary and a recipe book inorder to publicize people in the world the attractionof Creole Culture.
Hearn collected musical scores of Creole music
played by the musicians on the streets of New Orleans
almost fifteen years before jazz was born andcontinuously sent them to his friend and music critic,
Henry Edward Krehbiel with letters. There is one
letter talking about music that seems ragtime.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

11Did you ever hear negros play the piano by
ear? There are several curiosities here, Creole
negroes. Sometimes we pay them a bottle of wine
to come here and play for us. They use the piano
exactly like a banjo. It is good banjo-playing, but
no piano playing.
Hearn once spoke to one of the musicians on thestreet playing Creole music which has some features ofAfrican music,
It hath a most sweet sound to me; and to the
ethnologist a most fascinating interest. Verily, I
would rather listen to it, than hear a symphony of
Beethoven!
When Hearn was in Japan, he wrote to Professor
Chamberlain that he had always been moved byprimitive music, and was very excited with Africanmusic and Spanish American melody. He refuted
Chamberlain’s idea that Japanese music was noise.
It shows that at the time when only Westernclassic music was regarded as proper music, heobserved New Orleans music culture with his keen
ear without any prejudice.
From 1887 to 1889, he spent two years in
Martinique. Before he left, he paid as much as 106
dollars to buy a French camera ‘Detective’ in New
York. It was 30 years ago that we found 40 photos that
he took in the closet of my house in Tokyo. One ofthem is an old sepia-toned picture of a distant view ofthe village of Morne Rouge where he lived.
Hearn hired a maid named Cyrillia who could nottell time. At first, with kindness, he tried to teach her
how to do so several times but in vain. Later, however,
he became to think it was not necessary since she got
up at 4:30 without an alarm clock every morning. It
was the time when crickets which have been making
big sound all the night suddenly become silent. She
was a woman who lives without resistance to nature.
She was always very worried that a sorcerer, a witch
or a zombie would do something wrong to Hearn. In
those days people in the countryside of Martiniquebelieved zombies would appear after sunset and they
were active even in the urban areas between 2 a.m. and
4 a.m. Hearn wrote in his work ‘Ma Bonne’ that it wascommon to use a phrase, “The zombie will gobble theeup.” when parents scolded their children.
Again here in Martinique, he accepted folk
religion different from Christianity and developed his

12

The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn

open mind with his accumulated experience ofdifferent cultures.
When he came back to New York from Martinique,he brought in a project report of Japan to Harper andgot a chance to visit Japan. He left New York on March
8th, 1890 and arrived in Yokohama on April 4th. He fellin love with Japan at the first sight and never returnedto the U.S. He cancelled his contract with Harper.
Prof. Chamberlain and Ichizo Hattori he met atthe New Orleans Expo found him a position as ateacher at Shimane Middle School.
In New York he borrowed Kojiki, the oldest
Japanese history book translated by Prof. Chamberlain
from Patten of Harper. More than half Kamiyo no
Maki, the era of Gods, which occupies one third of
Kojiki, consists of Izumo legends. He bought Kojiki in
Yokohama and read intensively the stories of Izumo
Gods with making notes. Coincidentally, Hearn got a
job at a place he adored. He called Matsue “The Chief
City of the Province of the Gods” and was deeply
attracted by it.
What attracted him most was its vapor tone
scenery he had never seen before. The sunset at Lake
Shinji was very different from the sunsets in Europe,
the U.S. and Caribbean Sea. He described it “The lightis gentle as a light of dreams.”In Matsue there are twobrackish lakes, Shinjiko and Nakaumi that areconnected to Japan Sea, whose scene resembles thescene of the Ionian Sea just in front of us. He graduallyfound Izumo Area comfortable to live in probably
because he associated the shadows in Izumo Area withhis own shadows, which are his minority background,law height, loss of the sight of his left eye and trauma
for not receiving parental love.
The area also has a lot of materials which satisfied
his interests as a folklorist, such as mythology, legends,
folk religion, traditional customs. Furthermore,
Matsue was one of the pioneers of milk production,and there were already two milkers. There was also awestern cuisine restaurant, and he was able to eat steak
he liked very much even every night. Beer and whisky
were available at the drugstores, which means Matsue
in those days was a rare city where western diet waspossible compared with other cities on the Japan Sea
Side. Hearn was able to keep his health and continueenergetic reportorial activities.
In Matsue, he met Setsu Koizumi who later
became his companion for life, Sentaro Nishida, hiscolleague and the vice principal and wonderfulstudents. Their hospitality supported Hearn’s life
in Matsue.
His encounter with Setsu from Samurai family, hasa very significant meaning. Setsu loved stories since
her childhood and used to ask adults to narrate
folklores. Though she like to study at school, she had
to leave school when she was in the fourth grade of theelementary school due to a financial reason, whichgave her a sense of failure. When Setsu narrated“Tottori no Futon,” a Kwaidan that has been handed
down in Tottori Prefecture, Hearn said to her ,” You
are the one who can help me,” and always looked
forward to hearing stories narrated by her. Once when
Setsu lamented her lack education, saying she could
have been more of his help if she had higher education
with college degree, Hearn held of her hand and took
her to the bookshelf where his works were on. He said,“How were these books born? If you were an educatedwoman, you would laugh at those stories of spirits,
ghosts and former incarnation as ridiculous stories.”
Before he moved to Japan, he always wanted andlived a life with somebody who narrated him stories
such as his mother Rosa in Greece, Catherine in
Ireland, Matty Foley in Cincinnati, Cyrillia in
Martinique. Setsu was also a woman who grew up in
the world of narration, which enabled her to act as anarrator of Kwaidan, which have been translated in avariety of languages in the world as a masterpiece.
In the very latter year of Hearn, Setsu narrated one
story from a book titled Gayuu Kidan. It is a story of
Hoichi, a biwa player , who was taken by a ghost of
Taira Clan every night and played Biwa in front of thegravestone of Emperor Antoku who drowned himself.
Having noticed that Hoichi went out of the temple
every night, the chief priest of the temple found outthat he was haunted by evil spirit, he draw Buddhist
sutra all over Hoichi’s body. Since he forgot to draw it
on Hoichi’s ears, his ears were pulled away by theghost. It is a story later known as “Mimi-NashiHoichi,” one of Hearn’s most favorite Kwaidan.
This story has a lot in common with the stories ofOrpheus in Greek myth and ‘the Magic Fiddle’
handed dwon in Ireland as the main characters are thegod players of strings and they suffered from physicaldamages by the power of the alien world. He may havewanted to make it his work since he found a story inJapan which is similar to those he knew before he
moved to Japan.
In Kojiki I introduced earlier, there is a story that

Izanagi and Izanami, central characters of Japanesecreation myth, went down to netherworld. Izanami
went down to the world of the dead as she got badly
burned when she bore God of fire. Izanagi lamented
and went to netherworld to pick her up, but had torush back to the world since he violated the taboo of
not seeing his wife and was run after Izanami and devil
women. He barely protected himself with a big rockagainst them at a place which is called“Yomotsuhirasaka” and believed to be located on thesuburbs of Matsue.
He mentioned about this story as follows.
And of all legends primeval concerning theUnder world this story is one of the weirdest,— more weird than even the Assyrian legend of
the Descent of Ishtar. Even Izumo is especiallythe province of the gods, and the place of thechildhood of the race by whom Izanagi and
Izanami are yet worshiped.
The fact that he mentioned about Ishtar, mothergoddess of Assyria just like Aphrodita in Greek myth,
could have something to do with the fact that there
was a French print art depicting a group of Assyrian
astrologers on the wall of his room in his childhood.
Hearn was a person who had sympathy with stories
where humans are coming and going to the alien world.
That is why he loved stories such as Urashima Tarowhere Urashima visited the palace in the bottom of
the ocean and other folklores about marriages between
humans and other spirits. He believed the humanworld could be enriched by communicating with thealien world and he was against the humanism where
everything completes among human beings.
Hearn’s open mind matured through his trip in hislife accepting polytheism in Greece, Ireland, Creoleand Japan. At the end of his trip of life in japan, heseems to have evolved his open mind by listening tomysterious stories narrated by Setsu and enjoying
Japanese myth from the view of comparison.
Open mind grows an ability to see through theessence of things. In his lectures and works after hecame to Japan, he pointed out the features of Japaneseculture and mentioned how Japan should be in thefeature. Let me give some examples.
In his lecture titled “The Future of the Far East”
which he delivered in Kumamoto in January in 1894,
he spoke about the future of Japan.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

13The costly races may totally disappear as theresult. Nature is a great economist. She makes no
mistakes. The fittest to survive are those best able
to live with her, and to be content with a little.
Such is the law of the universe.
He said to maintain coexistence with nature andsimple life is the most important for the future ofJapan. It was the period when Japan won in Japan-sino
war and had been strengthening its power. He also
pointed out in the same lecture that, in the future,
there will be economical wars instead of political wars
and there is a risk of Japan being overwhelmed by
China. These are regarded actual issue in the modern
world and Hearn’s value is reevaluated.
In his essay titled “Earthquakes and National
Character”, he wrote there is no place where Japanese
can live in peace other than the world after death as
Japan suffers from so many disasters including
earthquakes, typhoons, floods and heavy snowfalls. He
said Ise Shrine which was the symbol of Shintoism isreconstructed regularly in order to improve theirpowers and accept changes. I believe his theory was
novel in those days and can be highly evaluated.
Regarding Japanese education, in his lecture in
Matsue, he said that school education put too muchemphasis in memory. Imagination was more importantfor human beings. He also said in his lecture hedelivered to the parents meeting of Okubo elementary
school in Shinjuku Tokyo 6 months before his death,that Japanese parents were too dependent on school
teachers in children’s education. He said parents
should not only discipline their children but also givethem basic education at home while he also noticed
that some families and schools made children study
too hard. Controlling children by providing
knowledge, monster parents who always complain toschools and the systems of entrance examination
which require students to study too hard — What
Hearn pointed out is actually the big issues for modern
Japanese education.
In his last work Japan: An Attempt at
Interpretation where he discussed mental history ofJapanese, he pointed out that the base of Japanesementality exits their faith for ancestors, which is
penetrating from family to local god, regional god to
Ise Shrine. He argued that since Ise is a shrine whereancestors of the emperor are enshrined, the faith ofJapanese toward the emperor is very close to their faith
for ancestors.

14

The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn

One of the persons who thought about how Japan
should be after the World War II was Bonner Fellers,
who was a close adviser of Douglas MacArthur. As akeen reader of Hearn’s writings he opened the
direction of utilizing the power of emperor
democratically as a symbol rather than punishing him
as a war criminal, considering the close relationshipbetween the faith to the ancestors and to the emperor.
I was named Bon after Bonner Fellers who was close to
my grandfather Kazuo. Five years ago, a letter
addressed to Mr. Fellers from my grandfather
informing he named his first grandson Bon after him
happened to return to me. It was Bonner Fellers who
opened a new way toward new peaceful japan who
sympathized with Hearn’s open mind.
Yonejiro Noguchi, illegitimate father of Isamu
Noguchi who is said to be the artist representing 20th
century called Hearn a prophet. He said a prophet is
not a person who says something that surprises people
but a person who understands the essence of things
and tells the truth. I believe Hearn’s open mind madeit possible.
As I mentioned, Hearn’s life was a life of a traveler
with a one way ticket, full of difficulties and failure.
However, I also believe that he was a person who
always found hope while struggling. What he found
was not a dream but hope. According to Mr. Yuji
Genda, one of my acquaintances and economist who
developed “Hopology”, dream comes from theunsatisfied feelings unconsciously, while hope issomething which is difficult to achieve and you still try
to get as a driving power for the future. Hope said tobe also different from happiness. Happiness calls forcontinuity of the current situation. On the other hand,hope has a close relationship with changes, changes
from the harsh condition to the better conditions orchanges somebody’s situation to a better one.
Hearn was very active as he was a person who
always had hope and received changes in order torealize his hope. I believe it helped him greatly tothink unbiasedly and his open mind to mature.
These days, we use the words “cultural resources”
quite often in Japan.
In Tokyo University graduate school, they opened
cultural resources studies in 2000. Just like recyclable
garbage, there are a variety of small cultures whichhave been accumulated for many years and have notbeen utilized. The purpose of the studies is to dig themout and retranslate them to connect them to economic
activities such as tourism and area revitalization.
In Matsue in 2008, we started “Matsue GhostTour” as one of the tourist attractions, dredging up
various ghost stories handed down in the castle city.
Since a lot of ghost stories in Matsue were retold byHearn in his books, what we do is to kind of recycle
Lafcaio Hearn as cultural resources. I suggested thetour, taking a hint from Ghost Bus Tour in Dublin in
Ireland and the Ghost Tour in New Orleans.
In this tour, we walk in the dark for two hours,with a special guide telling ghost stories. You can enjoy
yourself with your ears. The purpose of the tour is tohave a playful mind, to strain your ears open,
experience darkness and stimulate your intellectual
curiosity. It was the first attempt in Japan. We did the212 tours by the end of this March, and more than
3,400 people participated in the tour.
“The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn” was used forthe first time for the modern art exhibition held in
American College of Greece in Athens in October
2009. The exhibition where artists from all over theworld expressed Hearn’s spirit in art, moved a lot of
people and drew big reaction. Exhibitions with thesame theme were held in Matsue Castle and Koizumi
Yakumo Memorial Museum in Matsue City in 2010
and Nippon Club in New York in 2011 and in Tulane
University in New Orleans in 2012. The series of art
exhibition is a new trial of expressing Hearn’s Open
Mind in art.
There is also a movement of utilizing Hearn’s ideafrom the point of disaster prevention. “Michinoku
Yakumokai” has been active in the areas affected by
the East Japan Big Earthquake in 2011, producing a
DVD of “A Living God” the story that Hearn wrote
from a historical fact that Shoya, the landowner saved
people from Tsunami at the time of Ansei Nankai
Earthquake in 1854. In collaboration with NGOs ineach country, Asian Disaster Prevention Center
which is one of the Japanese governmentalorganizations has been translating “A Living God”
into many languages mainly of Asian countries anduse it as a textbook for disaster prevention at each site
by reading it to local people.

There are more and more activities to take Hearn
as cultural resource and utilize him as cultural creation,
understanding of different culture, tourism andrevitalizing of towns by adjusting his idea to themodern society. This kind of movement seems to be
combined with the social changes from the time when
we searched for endless economic growth to thecurrent trend when we try to make a sustainable
society where we can all live together.
John Kenneth Galbraith, who passed away in 2006,
predicted in his later life that the value will shift from
GDP to GNE (Gross National Enjoyment), whichmeans people will put more emphasis on how muchthey can produce to how much enjoyment they could
have in life. As his great grandson, I believe it isextremely important to utilize Hearn’s open mind as acultural resource in the modern world.
In his letter to Chamberlain dated December 14
1893, Hearn wrote that ghosts gave him a purpose oflife. And later in his life, in the lecture at the Imperial
University he said there is always one aspect of truth inliterature featuring supernatural themes such as
Kwaidan. He was a person who believes material
development would not make people happy. He rather
thought human society can be enriched bycommunicating with the alien world as human beings
can maintain humbleness. It was the ancient Greecethat Hearn regarded as the ideal society. He acquired
knowledge regarding ancient Greece from quite a few
books that he owned on Greek history, classic
literature, myth and anthology. He made a lot of noteson The Greek Anthology by George Burges. He statedin his lecture titled “Insects and Greek Poetry,”Those old Greeks, though happy as children
and as kindly, were very great philosophers, towhom we go for instruction even at this day.
What the world now most feels in need of is thereturn of that old Greek spirit of happiness andof kindness.
I think it is significant to hold the commemorating
events in Greece this time in this point. I hope
discussions in the symposium on Hearn’s open mind
formed in his trip from Greece to Japan, which islocated the other side of the earth, will help create asociety of coexistence.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

15

MARI CHRISTINEΜαρί Κριστίν
マリ・クリスティーヌ

Japan/USA | Inter-Cultural Interpreter; Hearn Library Researcher, Toyama UniversityΙαπωνία/ΗΠΑ | Διαπολιτισμικός μεσολαβητής, Ερευνητής της Βιβλιοθήκης Χερν του Πανεπιστημίου Τογιάμα

日本／アメリカ｜文化通訳者、富山大学ヘルン文庫客員特別研究員

Lafcadio Hearn’s Open Mind in the Classroom:
Findings from Hearn’s Kumamoto LecturesΤο ανοιχτό πνεύμα του Λευκάδιου Χερν στην αίθουσα διδασκαλίας:Ευρήματα από τις παραδόσεις του Χερν στο Κουμαμότο
教室のオープン・マインド――富山で新たに発見されたハーンの熊本での授業資料
Introduction
ood afternoon ladies and gentlemen, it isindeed a pleasure for me to have been
invited to speak today on “The Open Mindof Lafcadio Hearn” amongst such distinguishedscholars and guests.
I work in the media, and I also consult inintercultural communications and public relations.
I am currently visiting professor at Kyushu
University and at Toyama University which houses the
Hearn Library consisting of some 2600 books thatwere owned personally by Lafcadio Hearn himself. I
am a Fellow researcher.
At the time of the discovery of the Hearn Notes I
was visiting professor at Toyama University.
I believe it is not wrong to say that in the days of
Lafcadio Hearn, inter-cultural communication wasprobably much more exotic and adventurous than weknow it today. Only a very few people had the means
to travel or live in an exotic foreign country. Those
who did have the opportunity to live abroad often
wrote of their travels, discoveries and various
adventures. Travelers and expatriates were exposed totreacherous and unbearable inconveniences that mostwould find intolerable today. Some of those travelers
could speak the language of their host country but
most could not. Those pioneers were the first to write
about their adventures and because there were hardly
any documents before them, their words wereremembered, quoted and often used for reference.
Some of the authors and journalists were critical, someembellished their stories and others even had theirown interpretation. Lafcadio Hearn had written
numerous and detailed articles giving insight to JapanG

16

Lafcadio Hearn’s Open Mind in the Classroom

and Japanese culture. Because he was born of parentsof two cultures and lived in foreign countries, he seems
to have had an inherent ability to objectively observe
the cultures and lifestyles of the countries he lived in.
The academic discipline of inter-culturalcommunication or cross-cultural communication did
not exist until the early 1900’s. If it had existed in 1890,
one of Hearn’s titles would certainly have been an“inter-cultural communicator”.
Brief Biography of Lafcadio Hearn
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn ( June 27, 1850–September
26, 1904) was born here on Lefkada, the origin of his
middle name. He was also known by his Japanesename, Yakumo Koizumi. He was the son of an Irish
surgeon, Major Charles Bush Hearn, and Greek
mother, Rosa Kassimati. His father was stationed here
in Lefkada during the British occupation of the islands.
At the age of two, Hearn and his family relocatedto Dublin, Ireland. Later on, his parents divorced. He
was raised by his father’s aunt, Mrs. Brenane, who wasa wealthy Roman Catholic. In 1865 he was attending
the Catholic Ushaw College in Durham where he lostthe vision in his left eye due to an injury in theplayground. This accident influenced the shaping ofHearn’s character as he grew into adulthood. Later,
Hearn was also briefly educated in France. After his
return to England his aunt became bankrupt andcould no longer support him.
At age 19, Hearn was sent to live in the UnitedStates where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. At first he
was impoverished. He became acquainted with an
Englishman, Henry Watkins, an English printer who
befriended him for life. Because he was a talentedwriter, Hearn soon obtained a job as a reporter for the
Cincinnati Daily Enquirer where he worked from 1872
to 1875. With his free, creative style as he wrote forone of Cincinnati’s largest newspapers, he became
known for his lurid accounts of local crimes andmurders. He developed a reputation as the paper’s
premier sensational journalist as well as the author ofin-depth accounts of injustice to the poor anddisadvantaged residents of Cincinnati.
During the autumn of 1877, Hearn left Cincinnati
and headed south to New Orleans, Louisiana where heinitially wrote pieces on his discoveries in the“Gateway to the Tropics” for the Cincinnati
Commercial. Hearn became well-known for his
writings about the city of New Orleans that he was
fascinated with and it is said that he “put New Orleanson the map” as he gave accounts of the exciting culture,
food and festivities of the city with its mix of various
ethnic backgrounds. He lived in New Orleans foralmost a decade where he wrote for the Daily City Item
newspaper and later for the Times Democrat. The vast
number of articles he published helped to create thepopular reputation of New Orleans as a place with adistinct culture, more like Europe and the Caribbean’s.
The Creole culture was for him a favorite subject andhe even wrote a cooking book on Creole cuisine.
He also wrote for Harper’s magazine. They sent
Hearn to the West Indies in 1887 as a correspondent
where he lived for two years in Martinique.
In 1890, Hearn went to Japan as a newspaper
correspondent. Shortly after his arrival in Yokohama,he quit his job due to a disagreement about his
contract. It was in Japan that he found his greatest
inspiration. Through the goodwill of Basil Hall
Chamberlain, an Englishman who became a long timefriend, Hearn was introduced to a teaching position
during the summer of 1890 at the Shimane Prefectural
Common Middle School and Normal School in
Matsue, Shimane Prefecture, a western coastal town on
the Sea of Japan. During his 15-month stay in Matsue,
he married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a former
samurai family. He also met his lifelong friend, Sentaro
Nishida, a fellow teacher. Due to the severe cold in
Matsue and his health, Hearn sought a warmer climate.
In late 1891 Hearn obtained a new teaching position in
Kumamoto, Kyushu, at the Fifth Middle and Higher
School where he spent the next three years andcompleted his book, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.
He was not entirely happy with his teachingenvironment in Kumamoto so in October 1894, hewent on to live in Kobe, working with the English-

language newspaper, Kobe Chronicle. There in Kobe in1896 he became a naturalized Japanese citizen taking
the name Yakumo Koizumi.
In 1896, again with the assistance of Basil Hall
Chamberlain, he obtained a teaching position inTokyo. He taught English literature at the Tokyo
Imperial University until 1903. He was highly
respected by his students and his lectures were
eventually published. In 1904, he became a professor
at Waseda University. Unfortunately he died of heart
failure on September 26, 1904 at the age of 54.
Hearn is best known for his books about Japan,
especially his collection of Japanese legends and ghoststories. He also offered the West some of its firstdescriptions of pre-industrial and Meiji Era Japan.
Now I will present the discovery of Lafcadio
Hearn’s English lessons in Kumamoto taken down by
his student Takahiko Tomoeda.
Background of Takahiko Tomoeda’s Notebook
The Tomoeda notebook is a notebook that was
taken down by Takahiko Tomoeda when he studied
English in classes taught by Lafcadio Hearn in
Kumamoto. To this date, none of Lafcadio Hearn’s
lectures to his students in Kumamoto have been found.
The discovery of the notebook sheds light on how hemust have taught in his early stages in Kumamoto.
One of Hearn’s great talents was his ability to teachexpressions of self and his encouragements to students
to discover themselves in the context of their writingand English language ability. Hearn’s students
discovered not only English and the culture behind
the words, but they discovered their own thoughts andfeelings. For others, they learned to express themselves
and their culture to the English-speaking world. This
was the case of Takahiko Tomoeda, a Japanese student
from Buzen. Tomoeda studied English from Hearn
from autumn of 1893 to spring of 1894.
Now even in present-day Japan there is concern
from some Japanese educators who feel that studying
English at an early age will cause children to lose their
Japanese identity. However, Hearn did not try to makeforeigners out of the Japanese students. He taught andoffered ways for them to explain their country,
Japanese culture and themselves as Japanese,
accomplishing this in a foreign language. At the sametime, as a journalist, Hearn’s lectures seem to beinterviewing his students for his own references which
he utilized in his writings. Therefore, you will see fromthe notes that he was extremely diligent in explaining
Western culture and the historical background of theProceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

17meanings and origins of words and expressions. He
referred to places familiar to his students in theircommunity, as well as making references to thedifferences in expression and explanation of how
words and sentences are used in Japanese compared toEnglish and Western culture and vice versa. He foundhis role was not simply to teach English. He
discovered Japan through the eyes and ears of his
students, similar to his own correspondence with
Nishida from Matsue City. He sent his discoveries to
Chamberlain as he wrote his own articles.
Encounter with Tomoeda’s Notebook
Although Hearn had never been to Toyama, while
he was teaching at the Imperial Tokyo University, he
had students from Toyama Prefecture. Among them
was Tsunetaro Nannichi. Nannichi, who became thehead of Toyama High School, was related to the
Nakatsuchi family. The Nakatsuchi family owned the
Hokuseido Publishing Company where they
published books in English. Nakatsuchi Yoshitaka was
the nephew of Tsunetaro Nannichi.
After the death of Hearn, his family, especially his
wife, Setsu, was very worried that Hearn’s private
collection could be in danger of fire or earthquakes
and simply deterioration, if not properly cared for. She
was looking for a caretaker or buyer of his books. The
family also needed means to support themselves. A
wealthy woman, from Toyama prefecture, Haru Baba,
was consulted about the collection. She had donatedfunds for the building of Toyama High School for thepeople of Toyama. Professor Nannichi who was tobecome the school’s principal suggested that shepurchase the entire collection for the Toyama HighSchool. This is how the Hearn Library became housedin Toyama. Hokuseido crated the books to be sentfrom Tokyo to Toyama.
In 1943, Takahiko Tomoeda went to Toyama.
Tomoeda had taught English and Ethics at Tokyo
Bunri Daigaku which is the present Tsukuba
University. He visited his former student, Tsutomu
Takata (d.1946). Takata, then a teacher of English at
Toyama High School, was in charge of the Hearn
Library. Tomoeda visited the Hearn Library and in thecourse of the conversation, Tomoeda told Takata that
he had studied English from Lafcadio Hearn in
Kumamoto Fifth Middle and Higher School (Dai 5
Kotouchugakko) from 1892–1899. He had kept his
English class notebooks. Takata borrowed thenotebook from Tomoeda and arranged to have
Hokuseido Press publish the notebook. Hokuseido18

Lafcadio Hearn’s Open Mind in the Classroom

Press had published many of Hearn’s books in English
and translated to Japanese the same books. The
notebook was beautifully copied and edited by
Yoshitaka Nakatsuchi. WW2 had broken out and due
to public opinion at that time, English was notpolitically correct to use, paper was rationed and the
publication of English language books was not apriority. The Hokuseido Company decided to keep
the book in a safe place until a more appropriate time.
And indeed the notebook was put away in such asafe place that it was put away and forgotten until
2008. After WW2, the Hokuseido Company changed
hands from the Nakatsuchi family to a new owner.
The new owners no longer wanted the archived books
from past publications that were kept for reference.
The entire lot was sent to the Nakatsuchi family andthey in turn stored the entire collection in a shed on
their property. In 2007, the Nakatsuchi family washousecleaning and felt at a loss about what to do withall the material they had inherited. They consulted a
relative, living in Toyama, Atsushi Senda, who is very
knowledgeable in English language books and picture
books. He suggested they donate the material. The
Nakatsuchi family decided to send the archives to the
Toyama University Hearn Library.
In looking over the vast collection of material,
including a bookcase that was used in Hearn’s home,
he found many books and notebooks, publication
catalogues that were sent abroad to promote the sale of
new books by Yukichi Fukuzawa, Soseki Natsume,
Lafcadio Hearn and books published by diplomats
about their reminiscences of life in Japan. In this pileof “non-categorized” material, the notebook by
Tomoeda was patiently waiting to be found again.
In late 2009, Senda showed me the notebook. He
said he found it when looking through the“uncategorized” material that was part of the Hearn
Library. Because of my background in inter-culturalcommunications, he asked me if I would be interested
in translating it to Japanese if it had not been
published before. Of course, I was very intrigued andasked to read it first. It was amazing. I was spellboundby its simplicity and beautiful English text. It wasdifficult to imagine that this was the spoken English of
the late 1800’s. The quality of English words he uses istimeless. Even today, one could use the same words andsentences. It is a great English textbook. We checked tosee if there had been a former publication of which
there was not. I then proceeded to translate the text.
Atsushi Senda, a dear friend and colleague is anaccountant by profession but a student and researcher

of Manyoushu, the oldest existing collection of ancientJapanese poetry. Lafcadio Hearn also wrote about
Manyoushu. When I was appointed as Visiting
Professor at Toyama University, he took me to the
Hearn Library where I met Mrs. Kuribayashi who has
been the caretaker of the “sacred books” of Hearn.
Since she is a librarian, she knows the library by heart.
She is one of the most knowledgeable persons I am
acquainted with on the life and works of Lafcadio
Hearn. Upon entering the library, I was in awe at the2600 books that had belonged to Lafcadio Hearn.
Moreover, the genre of books that he had read andused was amazing.
Shortly thereafter, by coincidence, I was contacted
by a close friend. She knew I was at Toyama University,
researching Hearn. She invited me to hear a lecture by
a Professor Sukehiro Hirakawa, one of Japan’s
foremost academics of Lafcadio Hearn. At university, I
studied Comparative Culture and while reading
Lafcadio Hearn, I felt a kindred spirit. I would read his
books and say “You have it right, Hearn! This is exactly
how I feel. This is what I have experienced, and this iswhat I have seen! This is what I also think!” However,Hearn was writing about Japan over 100 years ago. My
work is inter-cultural communications; therefore I canidentify Hearn as one of the first inter-culturalcommunicators in Japan.
At the time of the lecture by Professor Hirakawa,
we did not realize the academic and historicalimportance of the notebook and therefore did not
mention it to Professor Hirakawa until our next
meeting which took place in Toyama.
As a visiting professor, I was able to invite guest
lecturers to the program and I boldly asked Professor
Hirakawa if he would visit my class. He kindly
accepted and came to Toyama. When we first showed
him the notebook, he was extremely surprised. He told
us that he had recently collaborated with Kumamoto
University professors to publish a book, Lafcadio
Hearn’s Student Composition Corrections, on the
essays of the students that Hearn taught in Matsue.
Hearn’s lectures at Tokyo Imperial University are
well known and read, but his time spent teaching inKumamoto Fifth Middle and Higher School has notbeen documented. This was a great find. He said that
this notebook was a “missing link”.
I sent Professor Hirakawa my first translation of
the English text into Japanese. He was very critical of
my Japanese translation. Although I have translated
books from English to Japanese in the past, I foundthat the volume of Japanese necessary to explain the

English meanings made the single 200 to 300-pageEnglish language book an encyclopedia. Therefore, in
written translation, the Japanese version became only asummary of the actual book. At times, translated
books do not entirely catch the actual mood or precise
meaning of the words. To use a popular phrase, muchgets “lost in translation”.
I did not want to summarize Hearn’s English. Eachword Hearn used is exact and his sentences areprofound. Not yet being technically capable ofcapturing his beautiful English into equally beautiful
Japanese, I was lost. Professor Hirakawa, then connected
me to Professor Nishikawa of Kumamoto University.
He is an English professor who in collaboration withProfessor Rosen had just the year before translated therecently found essays of Hearn’s students in Matsue intheir latest publication, Lafcadio Hearn’s Student
Composition Corrections. After my original translation,
Professor Nishikawa restructured the text into beautiful
Japanese for which I am very grateful.
The Journey Continues
Then, the next interesting journey began. We knewthat the notebook was a compilation of the original
notebook of Takahiko Tomoeda. It was rewritten by
Nakatsuchi for publication and there was an
introduction by Nakatsuchi to this effect. Therefore,
the original notebook might still exist! “Can we findit!” “Of course!” “Nevertheless, where?”On the Internet we found Tomoeda ‘shiryoukan’,
the Tomoeda archives. We found that there was anarchive in the Kyushu University Library. There wasalso another archive in Buzen City, Tomoeda’s
hometown. First, I called the librarian at Kyushu
University, who told me that their library had
materials from the Tomoeda Family dating from theEdo 1603–1868 and Meiji 1868–1912 periods. The
family was an “Oo Shoya”. The Oo Shoyas wereprominent families who were landowners and had
many big storehouses. They were obliged to host
visiting prominent people and imperial family
members visiting the area. The archives of the Kyushu
Oo Shoyas were being catalogued, documented, andstudied for their historical value by the Kyushu
University Library.
After several days, I received a call from Mr.
Kashijima. He regretfully informed me that hisarchives had nothing on Takahiko Tomoeda, only his
father and grandfather, Kakunosuke and Sauemon.
The following day I called the Buzen City Office andasked about the Tomoeda ‘shiryoukan’. The person at

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

19the information desk said they had never heard of it. I
then called the Buzen mayor’s office and wastransferred to the cultural department where they said
they knew of the family but did not know if the‘shiryoukan’ existed. The person on the phone said thatshe knew of an older person who might know
something and said she would try to contact him.
Eventually, I received a call from Mr. Odamoto. He
had met Tomoeda many years ago and had justrecently passed by the brick ‘shiryoukan’. It was
dilapidated and he could tell that it had not been in
use for many years. He said he would go to see if there
was anything written on the building about where tocontact the owners.
He called back to inform me that he had found atelephone number and name. It was with much
excitement that I called the number and asked if he
was Mr. Tomoeda. When the person on the line said,“yes, this is Tomoeda”, I was stunned. He is the
grandson of Takahiko Tomoeda. His name is Kansui
Tomoeda and Kansui’s father was the second of six
sons of Tomoeda. Kansui was a potter and lives in
Nougata, an hour away by car from Buzen. He agreed
to open the ‘shiryoukan’ to look for the notebook.
On February 2, 2012, Senda and I arrived at Omuta
Station in Buzen. Buzen was an old province innorthern Kyushu. Today the area is the eastern part of
Fukuoka Prefecture which in the past covered somenorthern parts of Oita Prefecture. It was from herethat Tomoeda was sent to Kumamoto to study. In his
book, Out of the East (Houghton Mifflin), Hearn
writes: “rich men, far away in the capital try to send
their sons to Kumamoto. It was considered desirable
that young men should be imbued with what is called‘the Kyushu spirit’….”
Kansui was waiting at the ‘shiryoukan’ andOdamoto arrived shortly after. Odamoto explainedthat Takahiko Tomoeda’s family had gone to Tokyo
before WW2 and the retainers of the family were in
charge of caring for the estate. The ‘shiryoukan,’ orstorehouse of archives, was run down. It had been built
by the eldest son of Tomoeda, a doctor, to house thebooks and papers of the family along withmemorabilia of his travels and family history. The
retainers one day decided to clean the ‘shiryoukan’ of
unnecessary items and started burning what was there.
Some of the neighbors, curious of what was happening,
went to take a look. Someone pointed out that thematerial might be important information for thehistory of Oo Shoya. They suggested donating thematerial from the Edo to Meiji period to Kyushu

20

Lafcadio Hearn’s Open Mind in the Classroom

University. The remainder of more recent materials
was left in the ‘shiryoukan’.
We entered the building and searched for thenotebook in boxes upon boxes of books, letters, andpictures. There were letters addressed to his family
from his travels abroad as well as letters addressed to
Takahiko Tomoeda before WW2. Several were fromthe period of the Japan-Russia War pertaining to thePortsmouth Treaty. Tomoeda at an early age, becauseof his language ability, was chosen to accompany
Baron Kensho Suyematsu (1855–1920) abroad. There
were several letters addressed to the Japanese
Litigation in London. Baron Suyematsu was also fromthe same area as Tomoeda in Kyushu. After combing
through every piece of paper, we found two pieces ofvery important information. One was a picture of
Tomoeda taken in November of Meiji 21, the year heentered Tokyo Imperial University. The other was his
report card addressed to his father.
From this, we had evidence that he was actually astudent in Kumamoto and that he was at the Tokyo
Imperial University at the time Hearn taught there.
We found that the Tomoeda family home in Hongo,
Tokyo had burned down during the WW2 bombingsof Tokyo. If the notebook had survived, the Tomoeda
family might have it. As far as Kansui knew, no family
member had heard of it.
Another lead was to pursue the finding of thefamily of Tsutomu Takata. He might have kept thenotebook without returning it to Tomoeda. We foundthat the home of Takata also burned during thebombings of Toyama City.
In our quest to find the original notebook of
Takahiko Tomoeda, we came across and met manykind people who were very generous with their timeand efforts to support us. I sincerely thank all of them.
Unfortunately, the original notebook is still missing.
The Tomoeda Notebook Contents
Reading the contents of the Tomoeda notebook is
an adventure in itself. The notebook is an excellent
English language textbook. It is of high quality English
and ESL students would find the choice of words
impeccable. There are books published on “How to
Write” for which this could also be utilized. Hearn did
not just stop at teaching English. He taught goodmanners and what was considered to be polite. What isthe polite way to speak? How should one ask and notcommand? How should one treat people? He usedreference to French grammar structure as well asJapanese to explain language differences. The topics hechose for his curriculum were from the everyday life ofstudents. He used places and events that they werefamiliar with: food, climate, weather, and their bodies.
His vast knowledge of history, culture, religions,languages, etc. took his students to limitless heights. Hislesson on the days of the week was eventually used when
he taught his son Kazuo. It appears in the 1957 bookRe-echo by Kazuo Koizumi, edited by Nancy Fellers.
He also uses some of his writing material in its

early stages in his lessons. The story of “The Fountainof Youth,” which was eventually published, is also in
the notebook. Whether we are scholars, teachers,
students, or simply Lafcadio Hearn fans, there issomething that we can all relate to in the Tomoeda
Notebook. We can all travel through the “unbeatenpath” along with Lafcadio Hearn and we can truly see
and experience the open mind of Lafcadio Hearn.
Thank you.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

21

JOHN MORANΤζον Μοράν
ジョン・モーラン

Ireland | Journalist, the Irish TimesΙρλανδία | Δημοσιογράφος στην Irish Times

アイルランド｜アイリッシュ・タイムズ紙ジャーナリスト

Early Influences on Lafcadio HearnΟι πρώιμες επιρροές του Λευκάδιου Χερν
ラフカディオ・ハーン――流浪と探求の旅

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn’s early life is not easy toanalyse accurately due to conflicting accounts
written by him and by others over more thanthe past century and a half. Such confusion was partly
explained by Hearn in his later years in a letter fromJapan in which he cautioned: “Only with much effort,
can I recall scattered memories of my boyhood. It
seems as if a much more artificial self were constantly
trying to speak of the self that is in me — thus
producing obvious incongruities.” [1]While “incongruities” and some “artificiality”
certainly exist in accounts of Hearn’s early life, there ismuch we do know about it and from this we canattempt to trace the emergence of important interests
he pursued in his later life as a writer.
And what a fascinating life it was. His
groundbreaking journalism includes an enormousvolume of feature articles and essays for US
newspapers and magazines in which he pioneered theliterary narrative style of the late 19th century andanticipated the new journalism of the mid-20th. [2] His
wide-ranging work covered African-American andother immigrant communities, world cultures, literary
criticism, folklore, religions, music, crime, cuisine,
editorials, travel writing, cartoons and illustrations,
letters and of course ghost stories. [3]Then there were translations of the finest French
writers of his day, a proto-magic realism book, twonovels, and 14 books on Japanese culture and folklore. [4]So where to begin to get some sense of this extraordinaryman? Well, we can start right here in Lefkas, his own
birthplace and then residence of his mother, who would
be of great significance in his life and work—and be firstin a long line of women of considerable importance.

22

Early Influences on Lafcadio Hearn

The Eternal Feminine
In a letter from New York to his younger brotherJames Daniel in 1890, just before he set out for Japan,
he said of his mother:“Whatever there is good in me and, I believe,
whatever there is of deeper good in yourself camefrom 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 faithin man or woman, my sensitiveness to artistic
things. I think only of her. And I would rather
have her portrait than a fortune.” [5]Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born on June 27th, 1850,
to Rosa Cassimati, who was from the nearby island of
Kythira, and Charles Bush Hearn, an Anglo-Irish
surgeon-major in the British army which thenoccupied the Ionian Islands. Hearn’s birth in Greece
and the influence of both parents affected his later life
and work in important ways.
First, there was the inheritance of his mother’s
bloodline which allowed him to explore his Greek“ghost memory”. This would develop into a cherishedconnection to classical Greece.
Second, Rosa would become for Hearn the
personification of the Other and the outsider, idealisedin “The Dream of a Summer Day”, but lost to him at
an early age. [6] This sense of the loss of Rosa is also
linked to his general romantic longing for a past whenartistic beauty was revered, from classical Greece toFrench and African Creole culture to the rites andrituals of old Japan. She was the mother of all theexotic outsiders he sought everywhere he travelled.

And he was their brother, because through Rosa,
Hearn could see himself in the people on the marginsof the places he wrote about with such sympathy andempathy wherever he travelled, always seeking beauty,
especially in humble people and their customs andfolklore in Cincinnati, New Orleans, Martinique andmany parts of Japan.
Like Father, Unlike Son
Then there was the significance of his father,Charles Bush Hearn, an officer in the Imperial British
army, a loyal servant of Empire, as were a long line of
Hearn ancestors. Patrick Lafcadio Hearn could havebeen a poster-child for the British Empire, but this was
not to be, due largely to his father’s abandonment.
Because of the influence of both parents, from his
earliest years as a writer for newspapers in Cincinnati
in the early 1870s up until his final work in Japan in
1904, Hearn was continually writing from the margins
to the centre of societies with global dominance, ie toa largely white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (Wasp)
readership in the US and the UK, making the case thatthe culture, religion, folklore, music, cuisine and daily
routines of people in the margins should be seen as
things of value and beauty. And in a key sense perhaps,
explaining the value and beauty of his oriental
mother — his subject matter — to his occidental
father — his readers.
It is fitting that here on Lefkada, the island of
Sappho’s Leap, we can begin to trace a direct line fromRosa Cassimati to a later empathy with women.
Despite on occasion falling into the paternalism
common to the period, in this empathy Hearn was
most unusual for a Victorian male writer.
The feminine influence followed in Ireland throughhis guardian and grandaunt Sarah Brenane, hisfavourite aunts, Jane and Catherine, and his nursemaid
Catherine “Kate” Ronane, perhaps the prototype forhis later stories on ordinary working women.
In later correspondence from Japan with the Irish
poet WB Yeats, Hearn alluded to the importance ofRonane, as his “Connaught nurse who told me fairy
tales and ghost stories”. [7]These strong female influences continued inCincinnati with his first wife, Alethea “Mattie” Foley,in New Orleans with Elizabeth Bisland and Mrs
Courtney, and in Martinique there was another maidand storyteller, Cyrillia. In Japan, Hearn was happy totake the surname of his wife and colleague, Setsu
Koizumi, a move that would be a step too far for mostliberal men even today.

In much of Hearn’s writing, women appear often
and prominently; most memorably in deeply
sympathetic stories such as the Cincinnati waterfront
world of “Dolly: an idyll of the Levee”; the so-called
Voodoo Queen in New Orleans in “The Death of Marie
Laveau”, in Martinique, the story of the porter women in“Les Porteuses”; and in Japan, he continued this theme inlooking at the world of a geisha in “Of a Dancing Girl”. [8]The central characters in his two novels, Chita: theStory of Last Island and Youma: the Story of a West
Indian Slave, were female, and foreign to his readers,the first Spanish, the second African-West Indian.
Tellingly in terms of the importance of his mother andher link to these two outsiders, Hearn worked amemory of Rosa into both of these novels. [9]His guardian in Ireland, Sarah Brenane, gave
Hearn an interesting example of great moral couragein defying a powerful social taboo by leaving theProtestant faith to marry a Catholic. For someone ofher background in Ireland this was as outrageous as
Lafcadio’s later marriage in Cincinnati to Mattie Foley,
a former slave, at a time when this was not only a greatsocial taboo but also against the law. Of interest, too, isthat Mattie’s father, like Lafcadio’s, was Irish.
As well as providing him with an outsider mother,
Greece would also introduce Hearn to his lifelong
religion, the worship of beauty in art and in life. As
John Cockerill, his former editor on his firstnewspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, noted:“He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed
attuned to the beautiful... The negro stevedores on
the steamboat-landings fascinated him. He wroteof their songs, their imitations, their uncouth ways
and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry
in their juba dances.” [10]The Rocky Road to Dublin
In 1852, Rosa and Lafcadio set off from Leffias on along journey to his father’s homeland of Ireland. Its
capital, Dublin, had once been the second city of the
British Empire, but at this time Ireland was in deep
trauma in the seventh and final year of its Great
Famine during which more than a million of its
poorest people died and millions more fled thecountry, mostly to the United States and Britain,
where they were not always welcome and often faced
considerable hostility because of their Catholic
religion, Irish nationality and desperate condition. It
was this hostility, rather than any rejection of his
father, that is likely to have been the main

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

23consideration in the US for dropping his obviously
Irish-Catholic first name Patrick and disguising his
Irishness for his largely Wasp readership.
While it was an unsettled and deeply disturbed
Ireland into which Lafcadio and Rosa arrived, his
relations in Dublin were neither poor nor IrishCatholic. They were wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestants
who lived a privileged existence in a large Georgian
house in the city centre.
In Lafcadio’s day, Ireland was bitterly divided alongreligious lines between the ruling minority AngloIrish Protestants and their co-religionists who largely
looked to England, while the Catholic underclassmajority mostly resented England’s rule. For
Protestant England, which had fought many wars with
its arch-enemies, Catholic France and Spain,
Catholicism was seen as foreign and threatening. To
the staunchly Protestant Hearns, the Greek Orthodox
religion of Rosa and Lafcadio was Catholic and alien.
However, not long after their arrival in Dublin,
Rosa and Lafcadio were taken under the wing of
Lafcadio’s grand-aunt, Sarah Brenane, a widow
without children who, as mentioned above, hadconverted to marry a Catholic. From this time
Lafcadio, although he was baptised into the Greek
Orthodox religion, was raised as a nominal Roman
Catholic by Mrs Brenane. Indeed, her well-stocked
library included books on the Greek and Gothic
themes that would feature prominently in his writings.
[Early biographers Kennard and McWilliams were
wrong in asserting that Brenane raised him in a strict
Catholicism.] [11] However, given his connection to
three religions in his early years, Greek Orthodox,
Protestant and Catholic, it is not surprising that thiswould become a key focus in his later attempts atinterpreting the peoples he visited.
Despite her isolation and Dublin’s relatively damp
and dull climate and Rosa’s initial difficulties inacclimatizing culturally and religiously, she appears tohave been happy at first, and particularly enjoyed her
jaunts with Mrs Brenane in a horse-drawn carriage tothe city centre for shopping and to the Catholic
Pro-Cathedral for Mass. [12]However the comfortable existence of Rosa andLafcadio changed utterly in 1853 when Charles
resumed an earlier relationship with Alicia Crawford,
who had recently been widowed. A year later, a deeply
unhappy Rosa returned to Greece, where later she
married Giovanni Cavallini from her native Kythira.
In 1857, Charles left for a military posting to India after
marrying Alicia, never to see Lafcado again.

24

Early Influences on Lafcadio Hearn

So by the age of seven, Lafcadio had lost bothparents and was separated from his younger brother,James Daniel. This may help to explain his later
insecurities in relationships, particularly his explosive
terminations with male friends and authority figures
such as publishers and editors.
While Lafcadio met his father only a handful oftimes, it should be noted that he retained some
affection for him; experiencing sense of deja vu
when visiting places in the Caribbean where hisfather had been stationed, treasuring a photographof him, and at a seance in Cincinnati forgiving his
scandalous behaviour. [13]Also of interest in his Dublin years is that it washere Lafcadio first heard stories of fairies and ghosts,
in particular from his nurse, Kate, which in addition
to his Gothic reading and a terror of Christian hell-fireand damnation invoked by a close relation, led tonightmares in his shadowy bedroom. Ironically, thesefears initiated his lifelong passion for all things Gothicand ghostly.
A major exhibition on the life and literature of
Hearn will open in October, 2015, in the Little
Museum of Dublin.
The Call of the Sea
Beyond Dublin, the place in Ireland with the mostsignificance in terms for his later writing was theseaside resort of Tramore in Co Waterford where hespent long summer holidays with Mrs Brenane and her
close friends, the Molyneux family.
The name Tramore is the Anglicisation of the Irish
term for big strand, trá mór, which has always been the
town’s main attraction. On that big beach looking out
onto Tramore’s turbulent bay, Lafcadio had his final
meeting with his father before Charles left for India.
But here young Lafcadio would listen every day forhours to fishermen’s stories of shipwreck and legendary
tales of adventure, which “little Patrick”, as he wasalways called then, would typically embellish while
retelling them when he returned home. [14]Up to his last years, Hearn would still vividly recall
his Tramore summers:“Then I found myself thinking of the vague terror
with which I had listened, when a child, to thevoice of the sea: — and I remembered that inafter-years, on different coasts in different parts of
the world, the sound of the surf had always revived
the childish emotion.” [15]Hearn would later excel in writing tales of the sea,
not least in his exquisite descriptions in stories such as,“Gulf Winds”, “A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics” andin a novella, Chita—the Story of Last Island. [16]Of note also is that the Catholic Church of theHoly Cross, built in 1860, stands high on a hill
overlooking the town. A sensitive Lafcadio would haveattended on Sundays and seen it every day on his way
to and from the strand. It was built in an exaggerated
Gothic style and is likely to have been one of theGothic churches — together with the chapel at hisboarding school in Ushaw — that filled him with suchhorror as a boy. (In the graveyard behind it, in the
Molyneux family plot, is the grave of Sarah Brenane.)
The Waterford link is also significant in that the SS
Cella, the ship from which the tremulous teenager,
Patrick Hearn, disembarked in New York on
September 2nd, 1869, was built at the Malcomson
Brothers’ shipyard in Waterford.
In Tramore today, Hearn is increasingly wellknown thanks to the work down the years of many
prominent townsfolk, which included a symposium tomark the centenary of his death in 2004, thecommission of a fine bust of him in the town’s library,and culminated in a hugely ambitious project to createa Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Gardens, which will recall
his life journey and which is now near completion
thanks to a generous grant from the Japan World Expo
1970 Commemorative Fund, and sterling work by the
town’s memorial garden team.
The Origin of the Specious
As a boy, Hearn was also brought on regular visits
to the village of Cong in County Mayo in Connaught— home province of his nurse Kate and epicentre of theFamine. Here he stayed in Strandhill, the home of
Catherine Elwood, one of his favourite aunts, beside
Ashford Castle, on Lough Corrib. He was enthralledby her beautiful singing and piano playing, inparticular he loved her version of Believe Me if All
Those Endearing Young Charms, a much-loved melody
by Irish poet and songwriter Thomas Moore.
Towards the end of his life in Japan, Lafcadio
Hearn, or as he was then known Koizumi Yakumo,
wrote of Cong and an encounter he had there with arough gypsy singer and harpist, Dan Fitzpatrick. This
story appears as “Hi-Mawari” in Kwaidan, in which
Fitzpatrick begins to play and sing the favourite Moore
melody of his aunt. Though at first he was horrified at
the thought of this man singing this song, he soon
became enthralled by Fitzpatrick’s rich, deep baritone.

Indeed, Fitzpatrick’s version affected Lafcadio so deeplythat his cousin noted it had moved him to tears. [17]In Cong, Hearn first reveals his passion for music,
which provides us with another link to his later life inthat wherever he went, he collected the songs and storiesof the ordinary people; from the African-American
roustabouts on the Levee in Cincinnati, to the Creoles
and people of colour in New Orleans and Martinique,and from Japanese labourers and street singers.
An “obvious incongruity” here is that Hearn sets the“Hi-Mawari” story in Wales, but the scene described isclearly in Ireland. [18] In my view, vague references toWales in Hearn’s writing are false trails. None arecorroborated. Hearn may have changed Irish locations
to Wales because editors and publishers in the US andBritain believed his target readership in these countries
would be less likely to buy books that mentioned Ireland.
At the time, anti-Irish-Catholic prejudice in the
UK and US was such that newspapers and magazines
there regularly carried cartoons depicting ape-like
Irishmen as violent, drunken and stupid. These
caricatures deeply offended Lafcadio. [19]Another 19th-century Irish writer, Sheridan Le
Fanu, revealed he was obliged by his London publisher
in 1863 not to include Irish settings and social
situations in his future work. From then on, his
settings were in English counties and Wales.
The Fall of the House of Ushaw
While little is known of Hearn’s earliest schooling
other than a reference that he was privately educated,
it was clearly significant in terms of his reading andwriting skills. His talent as a writer first become
evident at boarding school in England which heattended between the ages of 13 and 17.
In 1863 Hearn was sent to St Cuthbert’s College in
Ushaw, outside the city of Durham in northern
England. This move would have been very challenging
for him, leaving the pampered comforts of home in
Ireland for a Spartan school life in England, and where
having an Irish accent and the signature Irish name
Patrick — or Paddy, as he was called at Ushaw — is likely
to have exposed him to the prejudices of the period. [20]Hearn’s experiences at St Cuthbert’s had aconsiderable influence on his life and literature. He
regularly took first place in annual English
composition tests. He also developed his interests in
English literature (which he would put to great use as
Professor of English Literature in Japan), in classical
Greece, in Gothic themes, religion, and in another“incongruous” sense, in French.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

25

Of this French interest, biographer Paul Murray
notes:“He did well in French at his English boarding
school which, being the offshoot of a French
institution, may well have been how he had a highstandard in that language.” [21]St Cuthbert’s offers the possibility of a solution to the
puzzle of the origin of his abilities in translating theworks of 19th-century French masters such as Gautier,
De Maupassant and Flaubert, and his translations ofCreole French in New Orleans and Martinique.
There are a number references by Hearn to having
attended a college in France, and these have been
repeated by most of the earlier biographers, but
without corroboration. Bernadette Lemoine is one of
the few who have carried out any serious research forevidence of his attendance at a school in France, but
she found none. [22]Paul Murray notes Hearn’s claim that: “he waswithdrawn from school in France at the time of Mrs
Brenane’s ‘ruin’ [meaning financial ruin] but we know
he was in Ushaw at that stage”. [23]St Cuthbert’s was a direct descendant of the
English College at Douai in France where wealthy
Catholic families from Britain and Ireland had been
educated since the mid-16th century. It was forced toclose after the French Revolution and its professors
fled back to England where they established twocolleges, one of which was St Cuthbert’s.
My sense is that Hearn’s claim of schooling inFrance is partially based on wishful thinking and wasjustified in his mind by St Cuthbert’s origins in France,
where it had been for almost a quarter of a millennium
before moving to England. For the great translator of
De Maupassant, Gautier and not least, Flaubert,
perhaps Hearn might be allowed a “sentimental
education” in France.
With further regard to Hearn’s later interest in
religions, St Cuthbert’s is of note in that while there
he moved from his fleeting early exposure to Greek
Orthodox, Anglican and Catholic religious influences
to pantheism. While St Cuthbert’s was a Catholic
seminary, here he abandoned Catholicism and lost
his terrors of Christian hell-fire and damnation,
realising his emancipation through pagan legends ofclassical Greece, as he explained in a biographicalfragment, “Idolatry”:“Now after I had learned to know and to love theolder gods, the world again began to glow about me.

26

Early Influences on Lafcadio Hearn

Glooms that had brooded over it slowly thinned away.
The terror was not yet gone; but I now wanted only
reason to disbelieve all that I feared and hated. I
looked for beauty and everywhere found it. I had
entered my Renaissance.” [24]And his new-found freedom from early religious
fears now made way for a love of art and in it, theghostly. “The real secret of art is feeling. The highest
form of that feeling is that which the splendour of
Nature gives, — the thrill and awe of terrible beauty.” [25]Hearn’s abrupt departure from school in 1867 has
been blamed by many on the collapse of a businesslinked to his grand-aunt in London, but it may havebeen more influenced by a great personal tragedy
when in 1866 he lost the sight of his left eye in aschoolyard incident. The catastrophic injury led tosurgery in Dublin and a significant period ofconvalescence, which offers another explanation for
his abrupt departure from school and may go some
way towards helping us clear up the mystery of the twolost years between 1867 and 1869, about which wecurrently know little of substance. The injury also led
to his mistaken belief that he looked repulsive.
An Oriental Irony
By the time Hearn began his studies at Ushaw, Mrs
Brenane had moved from Ireland to live with Henry
Molyneux—the son of her Tramore friends—in
Redhill, Surrey, just south of London. Hearn would
later develop a hatred of Molyneux. He blamed his
removal from St Cuthbert’s and the loss of a financial
inheritance from Mrs Brenane entirely on Molyneux,
allegedly due to the failure of his business.
Henry Molynuex & Co was based in the St Paul’sarea of London where he traded in some very interestingproducts, oriental goods. Given that Molyneux was
actually trading in such items while Hearn was livingwith him and his grandaunt, it is reasonable to suggest
the irony that it was Molyneux who introduced him tohis great life passion for the Orient. Given Hearn’s great
success in Japan, his notorious weakness for harbouring
a grudge may not have allowed him to credit Molyneux
with such an inconvenient fact.
A Liaison in Lefkas
In conclusion, while Hearn did not always escape
the prejudices of the Victorian era, due in no smallpart to his unorthodox origins he attempted to see theworld from the perspective of the Other and tochallenge the ideas of his readers with bravery andindeed, at great personal cost.

His rare sensibility to see himself in others andothers in himself was the happy outcome of anotherwise unfortunate relationship between Rosa
Cassimati and Charles Bush Hearn more than acentury and a half ago. However, their liaison in
Lefkas produced a child who could be later
characterized as a “global soul” and a “magnificent
traveller” — or what he best explained himself as a“civilized nomad” — who brought his great empathy
and art to the people and places he encountered. [26]This marks him out as a pioneering citizen of theworld, whose guide was an open mind on his
extraordinary odyssey from Patrick Lafcadio Hearn toKoizumi Yakumo.
REFERENCES[1] Kennard, N, Lafcadio Hearn — His Life and Work,
p 45, 1911. OW Frost, Young Hearn, 1958.
[2] Hartsock, John C, A History of American Literary
Journalism: the Emergence of a Modern Narrative
Form, 2000.
[3] Bisland, E, The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn,Vols 1 and 2, 1906. Bronner, M, ed, Letters fromthe Raven, 1907. Mordell, A, Essays in European
and Oriental Literature by Lafcadio Hearn, 1923.
Goodman, H, The Selected Writings of Lafcadio
Hearn, 1949. Frost, OW, ed, Children of the Levee,1957. Stevenson, E, The Grass Lark, A Study ofLafcadio Hearn, 1961, 1999. Mordell, A,
Discoveries, Essays on Lafcadio Hearn, 1964. Cott,J, Wandering Ghost, the Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn,
1990. Hasegawa, Yoji, A Walk in Kumamoto, The
Life and Times of Setsu Koizumi, Lafcadio Hearn’s
Japanese Wife, 1997. Bronner, S J, Lafcadio
Hearn’s America, Ethnographic Sketches andEditorials, 2002.
[4] Hearn, L, Stray Leaves from Strange Literature,
1884; Some Chinese Ghosts, 1887; The Temptationof Saint Anthony, Flaubert, Gustave, 1910;
Fantastics and Other Fancies, 1914; Shadowings,
1900; Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894;
Kwaidan, 1904; Japan, An Attempt at
Interpretation, 1904.
[5]		Kneeland, Atlantic Monthly, January 1923. Seealso, Image of ‘the Creole Mother’ in Hearn’sYouma, Makino, Y, p 104, in Hirakawa, S, ed,
Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives, 2007

[6] Hearn, L, Out of the East, Reveries and Studies in
New Japan, pp 20-21, 1895.
[7] Murray, P, A Fantastic Journey; the Life andLiterature of Lafcadio Hearn, p 35.
[8] Frost, OW, op cit, pp 13-22, 1957. S FrederickStarr, Inventing New Orleans, Writings of Lafcadio
Hearn, pp 70-72, 2001. Hearn, L, Two Years in
the French West Indies, pp 97-119, 1890. Hearn, L,
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, op cit, pp 525-552.
[9] Murray, op cit, pp 4-5[10] Gould, G, op cit, p 30, 1908
[11] Kennard, N, Lafcadio Hearn: His Life and Work;
McWilliams, V, Lafcadio Hearn, 1946.
[12] Frost, OW, Young Hearn, p 26, 1858.
[13] Mordel, Albert, ed, Lafcadio Hearn, Occidental
Gleanings, Sketches and Essays, Vol 1, pp 24-35,
1924. See also, Ronan, Sean G, and Toki Koizumi,
Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo), His Life Workand Irish Background, 1991; Murray, P, op cit; andRonan, Sean G, ed, Irish Writing on Lafcadio
Hearn and Japan, 1997.
[14] McWilliams, op cit, p 37, 1946. Kennard, N, op cit,
p 52.
[15] Hearn, L, In Ghostly Japan, pp 238, 1899. See
Noguchi, Yone, Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, At
Yaidzu, pp 80-104, 1911. See also, Hearn and theSea, Hirakawa, S, op cit, pp 41-54, 2007[16] Gould, G, op cit, pp 87-90. Hearn, L, Two Yearsin the French West Indies, 1890, pp 1-93. Hearn,
L, The Legend of L’Ile Derniere in Chita: theStory of Last Island, pp 3-59, 1889.
[17] Hearn, L, Kwaidan, Hi-Mawari, pp 107-111, 1904.
[18] Kennard, N, op cit, p 39.
[19] Murray, P, op cit, 85, 1993.
[20] Koizumi, K, Father and I, Memories of Lafcadio
Hearn, p 149, 1935.
[21] Murray, P, op cit, p 253.
[22] Lemoine, B, Review of Comparative Literature,
Lafcadio Hearn as an ambassador of French
literature in the United States in Japan pp 299317, July-September, 2006.
[23] Murray, P, op cit, p 26.
[24] Bisland, E, Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, Vol
1, Idolatry, pp 25-32.
[25] Gould, G, op cit, p 112.
[26] Mordell, A, A Ghost, in Karma and Other Stories
and Essays, pp 63-75, 1918.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

27

SOTIRIS CHALIKIASΣωτ ήρης Χαλικιάς
ソティリス・ハリキャス

Greece | Translator and WriterΕλλάδα | Μεταφραστής και Συγγραφέας

ギリシャ｜翻訳家、作家

Lafcadio Hearn’s Imagined GreeceΗ φανταστική Ελλάδα του Λευκάδιου Χερν
ラフカディオ・ハーンにおける想像のギリシャR

eading the books and the correspondence ofLafcadio Hearn, we easily realise that he is not,in any way, a representative of the 19th century
Greek world. A world of which he was totally ignorantdue to the personal odyssey that was, in fact, his life.
Lafcadio Hearn’s importance acquires its real
dimension only if he is seen in a wider context: He wasa Western man of his time, confronted in his forties
with another culture and able to respond to this greatchallenge in a profound and open way. A way in which
his interest for, and his respect of, the ‘Other’ was its
main aspect.
We can’t understand Lafcadio Hearn’s almost
immediate admiration for Japan, if we do not take into
consideration the fact that for him the Westernworld—and especially its Anglo-Saxon component—
was never entirely his own. As he would write in New
Orleans to the only person he considered a father
figure, the printer Henry Watkin: “…my heart always
feels like a bird, fluttering impatiently for the migrating
season. I think I could be quite happy if I were aswallow and could have a summer nest in the ear of an
Egyptian colossus or a broken capital of Parthenon”. [1]In other words, all those years before Japan—with
the happy exception of the time spent in Martinique—he had the feeling of belonging, at least partially, toanother world. To where, however, he could neverreturn. Since his early childhood, as so clearly we know
by his own strong words, to escape the depressing
atmosphere of his aunt’s, Mrs Brenane’s, great house hetook refuge every day in its library. Helped by thematerial that he drew from the pages of books foundthere, he created in his mind dreamlike worlds which
could offer to him the affection and the acceptance, so

28

Lafcadio Hearn’s Imagined Greece

cruelly refused to him, those first years of his life, by
the real world.
One day, in an unexplored corner of the library, heran into some beautiful art books, filled with figures ofgods and demigods, athletes and heroes, nymphs andfauns of the Greek mythology, and as he will write
years later: “How my heart leaped and fluttered on that
happy day! I stared dumbfounded! And these had beencalled devils! I adored them! I loved them! I promised
to detest, forever, those who refused them reverence…”[2]
Even if those books first disappeared and thenreturned without their images, they had enabled him,
as he would later state in the essay provokingly called“Idolatry”: “to understand how Greek artists had
idealized the human figure”. [3] Briefly said, throughthose books he entered, as himself would later evaluate
it, into his own Renaissance: The divine humanity andbeauty of the ancient Greek world would be his true
guiding light from then on—a new paganism!
In other words, in that library, his aunt’s plans tomake Lafcadio a devote Catholic had been definitely
shattered. Plans that sent him from one Catholicschool to another and where, instead of turning him
into a devote Christian, turned him into a life longdeep critic of that religion: “…But I can’t dissociate thething called Christianity from all my life’s experiencesof hypocrisy, and cruelty and villainy”, [4] as he would
write—years later in Japan—to Professor Chamberlain.
Schools that in another field, though, had a deep
impact on the course of his life: In the Institution
Ecclésiastique at Yvetot, in France, he learned French,a language which was going to become precious forhim in the future. In another one, St Cuthbert’sCollege, in Durham County, at sixteen, due to an

accident, he lost an eye, a tragedy that changed his life
in a radical way .
“At nineteen years of age”—he would summarize
later—“after my people had been reduced from riches
to poverty, by an adventurer, I was dropped pennilesson the pavement of an American city to begin life.
Had a rough time. Often slept in the street, worked asservant, waiter, printer, proof reader, hack-writer;
gradually pulled myself up” [5]. He was, in fact, savedby journalism, a field in which he soon proved to bevery talented.
As a result of all this wandering, his feeling of notbelonging entirely, to this Anglo-Saxon surrounding
was further reinforced. His reference to his otherbackground had even been enlarged, as we can see
from a letter written in Cincinnati (May 1876), to a
woman with whom he had a strange relationship who
proved to be Mrs Ellen Freeman: “My love for things
Oriental need not surprise you, as I happen to be an
Oriental by birth and half by blood”. [6] His
correspondence with this—for years, ‘Unknown Lady’—was also the opportunity to emphasize his paganism:“I do not believe in God—neither god of Greece nor ofRome nor any other god. I almost believe in thegraceful Hellenic anthropomorphism which
worshipped feminine softness and serpentine
fascination and intoxicating loveliness in the garb ofVenus Anadyomene”. [7]When Lafcadio arrived in New Orleans, crossing
Canal Street to the ‘Vieux Carré’ he felt immediately
as if he had arrived almost at home. Before “this divine
breath of the ocean”—he wrote, (pulling this imageout of his few real Greek reminiscences due to hismother’s deep religious feelings)—“…the Greek sailor,awaking from the vision of winds and waves, may join
the three fingers of his right hand, after the manner ofthe Eastern Church, and cross himself, and sleep again
in peace”. [8]In New Orleans, his knowledge of the Frenchlanguage not only permitted him to find work and to
start his writing activity—the translation of French
literature was his first step on that path—and also
opened up for him the way of entering the Creole life,
which fascinated him so much and to which heengaged his full interest and with a mind quite open
to this first actual ‘Difference’.
Interest that very soon turned towards moredifferent cultures, as we can easily understand from his
renditions of folktales, legends, and myths out ofvarious—mainly oriental traditions—contained in his

books Strange Leaves from Strange Literature (1884)
and Some Chinese Ghosts (1887). In New Orleans, hefirst came in contact with Buddhism, which would beof prime importance once in Japan, while, at the sametime, through his incessant reading—so painful tohim — he felt the influence of Herbert Spencer’s ‘Great
Doubt’, another important precondition for his
opening up to other cultural traditions. In that city,
too, he mentioned Japan for the first time in one of his
letters to Henry Watkin. As Milton Bronner so
pertinently summarized it: “N. Orleans’ Hearn is thefather of the West India’s Hearn, as well as of the oneof Japan”. [9]In New Orleans, he also had the opportunity tomeet real Greek people. Reading his comments, we
can clearly see to what degree inside him there was an‘imagined Greece’, out of both the deep love he bore forhis mother and his childhood fascination for theancient culture: “…There are many Greeks, sailors andlabourers, in New Orleans; but I cannot say that theyinspire one with dreams of Athens or of Corinth, ofPanathenaic processions or Panhellenic games. Theirfaces are not numismatic; their forms are not athletic.
Sometimes you can discern something national abouta Greek steamboat man,—a certain characteristic
which distinguishes him from the equally swarthy
Italian, Spaniard…But that something is not of
antiquity; it is not inspirational. It is Byzantine, andone is apt to dislike it…” [10]His dislike of the Byzantine forms had notchanged an iota, as we see, from what he had written
some years ago to Mrs. Freeman, speaking about Greek
Orthodox icons: “…My mother, a Greek Woman, wasrather reverential; she believed in the Oriental
Catholicism—the Byzantine fashion of Christianity
which produced such hideous Madonnas and idioticlooking saints…” [11]Among the people mentioned, was one Greek
gentleman: “I never met a finer old man. Though morethan seventy years of age, his face was still as firmly
outlined , as clearly cut, as an antique cameo; its traits
recalled memories of old marbles, portraits in stone ofAristophanes and Sophocles; it bespoke a grandblending of cynicism and poetry”.
Even the young women of that community weremainly evaluated by the criteria of ancient Greek
beauties: “…But I have seen a few rare Hellenic types
here, and among these some beautiful Romaic girls—
maidens with faces to remind you of the gracious vasepaintings of antiquity…”. [12]In other words, beauty in the real world was to be

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

29found elsewhere, in the Creole women, for instance,that he admired so much. Years later, from Japan thistime, he would finally admit that his attraction to the‘darkness’ of those women was a result of his dislike ofthe ‘fairness’ of Western civilization!
Arriving in Japan, on April 12th 1890, one of thefirst things he wrote, was the following, from a letterto Henry Watkin: “…Here I am in the land of dreams
surrounded by strange Gods. I seem to have known
and loved them before somewhere…” [13] And to
Elisabeth Bisland, expressing his first impressions ofJapan, among other things: “…And I believe that theirart is far in advance of our art as old Greek art wassuperior to that of the earliest European artgrouping’s…” [14] He would be much clearer in one of
his letters to Professor Chamberlain, when he wasalready living at Matsue: “… (Percival Lowell’s)
observation that the Japanese are the happiest people
in the world, is superlatively true. It is the old Greeksoul again”. [15]
Living and married in that country he had soon
developed, as we know, a deep understanding of how
the Japanese way of life was morally superior to theone he left behind. An impression that helped him, as
he underlined to Professor Chamberlain “…to doubt
whether our own civilisation is morally all we believe itis”. [16] As we know, though, after leaving Matsue hestarted to realize the inevitability of Japan’s adaptation
to modern industrial life. As he would write once inKumamoto: “The illusion is for ever over… ‘we havethrown Japan morally backward a thousand years…”“What is there, after all, to love in Japan, except what is
passing away?” [17] Kobe and finally Tokyo would
reinforce this feeling. How more poeticly expressed is
this disillusion than in the following passage from
“Horai”: “Evil winds from the West are blowing over
Horai—and the magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking
away before them, never again to appear save in
pictures and poems and dreams”. [18]In this context, however, his radical criticism of thenotion of ‘progress’ is of an important actuality, besides
giving a clear indication of his insight: “Perhaps the lawof progress means increase of misery and wretcheddevelopment of selfishness and jealousies anoppression of the many for the benefit of few”. [19]At the same time, Lafcadio Hearn was not at all adogmatic and absolute opponent to every aspect ofmodernity: He knew that from another point of view,the modern world had the potential to offer an
unknown civic freedom, and as he wrote on this,30

Lafcadio Hearn’s Imagined Greece

referring once again to his ‘imagined’ Greece: “…No
Greek of the golden Greek prime ever enjoyed somuch as the faintest sense of modern civic freedom.
Even the Gods were not free…”. [20] He also refused toconsider, as others did, the escape from everyday life avalid personal attitude in front of modern life’s
problems. As he wrote to Prof. Chamberlain: “…What
you and I love does not belong to industrialism; yet
only by industrialism can any of us exist. We can dowhat is beautiful or right only by the aid ofindustrialism, unless, like, Thoreau, we prefer to live inthe woods…” [21]One of his last texts (Survivals), contains asummary of the fascination he felt for Japanthroughout his life in that country, a fascination, as we
said, that clearly was for him the fascination for aworld that we will never find again: “…Not to feel the
beauty of this archaic life is to prove oneself insensible
to all beauty. Even that Greek world, for which ourscholars and poets profess such loving admiration,must have been in many ways a world of the same kind,whose existence no modern mind could share”. [22]Until his death, however, his ‘imagined’ Greece had
to coexist inside him with a misty and dear picture,that he so desperately tried not to forget all his life long.
A picture “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 of making me happy”. [23]This beloved One, she whom so unjustly they hadtaken out of his life. He had never forgot, though, as
he wrote once to his brother, that “…whatever is goodin me came from that dark-race soul of which we know
so little…” [24]This beloved One about whom he did not hesitate
to declare that he would rather have her portrait thana fortune!
Notes[1] Letters from the Raven, p. 49–50[2] Wandering Ghost, p. 21[3] ibid.
[4] The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn. (Letters toProfessor B. Chamberlain). Kumamoto, August30, 1893[5] The Japanese Letters… Kumamoto, January 23, 1893
[6] Letters from the Raven, p. 133[7] o.c. p. 141[8] Wandering Ghost, p. 119[9] Letters from the Raven, p.191

[10] o.c. p. 173[11] o.c. p. 136[12] o.c. p. 174[13] o.c. p. 94[14] Wandering Ghost, p. 259[15] The Japanese Letters… Matsue, May 22, 1891
[16] o.c. Matsue, August 27, 1891
[17] o.c. Kumamoto, February 16, 1894
[18] L. Hearn’s Japan. p. 130[19] The Japanese Letters… Matsue, August 27, 1891
[20] o.c. Kumamoto, March 13, 1894
[21] o.c. Kumamoto, June 16, 1894
[22] L. Hearn’s Japan, p. 227[23] Wandering Ghost, p. 6[24] Writings from Japan, “Introduction”, p. 9

Works Cited• Cott, Jonathan. Wandering Ghost. Tokyo:
Kodansha International, 1990.
• Hearn, Lafcadio. Letters from the Raven: Being theCorrespondence of Lafcadio Hearn with Henry
Watkin. Primary Source Edition. Ed. Milton
Bronner. New York: Brentano’s, 1907.
• — The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn. Ed.
Elizabeth Bisland. Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910.
• — Writings from Japan: An Anthology. Ed. Francis
King. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
• — Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan. Ed. Donald Richie.
Rutland (Vermont): Charles E. Tuttle, 1997.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

31

MASAYUKI IKEDA

Μασαγιούκι Ικέντα
池田雅之

Japan | Professor, Waseda UniversityΙαπωνία | Καθηγητής στο Πανεπιστήμιο Γουασίντα

日本｜早稲田大学教授

The Contribution of Hearn’s Literature to Present Times:
Learning from the Retold Tales of the World of KwaidanΗ συνεισφορά του Λευκάδιου Χερν στη Σύγχρονη Λογοτεχνία:Μαθαίνοντας από τους διασκευασμένους μύθους του κόσμου του Καϊντάν
ハーン文学が現代に語りかけるもの――再話文学の世界性L

afcadio Hearn (1850–1904), starting with
Kwaidan, populated his unique world ofretold tales with ghosts, monsters, fairies, andspirits. The common bonds that hold them together
are not the typical fear factors characteristic of ghoststories and monster novels, but rather the basic
human emotions of sadness and isolation, dread andbeauty. When reading Hearn’s retellings, thefierceness and savagery of monsters and spirits and thefear they engender are superseded by the spiritual
power and stark reality expressed through stories suchas O-Yuki and Aoyagi.
Hearn’s retold tales also open up a universalistic
sphere of words dealing with the conversations
between the dead, supernatural beings and nature
personified. His literary world reflects our fundamental
desire to have a communal relationship with each other,which ultimately defines us as human beings. This
retold literature expresses Hearn’s own lost utopia.
In other words, Hearn’s utopia is the world of
dreams and of sleep. In that world, he re-encounters
those who were separated from him, but whom helongs to see again. Here, a father resurrects his deadson; a husband brings his wife back to life from thegrave. Here, the unrequited love of two who weredestined never to be joined in this life finally isfulfilled. Those who have left us—brothers, sisters, andclose friends—return to us in a new reality more
beautiful and vibrant and young than they ever werewhen they were with us in this world.
The reader will call to mind “The Story of Aoyagi,”“The Story of O-Tei,” and “Yuki-Onna” in Kwaidan,
when reading the sentence, “There is no such thing as
getting old; immortality and eternal youth are

32

The Contribution of Hearn’s Literature to Present Times

revealed.” This is the essence of Hearn’s dream world of
deep slumber.
The Foundation of Kwaidan in Hearn’s Childhood
Hearn believed in the real existence of ghosts,
spiritual beings and monsters. As a child, he saw themand lived among them. We learn this through his
autobiographic essays such as “Nightmare-Touch” and“My Guardian Angel.” These two works are precious tous, because they make the tragedies of his earlychildhood known to us. And not only that, these two
essays help us to understand his indirect motivation
for writing Kwaidan in later life. I believe theyspecifically show us his reasons for retelling the talesof “Mujina,” “Yuki-Onna,” and “The Story of
Miminashi Houichi.” In order to understand theorigins of Hearn’s ghosts and monsters, we must go
back to his childhood.
In 1853, when Hearn was three years old, he lived
with his Greek mother, Rosa Antonia Cassimati(1823–1882) in Dublin. His father, Charles BushHearn (1819–1866) was a military medical doctorfrom Ireland. The two had met and married in Greece,
and then returned to his homeland. But Charles’ love
for Rosa had already waned by this juncture, as she hada very difficult time adjusting to the urban lifestyle in
Dublin, which was very different from her native
home in Greece in language, religion and climate.
Because of these differences, she became homesick anddeveloped mental illness. In 1854 she decided to leave
everything, including her son, little Lafcadio Hearn,
and returned to her home of Kythira, Greece.
After that, Hearn never had a chance to see her
again. But he never lost his compassion towards herand his longing for his mother, who had struggled in aforeign country and had been abandoned by herhusband. His feelings towards his mother can betraced throughout his retold tales.
The character of the unhappy, unfulfilled woman
who appears throughout Kwaidan, in stories such as“Yuki-Onna,” “Aoyagi,” and “Wakai” (Reconciliation),seems to reflect his mother Rosa, who was also an
unfortunate character in his life. These women,
described as ghosts, monsters and spirits in “YukiOnna”, “Wakai,” and “Yaburareta Yakusoku” (Broken
Promise), portray his own mother’s unhappiness andunfulfilled longings. These spiritual creations of
Hearn’s were betrayed by men, but they never give up
their desire to be reunited with the objects of theirlove, and are therefore destined to an existence ofsadness and unrequited love.
Hearn tried to overlap these fairies’ misfortunes
with his own mother Rosa’s fate. This underlying
theme cries out from many of his retold tales. The
reader is struck by his attempts to reveal their identity
as women of sorrow, madness, rage, and eternity
throughout Kwaidan. Because Hearn was separated
from his mother at a very early age, he, in fact, did notknow directly about his mother’s life, her madness, or
her death. But his imagined fate for her colors his
fascination with the portrayal of these characters.
Hearn’s Eternal Feminine—Yuki-Onna
Today I am privileged to speak from my studies
about Hearn in his birthplace of Lefcada. Of
particularly interest for us here is Hearn’s retelling of“Yuki-Onna,” which I am honored to share about withyou. I would like to talk specifically about therelationship between Yuki-Onna and Hearn’s mother,
Rosa. Yuki-Onna is one of the folk tales ofintermarriage between human and non-humancreatures. In the story, the fairy Yuki-Onna marries ahuman man, who betrays her. She returns to theunderworld. Although Hearn’s perspective is very
Japanese in some sense, his way of perceiving nature
also continues to be Western. He looks at snow innature through Western eyes, as being powerful andcatastrophic, on the one hand; but at the same time,
he sees it in a Japanese way, as a rich cover oversecrets, like a woman’s capacity to quietly maskdifficulty and provide a sense of stability andcalmness. Just as in one of his earlier works, “Izumino-Otome,” written when he still lived in America,
Hearn continues with the theme of the eternally
young and sacred feminine being in his tale of “Yuki-

Onna,” written much later. This theme is apparent in
the following excerpt:
O-Yuki proved a very good daughter-in-law. When
Minokichi’s mother came to die, — some five years
later, — her last words were words of affection andpraise for the wife of her son. And O-Yuki bore
Minokichi ten children, boys and girls, —handsome
children all of them, and very fair of skin.
The country-folk thought O-Yuki a wonderfulperson, by nature different from themselves. Mostof the peasant-women age early; but O-Yuki, evenafter having become the mother of ten children,
looked as young and fresh as on the day when she
had first come to the village.
By forming the image of the eternal woman as an
anima in Yuki-Onna, Hearn was intently looking at awoman’s face among the dead in the spiritual world,
the face of his mother, Rosa Cassimati, from whom hewas separated as a child. In the case of Yuki-Onna,
O-Yuki gave birth to ten beautiful boys and girls withher husband Minokichi, but because of his betrayal,
the story drastically changes course and reaches its
climax. He confessed to his wife, who was actually
Yuki-Onna in a different form, that he had seen YukiOnna when he was young. A typical taboo of thesefolk tales is that one must always keep secret a sightingof supernatural beings: “Don’t look, don’t tell.”
Her husband’s confession forced Yuki-Onna toreveal her true identity to him: the madness anddestruction that her femininity had covered. Her returnto the underworld, and the despair and agony painted byher figure calls to mind the sadness of Rosa, who left her
son Lafcadio behind with her husband Charles andreturned to her homeland of Greece. Four-year old
Hearn never saw his mother again in his lifetime, after
she departed from him. While there are some who might
disagree with the idea of interpreting Hearn’s writingsfrom the perspective of his personal life experiences, I
find that to do otherwise lessens the impact of his
description of the eternal feminine in his works.
In keeping with this mode of interpretation, reading
the next section of Yuki-Onna reveals the agony andanguish of the woman who has lost her place to belong.
Hearn’s negative image of the eternal anima has become
the ghost who wanders endlessly, never finding rest. At
the same time, his anima leaves an incomparably
beautiful impression of transcendence and transparency.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

33One night, after the children had gone to sleep,
O-Yuki was sewing by the light of a paper lamp;
and Minokichi, watching her, said:—“To see you sewing there, with the light on yourface, makes me think of a strange thing that
happened when I was a lad of eighteen. I then saw
somebody as beautiful and white as you are now—
indeed, she was very like you.”…
Without lifting her eyes from her work, O-Yuki
responded;—“It was I—I—I! O-Yuki it was! And I told you thenthat I would kill you if you ever said one word
about it! But for those children asleep there, I
would kill you this moment! And now you had
better take very, very good care of them; for if everthey have reason to complain of you, I will treat
you as you deserve!”…
Even as she screamed, her voice became thin, like acrying of the wind;—then she melted into a brightwhite mist that spired to the roof-beams, andshuddered away through the smoke-hole…Neveragain was she seen.

“Tell me about her…Where did you see her?”
Then Minokichi told her about the terrible nightin the ferryman’s hut,—and about the White
Woman that had stooped above him, smiling andwhispering,—and about the silent death of old
Mosaku. And he said:—“Asleep or awake, that was the only time that I saw abeing as beautiful as you. Of course, she was not ahuman being; and I was afraid of her,—very muchafraid,—but she was so white!...Indeed, I have neverbeen sure whether it was a dream that I saw, or the
Woman of the Snow.”…
O-Yuki flung down her sewing and arose, andbowed above Minokichi where he sat, and shrieked
into his face:—

34

The Contribution of Hearn’s Literature to Present Times

Yuki-Onna was unable to kill her husband and children
before she returned to the underworld; she became ahumane, sorrowful ghost. Here we see Hearn’s typicalliterary ethos and lament. We could borrow Tsubouchi
Shouyou’s phrase about Edgar Allen Poe, andcharacterize Hearn’s literature as “calming the fearfulheart.” Therefore, Yuki-Onna typifies the underlying
theme of Hearn’s collection of retold ghost stories,
Kwaidan, which is not merely to stir up human fear,
but to reveal the morality and ethics that are deeply
embedded in human consciousness. The theme of
ethics in love overarches Hearn’s literature, and flows
from his personal life experiences, as the stories of
Yuki-Onna and of Aoyagi clearly reveal. The universal
tendencies of humanity that characterize Hearn’s
retold tales are equally evident in the fairy tales of theBrothers Grimm and of Hans Christian Andersen.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

35

HARICLEA ZengosΧαρίκλεια Ζήνγκου
ハリクレア・ゼンゴス

Greece | Professor, The American College of GreeceΕλλάδα | Καθηγήτρια στο Αμερικανικό Κολλέγιο Ελλάδος

ギリシャ｜ギリシャ・アメリカン・カレッジ教授

At Home in the World: Transnational Hearn

Ένα σπίτι στον κόσμο: Ο υπερεθνικός Χερν
世界中が我が家――トランスナショナル・ハーンGiven Lafcadio Hearn’s itinerant life and thediverse cultures he explored in his work,
scholarship on Hearn inevitably deals withissues of ethnic and national identity. Whether Hearn
was Greek, Irish, American, Japanese or a combination
thereof is a subject of scholarly debate—the questionthat I would like to pose is, should national identity bea point of contention at all given that Hearn’s nomadic
life served to construct modes of existence and ways ofseeing that were clearly transnational? Was Hearn
perhaps at home in the world?
In his essay “Never at Home: The Formation of
Lafcadio Hearn’s Identity,” Nobuyoshi Saito argues
that readers “are eager to ‘discover’ [Hearn’s] identity,
but in most cases…they are only trying to ‘establish’and ‘fix’ his identity to suit cultural needs of their own”
(63). There is some truth to this statement, particularly
if one examines the various examples of national andcultural appropriation evidenced in Hearn scholarship.
For example, scholars such as O.W. Frost and Malcolm
Cowley claim Hearn as an American man of lettersand part of the realist and regionalist movement. In
his book Young Hearn, Frost argues that “America was[Hearn’s] teacher, and—for more time than any
other—his adopted country” (217–218). Similarly, in
his introduction to The Selected Writings of Lafcadio
Hearn, Cowley defines a place for Hearn in theAmerican literary tradition of immigrant writing: “It is
doubtful whether [Hearn] could have survived as awriter, or survived at all, if he had started his career inanother country.” Other scholars see Hearn within an
Irish context. Sean G. Ronan, in his preface to Irish
Writing on Lafcadio Hearn and Japan, argues that
Hearn’s “Irish dimension” must be “fully36

At Home in the World

acknowledged and analyzed” (xiv). Still others claimfor Hearn a Greek identity. In the Greek title of his
monograph on Hearn, Nikos Sofianos refers to him as“the Greek poet of Japan.” And of course there are thecountless scholars who identify Hearn as Japan’s
adopted son and even more Japanese than the Japanese
themselves. Significantly, however, Hearn is given a
minor role, if one at all, in the literary histories ofGreece, Ireland, the United States and Japan,
indicating to some extent that while he isacknowledged in these national narratives, he isperhaps not fully identified as a native within these
specific national contexts.
Hearn’s parentage also complicates attempts to
identify him within a national and ethnic context.
Born on the island of Lefkas or Lefkada, then a part ofthe British Empire, in 1850, Patricio Lafcadio Hearn
was illegitimate and of mixed heritage—his father,Charles Bush Hearn, was an Irish Protestant military
officer and surgeon who descended from English
settlers in Ireland, while his mother, Rosa Cassimati,
was Greek and followed the Orthodox faith. When
Hearn was two years-old, he and his mother were sent
to live in Dublin while his father was stationed in theWest Indies. The Hearn family disapproved of Rosa;
there was a clash of cultures that eventually led to theannulment of the Hearn-Cassimati marriage and Rosa’s
return to Greece alone; her young son, who remainedin Ireland, was eventually taken in by his great-aunt.
Sadly, Hearn would never see his mother again. In somany ways, Hearn’s parentage and upbringing
embodied the cultural and ideological divides between
East and West, Orient and Occident, empire andcolony that would preoccupy him in his writing.

In his parents’ marriage, Hearn also saw the power
relationship between colonizer and colonized. He
rejected his father, blaming him for having abused andabandoned his mother, with whom Hearn deeply
sympathized. As a result, Hearn self-identified strongly
with his Greek heritage, seeing it as the source of his
creative energy, which in turn he saw as his inheritancefrom his mother. In a letter Hearn writes:
Whatever there is good in me came from that dark
race-soul of which we know so little. My love ofright, 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. (qtd in
Cott 16).
As an adult, Hearn went by the name Lafcadio rather
than Patrick or Paddy, which was perhaps a way toreconfirm his cultural identity as a Greek, but more
likely a way to keep alive some tie or psycho-emotional
connection to his absent mother. To borrow the title of
the recent Beton7 exhibition on Hearn held in Athens,
we could say Hearn was “a shadowy Greek,” for his
conception of Greece and Hellenism was largely an
imaginative and intellectual construct. “I have memoryof a place and a magical time in which the Sun and theMoon were larger and brighter than now,” Hearn once
wrote. “Whether it was of this life or of some life before
I cannot tell…” (qtd Hodges 6). If Greece represented“home” for Hearn, it was not in the sense of a fatherlandor homeland, but of an imaginary motherland
constructed from the odds and ends of memory.
It is safe to say that Hearn was global before there
was globalization. His migrant travels took him from
Ireland to France, England, the United States, theWest Indies and Japan. As Paul Murray narrates in his
definitive biography of Hearn, A Fantastic Journey:
The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn, with eachnew journey came a reinvention of the self. In Ireland
Hearn was marginalized as “the half-Greek, Roman
Catholic scion of the Protestant Hearns” (Murray 17);
the paternal family never really accepted the Greek
mother and dark-haired, half-Greek child. At the ageof 19, Hearn immigrated to Cincinnati. There he met
Alethea Foley, an African-American woman whom heeventually married, an unlawful act of miscegenation
at the time. They divorced and in 1877 Hearn moved
to New Orleans where he discarded the name Paddy

and became known as Lafcadio Hearn. After 10 years
in Louisiana, Hearn travelled to Martinique where helived for two years as a correspondent. In 1890 hetravelled to Japan where again he reinvented himself.
Notably, Hearn married a local woman, Koizumi Setsu,
who came from an aristocratic samurai family, andeventually became a naturalized Japanese citizen,
taking the name Koizumi Yakumo.
These constant reinventions of the self invite
discussion of Hearn in relation to a key issue inpostcolonial theory, that of identity. It can be argued
that Hearn is a product of the process of hybridization
as his subjectivity or identity is “composed fromvariable sources, different materials and many locations”(McLeod 219). Hybrid identities are not fixed or basedon ideas of rootedness or national identity; instead,“they remain perpetually in motion, pursuing errant
and unpredictable routes, open to change andreinscription” (McLeod 219). Simon J. Bronner details
Hearn’s hybrid life in his essay “‘Gumbo’ Folkloristics:
Lafcadio Hearn’s Creolization and Hybridization,”rightly describing Hearn’s displacement as an entirely
valuable position and perspective from which Hearn
developed an open-minded and receptive view ofdifferent cultures, races and ethnicities.
Hearn was a perennial outsider, not only because
he was half Irish and half Greek, but also because he
was half-blind due to an unfortunate accident at theage of 16 in which he suffered a loss of vision in his left
eye. His disability was perhaps a strange advantage, forit provided him with a sharpened outlook to thepossibility of empathetic links between distant andseemingly different societies (such as, for example, thecommonalities he saw between Japan and Greece). As
Bronner writes, “His holding a magnifying glass to theprinted page and small objects to better observe themgave him a sharp sensitivity to each individual word
and the tiniest creature” (Lafcadio Hearn’s America 7).
Paradoxically, Hearn’s narrow vision or “altered senseof sight” enhanced his perception, giving him auniquely pluralistic view of the world that “blur[red]boundaries, natural and cultural” (Bronner, Lafcadio
Hearn’s America 155).
As a consequence of his outsider status, Hearn
consciously focused on subjects that were on the fringe.
Caryl Phillips writes of Hearn’s preoccupation withthe eccentric and the exotic that “He peered down thealleys, he stole in through the back doors, and then hescrambled out again,” in search of another offbeat path
to explore. Similarly, in a letter Hearn describes
himself as “a man [who] must devote himself to one

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

37thing in order to succeed: so I have pledged me to theworship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, theExotic, the Monstrous. It quite suits mytemperament...” (Bisland, 1: 328–29). Because he wasmarginalized himself, Hearn was receptive to and acelebrant of the ethnic, racial and cultural Other.
From the Creole world of New Orleans to the world ofJapanese literature, religion and society, Hearn
explored people and places on the periphery whose
existence was threatened by the mainstream or
dominant national culture.
Given Hearn’s cosmopolitan or international
worldview, it seems a bit of a contradiction to use
labels of national and ethnic identity to define him.
Even if we attempt to categorize Hearn within ethnic
and national contexts, in the end they really do not
define him effectively. As an alternative to thesecategories of identity, I would like to suggest a
postcolonial theoretical framework that may provide amore fruitful way of viewing Hearn’s life and work. I
would like to borrow or adopt the theoreticalframework defined by Paul Gilroy in his classic studyof the black diaspora, The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness. This book is significant topostcolonial studies as it prefigured many of thedebates around transnationalism and globalizationthat have taken place since it was published in 1993.
Resisting the trend to understand Black cultures fromaround the Atlantic as being marginal to or derived
from dominant national cultures (for example,
African-American culture, which places American
culture at the center and African at the periphery),
Gilroy explores how black intellectuals such as W.E.B.
DuBois travelled and worked in a transnational framethat precludes association with their country of origin.
Gilroy does not rely on national paradigms to define
identity; rather, he emphasizes “the tension between
roots and routes” (133): that it is through routes, that is,the circulation or movement of people and cultures
through travel and migration, rather than roots, that is,origin, lineage and/or place, that contribute to identity
formation in the migrant experience.
Even though Hearn is obviously not part of theblack diaspora, Gilroy’s theory can provide a useful
way of viewing Hearn’s life and work. Given his
migrancy, hybridity, and constant reinvention, it isparticularly difficult to fix Hearn’s identity within one
nation or ethnic group for his life was influenced oraffected by five empires—the Ottomon, British,
French, American, and Japanese—and as many
countries: which nation can actually claim him as their38

At Home in the World

own? Paradoxically, all can claim him and yet none
exclusively for Hearn inhabits a transnational space
where identity is not exclusively defined by roots or
national paradigms, but by movement and migrancy.
For this reason, we should perhaps consider that
Hearn’s roots may not be as significant as the routes
that he took in his life, which brought him“imaginatively as well as physically, to many places andin contact with many different peoples” (McLeod 215).
In Hearn’s case, his life and work posit a mode oftransnational identity where the “grounded certainties
of roots are replaced with the transnational
contingencies of routes” (McLeod 215). In thispostcolonial context, identity is not fixed and centered,but fluid and changing, very much like the life of
Hearn. I believe that by exploring Hearn as a
postcolonial subject within this theoretical framework,
we can further enrich scholarship on his life and work.
It is amazing that a man born on the beautiful
Greek island of Lefkada should travel the world andwrite so brilliantly about the distant and unconnected
places he lived in. Without a doubt Hearn was global
and multicultural long before these concepts became
cultural and academic trends. In inhabiting atransnational space created from unpredictable routes
or migration rather than fixed roots, Hearn was a man
ahead of his time who, without knowing it or reallyplanning it, could be said to be a prototypical global
citizen of the 21st century.
Works Cited• “Lafcadio Hearn: A Shadowy Greek.” Beton7
Exhibition. n.p., n.d. Web. Oct 2014.
• Bisland, Elizabeth. The Life and Letters of Lafcadio
Hearn. 2 vols. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin,1906. Project Gutenberg. Web. 18 May 2014.
• Bronner, Simon J. “’Gumbo” Folkloristics: Lafcadio
Hearn’s Creolization and Hybridization in theFormative Period of Folklore Studies.” Journal of
Folklore Research 42.2 (2005): 141–184. ProjectMuse. Web. 22 May 2013.
• —. Lafcadio Hearn’s America: Ethnographic
Sketches and Editorials. Lexington: U of Kentucky
P, 2002. Print.
• Cott, Jonathan. Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey ofLafcadio Hearn. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1990. Print.
• Cowley, Malcolm. Introduction. The Selected
Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Ed. Henry Goodman.
New York: Citadel, 1949: 1–15. Print.
• Frost, O.W. Young Hearn. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1958.
Print.

• Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity andDouble Consciousness. London, Verso, 1993. Print.
• Hodges, Margaret. “East Meets West in Lafcadio
Hearn.” Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly 1991.1 (1991): 6–14. Project MUSE. Web.
26 Apr. 2014.
• McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. Print.
• Murray, Paul. A Fantastic Journey: The Life andLiterature of Lafcadio Hearn. Sandgate, Folkestone,
Kent: Japan Library, 1993. Print.
• Phillips, Caryl. Colour Me English: Migration andBelonging Before and After 9/11. New York:

Random House, 2011. Google Book Search. Web.
16 May 2014.
• Ronan, Sean G., ed. Irish Writing on Lafcadio
Hearn and Japan. Folkestone, Kent: Global
Oriental, 1997. Print.
• Saito, Nobuyoshi. “Never at Home: The Formationof Lafcadio Hearn’s Identity.” 2011. PDF file. http://
doors.doshisha.ac.jp/webopac/bdyview.do?bodyid=
TB12629347&elmid=Body&lfname=020000910004.pdf• Sofianos, Nikos. Λευκάδιος Χέρν: Ο Ελληνας Ποιητήςτης Ιαπωνίας [Lafcadio Hearn: The Greek Poet ofJapan]. Athens: Telikon, 2006. Print.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

39

DEMETRIOS TH. VASSILIADESΔημήτριος Θ. Βασιλειάδης
ディミ
トリオス・ヴァシリアーディス
Greece | Professor, University of AthensΕλλάδα | Καθηγητής, Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών

ギリシャ｜アテネ大学教授

Lafcadio Hearn and BuddhismΛευκάδιος Χερν και Βουδισμός
ラフカディオ・ハーンと仏教

Sources and Influences
afcadio’s pioneering writings on Japanese
Buddhism are based on the study of the books
and scripts translated into English,
conversations with Japanese monks and devotees,pilgrimages to temples and holy places as well as
personal experiences. His deeper understanding of
Buddhist philosophy, however, became possible due
to his previous extensive study of Western
philosophers, psychologists, biologists and otherscientists, like Herbert Spencer, Thomas Henry
Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, Alfred Russel Wallace,
Schneider and others often mentioned in his works.
At one point, he even calls himself a student ofHerbert Spencer, whom he regards as the greatest of
all explorers in the domain of psychology. He also
confesses that he found in Buddhist philosophy amore than romantic interest, because of his
acquaintance with Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy. [1]Lafcadio presents the teachings of Japanese
Buddhism in various books without ever systematizing
it all in one volume. His script is pervaded by a purely
enlightening disposition, while all catechism isskillfully shunned. His references to the highest
Buddhist philosophy are often compared with modern
Western thought. The similarities he comes uponamaze him, since the Buddhist conclusions have beenreached through mental processes unknown toWestern thinking, and unaided by any knowledge ofscience. As a matter of fact, a class of Buddhist
concepts can be fitted, or very nearly fitted, into
Western Categories as they both recognize the same
phenomena under different names. [2]L40

Lafcadio Hearn and Buddhism

Buddhist Philosophy in the Light ofLafcadio Hearn
Lafcadio confessed that he undertook the study ofthe basic principles of Buddhist philosophy for threereasons: a) to eliminate the West’s misunderstandingor ignorance, since it appears that Japan’s intellectual
elite was condemned as atheist, b) to differentiate
popular beliefs from philosophical ones, as he regards
that most Japanese people are not familiar with the
deeper meaning of Nirvāna as a state of total
extinction and nihilism, and c) because he considers
that it is of extraordinary interest for students ofmodern philosophy. [3]He enumerates 12 principal sects of Buddhism inJapan, while he presents both popular beliefs andhigher philosophical doctrines. He conveys a few
glimpses of the fantastic world of Buddhist
metaphysics, but at the same time he recognizes that
this could have never been a religion of millions. The
great majority of people do not trouble themselveswith Nirvāna and abstract ideas, but expect to go toheaven after this life. [4] The teaching is adapted
accordingly, in order to be relevant to the level of thestudents, as the Japanese saying “Nin mite ho toke”(first see, then teach) indicates.
Highest Buddhism “is a religion of metaphysicians,a religion of scholars, a religion so difficult to beunderstood, even by persons of some philosophicaltraining.” [5] To the difficulty of deep understanding,there is added a massive volume of seven thousandbooks of the Buddhist Canon, as well as a plethora ofinterpretations and comments. Theoretical andpractical impediments make the scholastic study of
Buddhist metaphysics far beyond popularcomprehension, while at the same time proficiency inChinese and a great degree of devotion is a prerequisite.
Describing the principles of higher Buddhist
philosophy, Lafcadio starts with the monistic doctrinethat there is but one Reality. This conception derives
from the recognition of the transitory and therefore
illusory nature of all the phenomena which are nothing
but names and forms. There is no denial of the realityof phenomena as phenomena but since they can notpass the test of reality, which is persistence, they are
considered as mere illusions. For Buddhism the solereality is the Absolute Buddha as an unconditioned
and infinite being which modern Japanese call the‘Essence of Mind’. The Absolute is above all relations, it
has nothing of what we call pain or pleasure; it knows
no difference between “I” and “Thou”, no distinction oftime and place. There is no division between subject
and object and no other veritable existence, whether ofMatter, or of Mind.
As Lafcadio notes in his essay “Nirvāna — A Studyin Synthetic Buddhism,” the non-dualistic state of
Nirvāna does not differ from the synthetic position of
Spencer that “it is one and the same Reality which ismanifested to us both subjectively and objectively.” [6]The theory of the English philosopher further
elaborates the need to transcend consciousness in orderto know the non-dual Reality, because while
consciousness lasts we cannot transcend the antithesis
of Object and Subject. This thesis is consistent with the
nihilistic philosophy of Śūnyavāda, that Japanese Zen
has also accepted. It assumes that consciousness
emanates from the contact of subject and object anddoes not constitute the deeper essence of Absolute
Reality, as supported by the idealistic school ofVijñānavāda. Τhe destruction of consciousness signifies
Nirvāna, the state where the individual being is
dissolved and Buddha’s true nature is realized. Nirvāna
is “that state of mind in which the consciousness bothof sensations and of ideas has wholly passed away.” [7]At this point, Lafcadio warns the Western scholarsthat inadequate understanding of the concept of
Nirvāna may lead to its false identification withabsolute nothingness or complete annihilation. Suchan interpretation would be erroneous since it would
entail half the truth. Nirvāna, indeed, signifies
extinction but this extinction does not mean soul deathor re-absorption of the finite into the infinite. Nirvāna
means extinction of individuality, disintegration of
conscious personality and annihilation of everythingthat can be included under the term ‘I’. All that we callself is ultimately false because it is a mere aggregate ofsensations, impulses, ideas related to the perishable
body, and all are doomed to dissolve with it. Nirvāna is
no cessation, but an emancipation, the highest state ofmind in which the consciousness both of sensations
and of ideas wholly passes into the light of formlessomnipotence and omniscience.
Another topic in Japanese Buddhism that ignites
Lafcadio’s imagination is a concept of the soulcompletely different from the West’s. Τhe Pythagorean
and Platonic concept of ‘psyche’ finds no resemblance
to the Buddhist concept. The profound difference inthis regard is that for Buddhists the conventional souldoes not exist. What we call ‘soul’ is simply anaggregate or the concentrated sum of previous
experiences, which like dust, comes together andconstantly creates our new state until it disperses again
with death to be reassembled into a subsequent formof life.
The human brain is an organized register of
infinitely numerous experiences received during theevolution of life, or rather during the evolution of that
series of organisms through which the human organism
has been reached. [8] The new being does not necessary
belong to the same kind as it is independent of the lineof heredity. Animals and divine beings have reasoning
powers, too, and as the Japanese say even the stones
worship Buddha. The difference between unconscious
matter and living beings is only a difference of degree,
not of kind, both are but varying manifestations of one
and the same unknown reality. [9]We are a composite of quintillions of forces, an
infinite number of lives from this and other planets.
There is no individual soul but Karma or theinnumerable desires and tendencies that survive after
the dissolution of the composite individuality seeking
to combine again and form a new composite
individuality in order to fulfill and accomplish theirinevitable retribution. None is there to pass from one
birth to another but only the movement ofimpressions and desires. The only birth and only deaththat actually exist are those of karma in some form or
condition, as it is the form of the wave only, not thewave itself that travels.
The idea of man’s multidimensional personality
allures Lafcadio, who writes that his mind and soul is
not a kingdom but an anarchical republic, that he is
not an individual but a population, and that he has“souls that have faith in fetishes, polytheistic souls, souls
proclaiming Islam, and souls medieval ... Cooperation
among all these is not to be thought of; always there istrouble — revolt, confusion, civil war.” [10]Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

41

The term ‘re-individualization’ that he so skillfully
employs, rather than ‘rebirth’, ‘reincarnation’ and‘paligenesia’, which are more familiar in the Hellenic
and Indian philosophies, describes with much greater
accuracy the fundamental difference between
Buddhism and the schools that accept the existence ofan innumerable number of individual souls. To
understand this doctrine one must get rid of thenotion of individuality, and think, not of persons, but
of successive states of feeling and consciousness. The
one Reality penetrates everything and all objective andsubjective existence is merely an aggregate ofphenomena created by the force (karma) of acts andthoughts. Whatever is good in the universe is theresult of meritorious acts or thoughts; and whatever isevil—of evil acts or thoughts.
The pilgrimage through death and birth continues
and rises from this and inferior worlds to terrestrial
conditions and other superior worlds. He, who canpass through, is freed from the bonds of self and enters
the Infinite Bliss. The whole cosmos proceeds througha spiritual evolution, of which the final goal is Nirvāna.
This process of spiritual evolution remains in deep
accord with the ethical aspirations of mankind towards
freedom and perfection and permeates the whole
mental being of the Far East. It colors every emotion, it
influences directly or indirectly almost every act.
In the doctrine of karma Lafcadio finds a partial
agreement with the modern scientific teaching of thehereditary transmission of tendencies. He denounces
those who cling to the theory of a permanent
personality and to a single incarnation, saying, they
can not find a moral meaning in the universe as itexists. Moreover, he stresses the positive impact of thenotion of re-individualization onto man’s
consciousness and especially on that of children, whowill not fear death because they will learn that they
have died millions of times already and that the sweet
summer will come back after the snow is gone.
For Lafcadio, metaphysical speculation seems not
only justifiable but necessary, as different ideals call fordifferent methods. The demotion of the empiricalworld as an illusion that cloaks the eternal andunchanging truth, leads inevitably to renunciation,
since the truth can only shine with the extinction ofthis illusion. Inducements for renunciation of the world
and its pleasures within the Buddhist texts are
numerous and carry the spirit given by Lafcadio’s
phrase: “But he who truly wishes to know must notlove this phantom nature, he must not find delight incontemplating the works and the deeds of men. Those

42

Lafcadio Hearn and Buddhism

things for which men miserably strive in this miserable
world, brief love and fame and honor, ... are empty as
passing foam.” [11]Lafcadio notes the conflicting relationship between
matter and spirit caused by insufficient understandingof renunciation. Stories like that of the young monk
who commits suicide to escape carnal desire and of thebeautiful lady who burns her face in order to be
admitted to the monastic order are such examples. [12]Transcending the world should take place throughspiritual maturity and not as a result of a self-centeredpursuit, no matter how noble that might be. From theabsolute viewpoint, all desires, even the ones for heavenand spiritual emancipation, are restricting and must
eventually be silenced: “One must not desire heaven asa state of pleasure ... it is only after the wish for Nirvāna
itself has ceased that Nirvāna can be attained.” [13]Man’s path is full of extreme practices, mistakes andmisunderstandings, but all his actions, good or bad,belong to the world of illusion. For the clear sight, allfeelings of self — all love and hate, joy and pain, hopeand regret — are like shadows. The cycle ofinnumerable births and deaths has never really existed.
This has been only in time; and time itself is illusion. [14]Realizing the Changeless Reality that abides
beyond all change, Lafcadio, like a modern day
Heraclitus, transcends all dualities and proclaims fromthe depth of his being, “Youth and age, beauty andhorror, sweetness and foulness, are not different —death and life are one and the same.” [15] The word
‘same’ does not relate to phenomena as such, which, nodoubt, have a different position and form withinspace-time, but their real essence, which is one,
common and unchanging — the Buddha’s absolutenature. The state of Nirvāna does not differ in essencefrom the phenomenal world, or samsāra, butconstitutes the clear perception of its real existence.
In his short report about the Buddhist doctrine ofemanation, the way in which Absolute Reality projects
itself as space-time with infinite subjective andobjective hypostases, he explains that the absolute is
the source and the final end of all forms withoutelaborating further, “the evolution of all forms comesfrom the Formless, of all material phenomena fromthe immaterial Unity and ultimately all have to return
into that original state in which the excitements ofIndividuality are known no more, and which istherefore designated THE VOID SUPREME.” [16]The path to liberation constitutes the gradualrealization of the Divine that pervades everything. He,
who arises above all forms, realizes that he has alwaysbeen a Buddha. The path towards self-realization isilluminated by the teachings of the enlightened
teachers or Tathāgata-s, who are no other thanincarnations of the one Absolute Buddha. Infinity
exists potentially in every being and at the end all will
have to realize it. There shall not remain even one
particle of dust that does not enter into Buddhahood.
Introduction of Buddhism in Japan
Besides the metaphysical doctrines, Lafcadio
searched for the reasons which led to acceptance of
Buddhism by the Japanese society. That question wasof special interest for him since he was a connoisseurof the ancient Japanese religion and differentiateddissimilarity between traditional ancestor worship, asseen in the Shinto religion, and the Buddhist doctrines
of non-existence of the soul and of rebirth.
Answering this question, Lafcadio makes anobservation that Buddhism was obliged to modify its
metaphysical worldview accepting continuation of thepresence of the spirits of the dead for a period of 100
years until their next incarnation, and recognizing thegreat gods of Shinto as Bodhisattvas or evenincarnations of Buddha himself.
Introduction of the law of karma in combination
with the doctrine of rebirth led to recognition of
personal responsibility of every being for his present
state. All states and conditions of a being areconsequences of the past actions. Good acts lead tohigher incarnations and to celestial worlds, while thebad ones lead to lower forms of life, even to animals.
Similarly, the dead were neither happy nor unhappy
due to the attention or lack thereof on the part of theirdescendants, but because of their past conduct whilein the body.
The Buddhist teaching of the duty of kindness to
all living creatures and of pity for all suffering had apowerful effect upon national habits and customs.
Lafcadio quotes a decree issued by Emperor Temmu
forbidding people to eat the flesh of a number ofanimals and use traps. Yet, he did not proceed to acomplete ban of meat-eating, wishing to keep bothreligions, since a complete ban would be contrary to
the habits and customs of Shintoism. [17]Even the Shinto doctrine of conscience — thegod-given sense of right and wrong — was not denied,but Buddhism gave it a new interpretation as theessential nature of the Buddha, dormant in every
human creature. Buddhism, however, did more thantolerate the old rites, it cultivated and elaborated them.
It taught that the spirits of the dead can find peacewith the offerings and prayers of the descendants, anda new and beautiful form of the domestic cult cameinto existence. All touching poetry of ancestor
worship in modern Japan can be traced to theteachings of Buddhist missionaries. [18]Lafcadio repeatedly stressed the great influencethat Buddhist art had in Japan, with sculpture,
painting, architecture and decoration transported
from China. New temples erected by Buddhist priests
should have evoked awe and admiration in people
accustomed only to silent and void Shinto temples.
“The Buddhist painter opened to simple fancy thepalaces of heaven, and guided hope.” [19]Yet, the greatest contribution of Buddhism toJapanese society was via education. Buddhist temples
were gradually converted into schools offering
education to all. That education was not limited only
to religion but embraced the arts and letters of China
which were patiently modified and reshaped toJapanese requirements. For the common people
everywhere the Buddhist priest was the schoolmaster.
In the highest meaning of the term, Buddhism wasa civilizing power that won the favour and acceptanceof emperors not only with its invaluable contribution
to the development of art and letters but also with its
growing influence on the strengthening of morals andsubmission to authority, by its capacity to inspire
larger hopes and fears than the more ancient religion
could create. Its adaptation in metaphysics inconjunction with respect to local traditions finally led
to its wide acceptance and somehow to a harmonious
coexistence with Shintoism under the same roof.
Concluding Remarks
Lafcadio’s interest and writings on Japanesereligion made several scholars question his religious
beliefs and philosophical orientation. A cursory
reading of his Buddhist writings could potentially lead
us to presume that he became a Buddhist because hemeticulously studied Buddhist philosophy, visited
holy Buddhist sites, noted numerous Buddhist stories
and because his family erected his grave according to
the Buddhist customs at the Zōshigaya Cemetery inToshima. But such interpretation is arbitrary and does
not correspond to the facts since he himself neveradopted the Buddhist religion formally and his
personal desire instructed to his eldest son was to put
his ashes in an ordinary jar and bury it, without any
religious ceremony, on a forested hillside. [20]Hearn never was a fanatic follower of any religion.
His study on Buddhism had two aspects: the practical

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

43and the philosophical. From the practical point ofview, he studied the everyday life—the influence ofreligion on the rituals, art and habits of people. He
loved the simplicity of Japanese art and literature andhe tried to relate to his reader the feelings andprejudices of an ordinary Buddhist of Japan.
His disposition towards Buddhist philosophy was
undeniably positive, because as he himself mentions,
he found in it “a universal scientific creed nobler than
any which has ever existed.” [21] He is not trapped in its
dogmas, however, and always remains a stochastic
observer. His study constitutes the effort of amultilayer approach to the Eternal Truth that stands
beyond dogma and the shackles of the limited mind.
Τhe absolute freedom that transcends the intellectual
boundaries of the scientific West and the religious East
comprises an inexhaustible source of attraction for his
interest and quest. [22]His study does not aim to produce a dogmatic
explanation of things through conceptual patterns but
is a reflective awareness in itself. His objective is tobroaden the horizons of his consciousness and theintellectual landscape of his readers.
Notes[1] Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904, p. 80.
[2] Kokoro — Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life,
1895, Kindle ed. loc. 1602.
[3] Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, pp. 78–79.

44

Lafcadio Hearn and Buddhism[4] Gleanings in Buddha Fields, 1897, p. 241.
[5] Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, p. 86.
[6] Ibid, p. 81.
[7] Gleanings in Buddha Fields, p. 217; Japan: An
Attempt at Interpretation, p. 81.
[8] Kokoro — Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life,
loc. 1671.
[9] Ibid, loc. 1726.
[10] Gleanings in Buddha Fields, pp. 92–93.
[11] Ibid, p. 294.
[12] Kokoro — Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life,ch. IX, “By Force of Karma.”[13] Gleanings in Buddha Fields, pp. 238–239.
[14] Ibid, p. 296.
[15] Ibid, p. 295.
[16] Kokoro — Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life,
loc. 1879.
[17] Gleanings in Buddha Fields, pp. 75–76.
[18] Ibid, p. 74.
[19] Ibid, p. 76.
[20] Cf. Rexroth, Kenneth, The Buddhist Writings ofLafcadio Hearn, 1981, p. xi.
[21] Ibid, p. 265.
[22] See Demetrios Th. Vassiliades, “Transcending
Cultural Boundaries: Demetrios Galanos &Lafcadios Hearn”, The Journal of East West
Comparative Literature, Seoul: The Korean
Society of East-West Comparative Literature, Vol.
29, 2013, pp. 257–371.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

45

LOUIS SOLO MARTINELΛουίς Σόλο Μαρτινέλ
ルイ＝ソロ・マルティネル

France/Martinique | Lecturer, Waseda University; Director, Fuji Scène FrancophoneΓαλλία/Μαρτινίκα | Λέκτορας στο Πανεπιστήμιο του Τόκιο και το Πανεπιστήμιο Γουασίντα

フランス／マルティニーク｜早稲田大学嘱託講師、
フジセーヌ・フランコフォン演出家

Exoticism and Cross-Culturality:
On Lafcadio Hearn’s Fantastic TalesΕξωτισμός και Διαπολιτισμικότητα:Σχετικά με τις φανταστικές ιστορίες του Λευκάδιου Χερν
エグゾティシズムと文化越境――ハーンの幻想物語について
Introduction
afcadio Hearn, an English writer of Greek-Irish
parents, a kind of Homer or Proteus of therealm of oddness, a forerunner of a certain trendof World Literature, collected strange stories, fabulous
legends and fantastic tales in America, the West Indies,
Martinique and Japan. Therefore his works became thelocus of passage and translation for European,
American, Caribbean, Creole and Asian Cultures. I
would say all those cultures run through him.
Born into a multi-cultural background, with anopen mind and an uncanny feeling for diversity, laterin his life he would encounter the most variegatedcross-cultural topics. During his numerous voyages
which always left a deep impression on him and always
were the occasion for a never-ending thrill of amazeddelight (le frisson) when discovering new countries
and their people, he collected stories which are
geographically distant from one another, yet poeticallyvery close.
I want to express my gratitude to the organizers
and everyone who made this symposium possible. I
also want to tell you how delighted I am to participate
in this symposium today, the objectives of which are so
close to those of my academic, theoretical andtheatrical researches in connection with Hearn’s works
and life. Today, within the framework set by theorganizers of this symposium, I shall try to illustrate
the open-mindedness of Hearn from various points ofview. I shall reconsider his cross-cultural flexibility andhis legacy in a global context. I shall try to shed asomewhat new light on Hearn and re-contextualize
his works and life. And I shall point out thesignificance of his Open Mind for today’s reader. And

L

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Exoticism and Cross-Culturality

I shall ask myself how his Open Mind can staymeaningful and inspiring in the future.
It is advisable from now to show his openmindedness, to reconsider his Cross-Culturality andhis Exoticism in the wide context of “Aesthetics ofDiversity”, a concept developed by the French travellerwriter Victor Segalen, and in the context of “Poetics ofRelation”, a concept developed by the Martinicanphilosopher-writer Edouard Glissant, to ponder its
aesthetics in all its meanings, to be inspired by these in
the future.
Over the last few years my work has been devoted
to reconsidering and re-contextualizing Hearn’s legacy
with new critical views and with modern tools in orderto understand the exoticism and cross-cultural
flexibility contained in his great works. I myself
consider him one of the first collector-writers ofCreole tales, a forerunner of a certain Creoleness. And,he was a lover of French Belles Lettres and devoted thelast part of his life to introduce the Japanese culture to
the West. Well, I can look at him as a master ofDiversity and Relation, the first Exot and one of thefathers of World literature. You might say that this is
too high a praise for an author like Hearn, but in myopinion this praise is rightly deserved. It is indeed aquestion of how to make possible the updating of thereading of Hearn’s works in the light of new tools of
the theory of culture and of new critical looks into his
works with regard to recent studies of contemporary
cultural history.
We need to reconsider Hearn’s work in its global
ethics and its aesthetics. His work is diffracted into
resonant periods (American, West Indian, Japanese),connected by diverse themes (Exoticism, Otherness,Diversity, Creole Identity), covers several domains(literary, social, ethnological, historic), reaches out toseveral objectives.
To illustrate the cross-cultural flexibility and theopen-mindedness of Hearn, it would becommonplace to start with the fact that he was bornhere on this Island of Lefkada in Greece, of a Greek
mother and a father who was an Anglo-Irish doctor,
thus a cross culture product. But it would be rather
original to say that first he was endowed with an
uncanny capacity to feel Diversity. Later he willencounter other cultural scatterings/crossings and feel
Exoticism, journey after journey.
My approach consists in saying that his travel
stories offer Exotic perspectives, his unusual stories are
ethnological inquiries, his fantastic tales are filled withwonderful Cross-Culturality and Trans-Culturality.
Hearn, travelling from Lefkada (Greece), his nativeisland to Tokyo ( Japan), his final destination, observed
minutely places and faces (people). His curiosity was
enthusiastic and without limits. He follows his desire
to know more, because he always wanted to satisfy histhirst for new discoveries and new encounters. Isn’t thisthe same sin which plagued Dante’s Ulysses: Curiosity?
Where as Dante put Ulysses in his inferno, Hearn
found in the Caribbean and in Japan a peaceful heaven.
Some spiteful tongues among the critics say that helooked at all Places and Faces with too muchexteriority, that is with the typical attitude of theoutsider, and with a kind of nostalgia for an exotic past.
On all the journeys he went, he was interested inanthropological facts, the oral and written literature,
myths and legends and traditional and popular
customs. He had keen powers of observation,
especially a keen eye for the exotic detail.
In Cincinnati, his job as a journalist allowed him
to approach various cultures. In the metropolis of New
York, he explored the districts of black people insearch of traditions. In the West Indies, he invested a
lot of time in collecting the traditional tales and tried
to translate them in order to get to the essential
elements of Creole culture. He painted portraits ofpeople from very humble backgrounds: carriers,
washerwomen, children’s nurses (Da). Eventually, inJapan, he will go to the heart (Kokoro) of the Japanese
civilization by searching deeper for tales, legends andreligious traditions.
To reconsider Hearn means also to reconsider theconcept of Exoticism. The concept of exoticism towhich I am referring here goes back to Victor Segalen.
His ambition was to make us accept the concept of

Exoticism as a defining element of what he named
himself “An Aesthetics of Diversity”. He imposes
several conditions: Exoticism should reconquer its
original purity, deprived of its rags and its old clichés,“having stripped it of its innumerable scoriae, flaws,
stains” (EE p.19).
To reconsider Hearn means also to reconsider the
figure of the Exot. Segalen gave his own definition.
“An Exot is a born Traveler, someone who senses all theflavor of diversity in worlds filled with wondrous
diversities” (EE, p.25) Moreover, in a marginal note
which he joins to the manuscript of his Essay on
Exoticism, Segalen did not hesitate to qualify Hearn asa better Exot when compared to Pierre Loti and otherExotic writers whom he calls severely pseudos-exots.
“Others, pseudo-Exots, the Lotis, tourists, had an effectthat was no less disastrous. I call them the Panderers of
the Sensation of Diversity (EE p.29).
With this authorization from the master of
Exoticism I feel entitled to look at Hearn’s Exoticism
as something different from touristic Exoticism, i.e. a
surpassing of traditional Exoticism. If the father of thereconsidered modern Exoticism, in his reconquered
original purity, names Hearn the first Exot, there has
to be a good reason. More than an exotic investigation,
it is the investigation of the Exot himself that begins
with Hearn, the Exot as understood by Segalen.
I call any possibility which arises from anauthentic experience of a journey, an Exotic
perspective. What is the opposite of Exotic: Endotic?
It is an ugly term, you may say, but in all thedictionaries I have consulted I could not find a more
opposite antonym of Exotic and Exoticism.
The French writer George Perec, literary affiliatedto the group founded by Raymond Queneau called
Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle—Workshop
for Potential Literature), uses the neologisms “infraordinary” in opposition to “extraordinary” and“endotic” in opposition to “exotic” (SSOP, p.Xii, p.205,
207). We can say after him, Endotic retrospective
would be on the other hand, the look at oneself, theinternal journey, the dive in the abyss of the memories,
the possibility of implanting a little more in oneself.
With this approach, I would say Exotic perspective
is a drive of curiosity (desire to know and to take careof ). And, if so, Endotic retrospective could be thedive of memory (desire to look at oneself and to
implant in oneself ). Encounters with somewhere else,
someone else, the other, the foreigner (people andcountries), the strange or strangeness are in factencounters with Diversity.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

47

Discovering Exoticism is also discovering oneself(external and internal journey). After his philosophicalexploration of the concept of Exoticism in his famousand ambitious Essay on Exoticism Segalen shows us,
with another essay Équipée, how exposure to radical
difference (exotic) is a positive dysfunction for oneself,
the self-same subject. The lost and found subject isfacing the new and old encounter with otherness andstrangeness, discovering the other and discovering
oneself (Diversities and Memories). “Moi-même etl’autre, nous nous sommes rencontrés ici, au plus
reculé du voyage. (…)” (EQ, p.38). (Tr.: I, myself andthe other, We meet up here, at the farthest extent of
the voyage). This quotation illustrates magnificently
the experience of Hearn: leaving in search ofsomewhere else, it turns out to be a search for oneself.
Segalen also said: “To leave one point is already to
begin to draw closer to it! The sphere is Monotony.
The poles are but a fiction” (EE, p.43).
The shiver he felt in front of a new environment in
the Caribbean and Japan and the resonances ofchildhood-memories create a confusion of sensations.
These are great Exotic perspectives and Endotic
retrospectives. Victor Segalen defined Exoticism as anaesthetics of Diversity: “I agree to call “Diverse”
everything that until now was called foreign, strange,
unexpected, surprising, mysterious, amorous,
superhuman, heroic, and even divine, everything thatis Other” (EE, p.67). Hearn’s books about Japan andMartinique are filled with Gods and Spirits. Segalen
and Hearn are on the same wavelength about
Exoticism and Diversity.
I. 	Exotics Perspectives and Endotic
Retrospectives in His Travel Stories
I based my paper mainly on two of his travel
stories: Two Years In French West Indies and “My FirstDay in the Orient.” But I could have easily referred toother texts too. In his travel stories about the
Caribbean archipelago as in those about the Japanesearchipelago, he found excellent parallels between
Japan and Caribbean (the mentality, the topography,
the sea and their literatures of the fantastic). The
Caribbean and the Japanese archipelagoes are situatedon the opposite side of the earth to each other,
separated by oceans and continents, but poetically we
can move them closer together.
Before landing in Japan (1890), Hearn had stayed in
Martinique for two years (1887–1889). He takes us on atour through old Saint-Pierre with all its peculiarities
and its particular atmosphere, through a world new for48

Exoticism and Cross-Culturality

him and his readers. It is a world which sometimes
seems to him naïve, childish, often tragic and fragile.
Wherever he goes, he is always on the lookout for
impressions and shivers, for example when he saunters
for the first time in the foreigner’s district of Yokohama.
In Japanese Sketches, Kwaidan, In Ghostly Japanand in “My First Day in the Orient,” he confronts us
with his experiences through travel stories, fantastic
tales, anecdotes and descriptions. Also In Two Years in
the French West Indies, he tells us that on one occasion
the view of the city of Saint-Pierre, which he poeticallyrenamed Pompeii of the tropics, imparted such an
emotion to him that he felt a faint shiver. The
experiences on his voyages to new Exotic places
revealed to him an Endotic retrospective. He had thevision that he was in a city of the antiquity. SaintPierre appears as a mirage. In front of a new Exotic
spectacle, he had the sensation of an old spectacle hecould never really have known, except from old
pictures. In “My First Day in the Orient,” describing
his first day in Yokohama, the same emotion and asimilar evocation of the past come to the fore. Hearn
is overwhelmed by illusions in both places. Here too
we have an Exotic perspective which builds itself up in
the same way. His first impressions on his arrival in the
Orient stem from an Exotic perspective and acorresponding Endotic retrospective which bringsback memories of the picture books of his childhood.
II. Sacrifice as a Positive Tasting of Diversity in
His Novels
Right from the start as a writer-journalist, Hearn
dreamed of becoming a famous novelist. He said that
he would wait for a powerful and challenging subject
so that he could show his talent as a novelist. Would
this powerful subject be a feminine figure? During hisWest Indian period he wrote Youma, a novel about ablack nursemaid for white children (1st sacrifice) who
died during a slave’s revolt by opposing to her loverand her slave brothers (2nd sacrifice). The slaves were
furious. They refused to save the girl whom she had toprotect. Hearn wrote to his friend McDonald “Thestory is substantially true.(…) The girl really died under
the heroic conditions described—refusing the help of
the blacks, and the ladder. Of course I may have
idealized her, but not her act.” (WLH, XV, p.79).
During his Japanese period he wrote “Kimiko,” a story
about a geisha. She was a victim of the Meiji
restoration and the economic decline of samuraifamilies. She was sold as a geisha (1st sacrifice) and had
to disappear (2nd sacrifice) and to sacrifice her love.

What fascinates Hearn in this story is the complete
oversight of the “me” and the fertile character of her
sacrifice according to Buddhist morality.
I tried a comparative study of these two feminine
figures in which I approached the concept of thesacrifice with Segalen’s Aesthetic eyes “a positive Tastingof Diversity” (EE, p.60). I presented this study incommunications at several international symposiums inJapan, France and Martinique. I pointed out forcomparison the historical framework, the destiny of thefeminine figures and the narrative structure.
The figures of Da Youma and Geisha Kimiko intheir respective roles follow a fate imposed by a historicsituation which turns out to be an alienation fromwhich they cannot escape if not by a fatal distance. The
tragedy described by Hearn becomes poignant in thelight of the historic events. The sacrifice of Kimiko andthe dedication of Youma which he observes anddescribes are positive tasting of Diversity.
In both cases, it is about sacrifice. They give up loveand freedom. The heroines of Hearn, in order toaccomplish what they are destined to do, are endowedwith ideal traits of character: beauty and kindness.
Their beauty and kindness transfigure them: forYouma it reads “The young bonne was universally
admired: she was one of those figures that a
Martiniquais would point out with pride to a stranger
as a type of the beauty of mixed race” (WLH, IV,
p.268) and for Kimiko, it reads, “An exceedingly
wonderful girl (…) To win any renown in her
profession, a geisha must be pretty or very clever, andthe famous ones are usually both, (…) if only thatbeauté du diable (in French in text: the beauty of thedevil) which inspired the Japanese proverb that even a
devil is pretty at eighteen. (note: Oni mo jiuhachi
azami no hana) But Kimiko was much more thanpretty” (WLH, VII, p.500). Kimiko was also perfectly
endowed for her job: “she had been perfectly trained
for the profession” (WLH, VII, p.501).
Besides the description of the idiosyncratic
behaviour of the heroines, both narratives are full ofheroic actions, bravery and courage. Youma will go as
far as facing a snake and will become the center ofadmiration in her community. “From that night
Youma became the object of a sort of cult” (WLH, IV,
p.300). Kimiko will refuse any advances by admirers,
even by those who cut off their little finger as a proofof loyalty and eternal affection. “some rich folks whooffered her lands and houses on condition of owningher, body and soul, found her less merciful. There is aforeign prince who remembers her name: he sent her agift of diamonds which she never wore.” (WLH, VII,
p.503). What is it that fascinates Hearn in these two
women’s behaviour? Is it the beauty and the power of
their actions or simply the character of Diversity, oreven the Divine? We can see that he idealized theircharacters to match their gestures. With Segalen, we
learned to distinguish the real pleasure from thedisinterested act. Segalen was the one who considered
the sacrifice as one of the most beautiful acts ofDiversity. It’s because the sacrifice is profitable to theother one. In this regard Hearn and Segalen see no
reductive or negative character in the act of sacrifice.
III. Cross-Culturality
	and Trans-Culturality
in Tales of the Fantastic.
I could had given my paper this subtitle: (Hisfantastic spirits form the West Indies to the East). It isbecause Hearn, a kind of Homer or Proteus in therealm of oddness, was a forerunner of a certain trendof World Literature, collecting strange stories,
fabulous legends and tales of the Fantastic in America,
the West Indies and Japan. Some stories are
geographically distant from one another, yet poeticallyvery close. This similarity between stories is sosurprising that I sometimes think the author himself
had collected these characters to conform to the same
theme and guides us through these wonderful stories.
I had these feelings for example during two
performances that I directed for the Theatre Company
Fuji Scène Francophone with which I managed tocelebrate Hearn in Japan: The Odyssey of the Oddness(2009) for the 150th anniversary of Yokohama
Opening port festival and The Eater of Shiver (2004)
for Centennial of Hearn’s Death. An international
casting (English, French, Creole, Japanese) assured thefull authenticity (linguistic, gestural, aesthetic) of thetales and made the audience shiver with pleasure andfear. In an embroidered montage, we have gathered
American macabre stories “skulls and skeletons”,
strange tales and fabulous legends from Japanesesketches, Martinican sketches, Kwaidan, In Ghostly
Japan, Tropics tales and Contes Créoles n°2.
All these collections of stories are summaries offeelings, laughter, fear and make us cringe with shivers.
The grotesque, comic, horrifying, strange, foreign anddivine, all coexist in these strangest of all stories.
Characters of the Japanese tales find themselves side byside with characters of the Martinican, American
stories and some French stories of the Fantastictranslated by Hearn. He invites us to share the shiver,which he refers to in French: “Frisson”.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

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He used this expression in Pa combiné chè: “…
More finely than any term in our tongue does the
French word “frisson” express that faint shiver—as of aghostly touch thrilling from hair to feet—which
intense pleasure sometimes gives, and which is felt
most often and most strongly in childhood, when theimagination is still so sensitive and so powerful thatone’s whole being trembles to the vibration of a fancy.
And this electric word best expresses, I think, that long
thrill of amazed delight inspired by the first knowledgeof the tropic world — a sensation of weirdness inbeauty, like the effect, in child-days, of fairy tales andstories of phantom isles” (WLH, IV, p.87). This shiverof stunned enjoyment “Frisson”, expresses in fact thestrong sensation of first contact with the world in its
wonderful diversities.
Hearn’s tales of the Fantastic are suited forcomparison. Such as La Diablesse, a fatale beautiful, ashe-devil of the Martinican green sugarcane fields who
suddenly shows herself in total silence only in the
middle of a very hot day, and Yuki Onna, a fatale
female ghost from the Japanese coast covered withwhite snow, who suddenly appears on a quiet andshivering night. We have also Oshidori, the sacredduck from the Japanese red marshes and Soukougnan,
an ominous enchanted bird from the Martinican
green undergrowth. It was very exciting for me tocompare Hearn’s Japanese and Creole tales in atheoretical and theatrical approach. Next to theuniversal aspects of the tales, we can appreciate theflavour of their Original aspects (dressing, frame, code,
aesthetics, ethics).
Segalen used the term Diverse. Glissant went
farther by using the neologism Diversal to confront
the notion Universal. These aspects give to the tales
the exotic stamp of Diversity and their cross-cultural
origins. Some Japanese tales are derived from Chineseand Indian sources. Some Martinican tales have
European, African and Amerindian sources. All thetales of the world are alike, all have universal functions
and universal morphology according to V. Propp andsome other specialists.
Myths, tales, legends are the expressions ofprimitive complexes and the unconscious according to
B. Bettelheim. They are also the projection of fantasies
and traumas. They are the supports of folklore andculture. They are the complex spaces of preservationof the mechanisms of the primitive mind, theterrifying mythology.
Hearn had no doubt about their ethnographicalcharacter. “Once upon a time” (English), “Mukashi,

50

Exoticism and Cross-Culturality

mukashi” ( Japanese), “Il était une fois” (French), “Ténian fwa” (Creole) and as I learned in Lefkada “Miā ForāKi Énan Kéro” (Greek), all the tales of the world begin
with this opening, already used by Apuleius in The
Metamorphoses: “Erant in quadam civitate rex andregina”. An opening which on one hand plants thedecor of poetic space-time, when the oral was a Masterand an agent of the secrets, and was devoted on thescene of the square to verbal sparring matches at thisfabulous time before the writing arrived. On the other
hand this opening shows the orality as boatman ofcultures and languages of borders of time and space.
This formula shows by its universality of the passage,transit, translat, a shape of cross-culturality.
Conclusion
Hearn’s initiative, whether it is under the angle ofa spiritual quest or a quest spontaneously under Exotic
influence, or still when he searches for genesis for his
papers, becomes allied to his simple search for
affections to take a human dimension. His Exotic
vision is conscious and aesthetic. In search of the
Other one, of the Diversity, he found himself. Any
encounter (face, figure, history, story, dream,nightmare, genesis) livens up his fantasies, which givehim momentary or permanent satisfaction. They arenecessary conditions for his balance, for the blooming(self-fulfilment) of his genius, and for the revelation of
his sensibility. He found his lost paradise inlandscapes, on beneficent faces. What favours thetransfer and the sublimation of the memories?
Everything connects him with the old continent,
everything transports him to his native homeland in
the antique legends.
The Marvelous West Indies delivered him fantastic
legends, the legendary Japan transferred to him themyths. Born into a multi-cultural background, with anopen mind and an uncanny capacity to feel diversity;
the scattered stories and cross-cultural topics crossed
his life and work. His experiences of voyage, histranslations of many French authors, his transcriptionsof some Creole sketches, his readings of diverse Exotic
stories from Europe (Greece, England, Ireland,
France), America (USA, Caribe, Martinique), Asia
( Japan, China, India) and his studies of major
philosophic, esthetic, psychological, ethical, spiritual
works (Christianity, Buddhism, Shintoism), all these
influenced him in a strange mix and made me wonder
how they could flow through him?
We do not have an answer yet but we know all
those passages, transits, translations made him amaster of diversity and one of the great fathers ofWorld literature.
His exotic perspectives, literary vocation andambitions achieve his traveller-writer’s destiny. He
wrote to Krehbiel: “I would give anything to be aliterary Columbus, to discover a Romantic America insome West Indian or North African or Oriental region,
to describe the life that is only fully treated of inuniversal geographies or ethnological researches”(LHW, XIII, p. 289). I would like to end with aperfectly suited quotation from Hearn’s text “Dust”
which seems to contain curiously but fortunately thespirit of concepts that I just presented: Open mind,
Exoticism, Cross-Culturality, Alterity, Creoleness,
Aesthetics of Diversity, Poetics of Relation.
“I am individual—an individual soul! Nay, I am a
population—a population unthinkable for multitude,even by groups of a thousand millions! Generations ofgenerations I am aeons of aeons! Countless times theconcourse now making me has been scattered, andmixed with other scatterings. Of what concern, then,
the next disintegration?” (LHW, VII, p.73)

Bibliography
Glissant, Édouard• Poetics of Relation, Tr. by Betsy Wing, University ofMichigan, 1997 (PRE)Hearn, Lafcadio• The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Volume I–XVI,Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1973 (WLH, I, … XVI)
• Trois fois bel conte, from Creole original manuscript,
French Tr. by Serge Denis, F-de-F: Désormeaux,
1977 (TBC)• Contes Créoles (II), from Creole original manuscript,
French Tr. by Louis Solo Martinel, Paris: Ibis Rouge,
2001 (CCII)
Perec, Georges• Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Ed. and Tr. by
John Sturrock, London: Penguin, 1977, 1999
(SSOP)
Segalen, Victor• Essay on Exoticism, An Aesthetics of Diversity, Ed.
and Tr. by Y. Rachel Schlick, Duke University,
London, 2002 (EE)
• Équipée, Paris: Gallimard, 1983 (EQ)

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

51

SHINGO NAGAOKA

Σίνγκο Ναγκαόκα
長岡真吾

Japan | Professor, Shimane UniversityΙαπωνία | Καθηγητής στο Πανεπιστήμιο Σιμάνε

日本｜島根大学教授

Greek, Irish and/or British?:Hearn’s Immigration to America and His Cultural IdentitiesΈλληνας, Ιρλανδός ή/και Βρετανός?:Η μετανάστευση του Χερν στην Αμερική και οι πολιτιστικές του ταυτότητες
ギリシャ人かアイルランド人か英国人か――ハーンのアメリカ入国と文化的アイデンティティP

atrick Lafcadio Hearn was born on the islandof Lefkada in 1850, named after his birthplace,and baptized Patricios Lefcadios Hearn in the
Greek Orthodox Church. Does this record simply
make him a “Greek-born” writer? Most Japanesedictionaries have long described Hearn as “a Greek
born writer,” or “a Greek born British writer.”
We have an interesting document now available on
the Internet. It is a passenger list of a transatlantic
vessel in which Lafcadio Hearn embarked. [1] When
Hearn was nineteen years old, he arrived at the port of
New York on the immigration steamship named S. S.
Cella, on September 2, 1869, according to thescrupulous research by Kinji Tanaka of Cincinnati,
Ohio, U. S. A. Tanaka also found out that young
Hearn declared at entry to the United States that thecountry he “belonged to” was “Greece.” [2]The photocopy of the actual list of the passengers
on the above steamship reveals some basic facts. The“Master of the ship” or the Captain’s name is “B.
Gleadell,” and the passengers were taken on board at“London and Havre.” [3] The headers of the list read,from the left, names, age, sex, occupation, and “thecountry to which they [passengers] severally belong.”
For example, the first one of the list reads “JaneHooper,” age 29, female, “Lady” for occupation, andthe country she belongs to is “England.” She is one of“Cabin” Passengers who have better rooms than
“Steerage” passengers.

52

Greek, Irish and/or British?

When we scroll down this ten-page document,close to the very end on the final page, we can see thename “Patrick Hearn”, age “19,” “male,” occupation“none,” and the country he belonged to, “Greece.”
The number of the total passengers on this ship is513, according to this passenger list. Out of 513, notably,
there was only one person who declared a Greek
identity. Only the 19-year-old young man named“Patrick Hearn” said to the registration clerk, “Greece.”
We have to presume that it was quite rare for the clerk
in those days to receive a passenger from Greece, as thefollowing record shows.
Take a look at this table “Immigrants from Greece
and Turkey, 1820–1920” by historian Roger Daniels. [4]What we clearly see is that the number of immigrants
from Greece had been extremely small. Especiallyduring the decade from 1861 to 1870 that includes theyear Patrick Hearn came to the US, there were only 72
immigrants from Greece. Though there was no actual
difference between tourists and immigrants at the time,
it stays exceptionally small in comparison with thenumbers of other countries. For example, during thesame ten years, there were more than 222 thousand
immigrants from England, 435 thousand from postfamine Ireland, and 11 thousand from Italy, according
to a source.
It’s not certain whether this Patrick Hearn knewthat there were very few immigrants from Greece tothe U. S. before the late 19th century. Why did he say“Greece”? It is noticed that Hearn declared his
nationality as British when he returned from
Martinique to New York in 1887. [5] Why Hearn said
Greece in 1869 can be explained according to thegenerally accepted understanding that his longing for
Greece was inseparably combined with longing for his
long-lost “Greek” mother.
Because he declared his Greek identity, was
Lafcadio a Greek born writer? No, he wasn’t. Strictly
speaking, Lafcadio was not born in Greece. At thetime he was born in Lefkada in 1850, the island waspart of the United States of the Ionian Islands. It was a
British Protectorate and that is why the country inwhich Hearn was born has an English name, and it
was also why his father Charles Bush Hearn came to
Cerigo/Kethyra and met his future wife Rosa Antonia
Cassimati. It all happened under the British rule.
The apparent grounds for Hearn’s Greek cultural
identity rely steadily on a premise that his mother
Rosa was Greek. So many resources take it for granted
that Rosa is a Greek woman that it will soundirrelevant or almost heretic or pagan to reconsider her
cultural identity. But we have to remember that it isalso true that Cerigo/Kythera was not yet Greece
when Rosa was born there. She was born in 1823, andmodern Greece was not independent yet from the
Ottoman Empire until 1830. And the Ionian Islands
were finally united to Greece as late as in 1864, whichis even ten years after Rosa’s return from Ireland.
However, some encyclopedias say that the Greek
ethnic identity consists of three basic necessary
conditions: 1) the language=Greek, 2) the
heritage=Hellenism, 3) the religion=the Greek
Orthodox Church. It’s considered that the Cassimatifamily satisfied these conditions and it made Rosa a
Greek woman without doubt. Also, the Ionian Islands
played an important role for the establishment ofmodern Greek nationalism. Still, the point I’m trying

to elaborate here is about something that should be
added to it, as we can sense in the following childhood
reminiscence written by Lafcadio Hearn. It’s aquotation from a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain(Sept 7, 1893):
I have never been in Italy since a child, and know
it only from books. When six years old I spoke
two languages, Romaic and Italian, both now
utterly forgotten. [6]Hearn remembers that he “spoke two languages,
Romaic and Italian” when he was six. It’s 1856 when hewas six years old, and he was in Ireland, in an Englishspeaking environment, and his mother Rosa wasalready back in Cerigo, and it was a year before hisfather’s second marriage and subsequent departure to
India. In another letter to Chamberlain a year and ahalf later (March, 1895), Hearn again recalls hisbilingual childhood as in the following:
By the way, my child-tongue was Italian. I spoke
Romaic and Italian by turns. 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 with the teacher, who lookedexactly like a murderer and never smiled. So I
know not Italian. [7] (Emphasis added)
Hearn, it seems, remembers clearly the original,
before-Ireland language environment provided by his
mother. But later in his life, even though he tried torebuild his memory through a language lesson, he
failed to retrieve his memory of “Italian.” Is there any
reason for this failure?
To consider this question, we have to go back to
Rosa Cassimati and the history of the Ionian Islands.
Before the British rule, the Ionian Islands wereoverseas possession of the Republic of Venice for over
400 years, from the mid-14th until the end of 18th
century (1797). And as for the language environment
under the Venetian rule, I found a well-researchedsummary on Wikipedia:
During the Venetian period all public acts weredrawn up in the Venetian language, the official
language of the Government. Greek remained
spoken by the peasantry whereas Venetian was
adopted by the upper class and it was generally
preferred within the towns. Thus, the Venetianlanguage became, if not the dominant language ofProceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

53the Ionians, at least the most common one. The
Venetians did little in the area of education, mainly
due to the fact that schooling was not a
responsibility of the state at that time in Europe
but a private matter. Some authors believe that thiswas done intentionally by Venice, as part of its
colonial policy. People belonging to the upperclasses were more likely to be educated and to havestudied in an Italian university, usually that of
Padua. [8] (Emphasis added)
According to Hearn biographers, the Cassimati family
was of noble Ionian rank and consequential in theirsociety. As the above quotation says, “Venetian was
adopted by the upper class” and it “became, if not thedominant language of the Ionians, at least the mostcommon one.” Therefore, it is natural to presume that
Rosa could speak both Romaic (the Modern Greek
language) and the Venetian language. It is no wonder
why the Italian language that Hearn was taught in the
U. S. did not conjure up any memory of his childhood.
I have to argue that it was not Italian but Venetian. As
to how those two languages are different, I provide
general knowledge that Venetian is not a dialect ofItalian, that it is a separate language, and that Venetiandiffers from Italian in grammar, phonetics, andvocabulary. I just have to wonder what Lafcadio
would have had to say if he had heard the spoken
Venetian language.
Also, I have to draw attention to how Hearn
expressed his memory of bilingual childhood. He said,“my child-tongue was Italian.” It is interesting that heused the word “child-tongue,” not “mother tongue.”
Even a little research on the usage of the phrase “childtongue” apparently shows that it’s quite rate to comeacross this phrase in the way Hearn meant.
So I have to imagine that Hearn’s use of the phrase“child-tongue” is rather unique, and that it may havesome specific meaning, or some unconscious/
subconscious implication. What, then, is his “mothertongue”? For Hearn the phrase must have been selfcontradictory and rather ironical. His mother’s“tongue” was Greek and Venetian, but his “mothertongue” was English, or so we suppose. So, Hearn’s
mother tongue is in fact his father’s “tongue,” and his
mother’s “tongue” was not his “mother tongue.”
The “mother tongue” may be a single dominantlanguage and it usually gives an essential ground for
ethnic and/or cultural identity. The “child-tongue,” on
the other hand, can be one or more than two
languages. It can be several languages taught by plural

54

Greek, Irish and/or British?

tongues. And this shift or transition from the mothertongue to “child-tongue” seems to indicate a crucial
and significant characteristic of Lafcadio Hearn. It
represents a shift from the singular to the plural, which
can be regarded as Hearn’s fundamental vision and as abasic symbiotic structure of his open mind.
Nineteen-year-old Lafcadio did not tell a lie when
he declared that he belonged to Greece at entry to the
U. S. Now we know that by Greece he subconsciously
and eventually meant all the way from Cerigo to
Lefkada, to Ireland, to England, and to the UnitedStates, and possibly to all the other places that he andhis parents went through. By Greece he meant as
metaphor that he lost his mother and then his father
and then other supporters. By Greece he meant
Venetian and Romaic. By Greece he meant the plural
histories of the Ionian Islands. By Greece he meant lesssense of belongingness to Ireland and his ambiguous
attitudes to the large number of immigrants from postfamine Ireland. And later in his life, by Greece hemeant Japan, too, as in his work Japan: An Attempt At
Interpretation (1904) Hearn compares Japan withancient Greece in his own way.
There had always been plural layers of reality whichwere immanent in and around his environment, andLafcadio was somewhat different from others in his
unique ability of sensing such synchronic on-goingstories in those symbiotic plural layers of reality. And
this can be a reason that he was as much fascinatedwith Celtic fairy tales as with Izumo mythology. Bothare immanent but not visible. Or just think ofMiminashi-Hoichi, Hearn’s favorite tale, in which aninteraction and an intersection of the two different
layers of life are depicted. And it is Hoichi who inperson revealed that the alternative realm is immanent
within our life and reality, which are not completely
ruled under a single layer.
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was not from Greece. He
was from the United States of the Ionian Islands,
where plural languages were heard and where
different histories and cultures intersected. When
Lafcadio said Greece, he unconsciously meant thathis past was immanent and symbiotic in invisible
layers. And by doing so, he even partially predicted
his future life in Japan.
I also hope to suggest that we do further researchon Rosa Antonia Cassimati. We must know more
about her, to examine how she was entangled in amonosyllabic, monolingual, and monophonic narrative
and was possibly kept away from an open mind.

Notes[1] “New York Passenger Arrival Records, 1820–1957”
are available both in microfilm and online
database. The National Archives at New York City
provide access to the microfilm and Ancestry.com<www.ancestryinstitution.com> has searchable
online database of the same records.
		Year: 1869; Arrival: New York, New York;Microfilm Serial: M237, 1820–1897; Microfilm
Roll: Roll 317; Line: 1; List Number: 1020.
		Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger Lists, 1820–
1957 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA:
Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010.
[2] See 田中欣二「ハーンの渡米年月と船名」(Tanaka,
Kinji. “Hearn’s Ship and Date of Entry to the U. S.
A.”) and「ハーンが乗船渡米したS.S.CELLA」(“S.
S. Cella, Hearn’s Steamship to the U. S. A”)『へるん』45号、2008年 (Lafcadio Hearn. [The Hearn
Society, Japan] 45. 2008: 76–82. Print.)
		As to the entry formalities at the port of New
York at the time of 1869, immigration processing
was done according to “An Act for the protectionof immigrants, second class, steerage, and deck
passengers” passed in 1855, at Castle Garden. By
1867, the processing procedures were divided
among twelve departments, and the members of“The Registering Department” recorded “allnecessary information pertaining to each
immigrant, such as name, nationality, former
residence and intended destination.” No official
documents were required of immigrants. Startingin 1820, however, the captain or master of a vessel
arriving from a foreign country was required tosubmit a list of passengers to the collector ofcustoms. According to these facts, it is presumed
that “Patrick Hearn” declared his “Greek”
identity twice: when the list of passengers wasmade and when he was asked by the registration

clerk at Castle Garden. See George J. Svejda,
Castle Garden As An Immigrant Depot, 1855–1890.
Washington: U. S. Dept. of the Interior, Divisionof History, Office of Archeology and HistoricPreservation, Dec. 1968. 34, 84. Print. See also,“Immigration Records (Ship Passenger Arrival
Records and Land Border Entries)” The National
Archives. The U.S. National Archives and Records
Administration. Feb. 1, 2010. Web. Dec. 5, 2014.
<http://www.archives.gov/research/immigration/passenger-arrival.html>[3] According to the report of “Marine Intelligence.
New York, Thursday, Sept. 2,” this steamship S. S.
Cella left London on the 14th of August, called atHavre, France, and left the port on the 17th ofAugust. It is not certain yet, however, from which
port Patrick Lafcadio Hearn embarked in thesteamship. The “Marine Intelligence” also reportsthat the total number of the passengers is 513. See“Arrived. Marine Intelligence. New York, Thursday,
Sept. 2.” New York Times 3 September 1869: 8.
PDF. 18 Aug. 2014. <http://query.nytimes.com/
mem/archive-free/>[4] Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of
Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. 2nd
ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002. 202. Print.
[5] Tanaka,「ハーンの渡米年月と船名」(“Hearn’s Shipand Date of Entry to the U. S. A.”), 77.
[6] Hearn, Lafcadio. The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio
Hearn. Ed & Introduction. Elizabeth Bisland.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910. 160. PDF.
[7] Hearn, Lafcadio. The Life and Letters of Lafcadio
Hearn. Vol. 2. Ed. Elizabeth Bisland. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1906. 217–18. PDF.
[8] “Ionian Islands under Venetian rule.” Wikipedia:
The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation,
Inc. 19 May 2014. Web. 28 June 2014. <http://
en.wikipedia.org/>

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

55

PAUL MURRAYΠολ Μόρεϊ
ポール・マレイ

Ireland | Hearn BiographerΙρλανδία | Βιογράφος του Χερν

アイルランド｜ハーン伝記作家

Gothic Horror:
The Dublin Haunting of Lafcadio HearnΓοτθικός Τρόμος: Το Δουβλίνο στοιχειώνει τον Λευκάδιο Χερν
ゴシック・ホラー――ハーンに刻まれたダブリンの呪い

While there are some autobiographicalelements scattered through his American
writings, it was in Japan that Lafcadio
Hearn began to explore his Irish childhood in print.
He tried drafting an autobiography but eventually
abandoned the project. Fragments of the material werereworked and appeared in various forms in his
Japanese books. The material relating to his childhood
is found mainly in:• “By the Japanese Sea”, Glimpses of Unfamiliar
Japan, 1894.
• “The Dream of a Summer Day”, Out of the East, 1897.
• “Vespertina Cognitio”, Exotics and Retrospectives, 1898.
• “Gothic Horror” and “Nightmare-Touch”,
Shadowings, 1900.
• “Hi-Mawari”, Kwaidan, 1904.
He also recalled his Dublin childhood in a letter toW.B. Yeats in September 1901.
Although he may have given Yeats the impressionthat he had been happy growing up in Dublin, thecommon thread of these writings is an exploration of
the terrors he endured there in the houses of his
great-aunt, Mrs Brenane, from the time he came into
her care in 1854 to his departure for boarding school in
England in 1863. They lived in the Rathmines area fora year or so and then from 1855 (or 1856) to 1863 in 73
Upper Leeson Street, where most, if not all, thehauntings took place. These childhood terrors
remained indelibly imprinted on his psyche and aresurely a clue to the horror that permeated his writing
throughout his adult life.
“Vespertina Cognitio” describes a haunting that
happened to Hearn in the West Indies, underneath
which lay the terrors of his Dublin experiences. He

56

Gothic Horror

had as a child suffered a fear of the supernatural bynight and day, the horror of which was so intense that
he believed it would have been fatal if such fear had
been prolonged beyond a few seconds.
It must have been well after midnight when I felt
the first vague uneasiness, — the suspicion, — thatprecedes a nightmare. I was half-conscious, dreamconscious of the actual, — knew myself in that very
room, — wanted to get up. Immediately theuneasiness grew into terror, because I found that I
could not move. Something un-utterable in the air
was mastering will. I tried to cry out, and my utmost
effort resulted only in a whisper too low for any
one to hear. Simultaneously I became aware of a
Step ascending the stair, — a muffled heaviness; andthe real nightmare began, — the horror of theghastly magnetism that held voice and limb, — thehopeless will-struggle against dumbness andimpotence. The stealthy Step approached, — butwith lentor malevolently measured, — slowly, slowly,
as if the stairs were miles deep. It gained thethreshold, — waited. Gradually then, and withoutsound, the locked door opened; and the Thing
entered, bending as it came, — a thing robed,— feminine, — reaching to the roof, — not to belooked at! A floor-plank creaked as It neared thebed; —and then—with a frantic effort—I woke,bathed in sweat; my heart beating as if it weregoing to burst. The shrine-light had died: in theblackness I could see nothing; but I thought I
heard that Step retreating. I certainly heard theplank creak again. With the panic still upon me, I
was actually unable to stir. The wisdom of striking amatch occurred to me, but I dared not yet rise.
Presently, as I held my breath to listen, a new waveof black fear passed through me; for I heard
moanings, — long nightmare moanings, —moanings that seemed to be answering each otherfrom two different rooms below. And then, close
to me, my guide began to moan hoarsely, hideously.
Hearn concludes this episode in “Vespertina
Cognitio” by saying that while the nightmare
experienced by his accompanying guide was a familiar
creation of West-Indian superstition, the shape that hehad dreamed about was same one that used to vex his
sleep in childhood, — “a phantom created for me by
the impression of a certain horrible Celtic story which
ought not to have been told to any child blessed, or
cursed, with an imagination.” [1]The horrible Celtic story was probably told to theyoung Patrick Lafcadio by one of Mrs Brenane’sservants. Kate Ronane, an Irish nursemaid who was
hired to look after him when his mother returned to
Greece in 1854 is a possible candidate. A servant like
Kate might well have been recruited from among thepeasantry at a time when the oral tradition of storytelling was still very much alive in the Irish
countryside. The strong horrific element in thisfolklore can be seen in the collections published by
Oscar Wilde’s parents in Hearn’s lifetime: Sir William
Wilde’s Irish Popular Superstitions appeared in 1852 [2] ,just as Patrick Lafcadio was arriving in Ireland with hismother and Lady Wilde’s later volumes, Ancient
Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland,with sketches of the Irish past (1887) [3] and, Ancient
Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland, Contributions to
Irish Lore (1890) [4] relied heavily on her husband’s
earlier research. Hearn’s later phrase, ‘the divinely
beautiful’ [5] had occurred previously in Lady Wilde’s
work. These books would later also influence Hearn’s
Dublin contemporary, Bram Stoker. [6]
In “Nightmare-Touch” (Shadowings), Hearn again
detailed the hauntings which had terrified him in Mrs
Brenane’s house. When he was about five years old he
was condemned to sleep by himself in an isolated room,
called the Child’s Room. This was, he remembered,narrow and high and, in spite of one tall window, very
gloomy. It contained a fireplace “wherein no fire wasever kindled; and the Child suspected that the chimney
was haunted.” Of the haunters he had this to say:
They were not like any people that I had everknown. They were shadowy dark-robed figures,

capable of atrocious self-distortion, — capable, forinstance, of growing up to the ceiling, and thenacross it, and then lengthening themselves, headdownwards, along the opposite wall. Only theirfaces were distinct; and I tried not to look at theirfaces. I tried also in my dreams—or thought that I
tried—to awaken myself from the sight of them bypulling at my eyelids with my fingers; but theeyelids would remain closed, as if sealed.... Many
years afterwards, the frightful plates in Orfila’s
Traité des Exhumés, beheld for the first time,recalled to me with a sickening start the dreamterrors of childhood. But to understand the Child’s
experience, you must imagine Orfila’s drawings
intensely alive, and continually elongating or
distorting, as in some monstrous anamorphosis.
Nevertheless the mere sight of those nightmarefaces was not the worst of the experiences in theChild’s Room. The dreams always began with asuspicion, or sensation of something heavy in theair, — slowly quenching will, — slowly numbing my
power to move. At such times I usually foundmyself alone in a large unlighted apartment; and,almost simultaneously with the first sensation offear, the atmosphere of the room would become
suffused, half-way to the ceiling, with a sombreyellowish glow, marking objects dimly visible,— though the ceiling itself remained pitch-black.
This was not a true appearance of light: rather it
seemed as if the black air were changing color frombeneath.... Certain terrible aspects of sunset, on
the eve of storm, offer like effects of sinister color....
Forthwith I would try to escape, — (feeling at every
step a sensation as of wading), — and would
sometimes succeed in struggling half-way acrossthe room; — but there I would always find myself
brought to a standstill, — paralyzed by some
innominable opposition. Happy voices I could
hear in the next room; — I could see light throughthe transom over the door that I had vainly
endeavored to reach; — I knew that one loud cry
would save me. But not even by the most frantic
effort could I raise my voice above a whisper....
And all this signified only that the Nameless wascoming, — was nearing, — was mounting the stairs.
I could hear the step, — booming like the sound ofa muffled drum, — and I wondered why nobody
else heard it. A long, long time the haunter would
take to come, — malevolently pausing after eachghastly footfall. Then, without a creak, the bolted
door would open, — slowly, slowly, — and the thing

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

57would enter, gibbering soundlessly, — and put out
hands, — and clutch me, — and toss me to the black
ceiling, — and catch me descending to toss me up
again, and again, and again.... In those moments
the feeling was not fear: fear itself had been
torpified by the first seizure. It was a sensation thathas no name in the language of the living. For
every touch brought a shock of something
infinitely worse than pain, — something thatthrilled into the innermost secret being of me, — asort of abominable electricity, discovering
unimagined capacities of suffering in totally
unfamiliar regions of sentiency.... This wascommonly the work of a single tormentor; but I
can also remember having been caught by a group,and tossed from one to another, — seemingly for atime of many minutes. [7]Hearn was tortured outside, as well as inside, Mrs
Brenane’s home. In “Gothic Horror”, also published in
Shadowings, it was the terror inspired by thearchitecture of the church where he was taken in
Dublin, possibly St Patrick’s or Christ Church
Cathedrals. He realised it was the ‘wizened andpointed shapes’ of the windows which were the sourceof his distress. He linked the goblins which haunted
his dreams with the Gothic architecture. He identified
the points, into which doors, windows, aisles, roofs
and everything else in this form tapered, as the specificfocus of his fear:
Even though built by hands of men, it had ceased
to be a mass of dead stone: it is infused with
Something that thinks and threatens; — it has
become a shadowing malevolence, a multiple
goblinry, a monstrous fetish! [8]Reinforcement of this point, comes in the last of
Hearn’s Japanese stories to probe his childhood, “HiMawari”, published in Kwaidan in 1904, the year of hisdeath. Stopping near the Japanese village of Takata, hesees a sunflower, the Japanese word for which, Himawari, means ‘the sunward-turning’. This connects in
his mind with the lines in Thomas Moore’s “Believe
Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms”:‘As the Sunflower turns on her god, when he sets
The same look that she turned when he rose.’This in turn transports him back to a ‘glowing
glorious August day’ in 1857 when, as a seven-year-old,

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Gothic Horror

he was looking for fairy rings on the Elwood estatearound Cong, on the shores of Lough Corrib inCounty Mayo. He was with his cousin, Robert Elwood,
who was in the process of terrifying him with tales ofgoblins when an unkempt local harper, Dan
Fitzpatrick, arrives at the house with his harp and theboys rush back to hear him perform. But when hesings “Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young
Charms”, young Patrick Lafcadio is appalled that theold harper should sing a song performed by his aunt,
Catherine Elwood, ‘the dearest and fairest being in mylittle world’. He is, however, in spite of himself, won
over by Fitzpatrick’s rendition:
With the utterance of the syllables ‘today’, that deep,
grim voice suddenly breaks into a quivering
tenderness indescribable;—then, marvellously
changing, it mellows into tones sonorous and rich as
the notes of a great organ,—while a sensation unlike
anything ever felt before takes me by the throat...
What witchcraft has he learned? what secret has hefound—this scowling man of the road?... Oh! isthere anyone else in the whole world who can sing
like that?... And the form of the singer flickers anddims;—and the house, and the lawn, and all thevisible shapes of things tremble and swim before me.
Yet instinctively I fear that man;—I almost hate him;and I feel myself flushing with anger and shame
because of his power to move me thus...
‘He made you cry’, Robert compassionately
observes, to my further confusion,—as the harper
strides away, richer by a gift of sixpence taken
without thanks... ‘But I think he must be a gipsy.
Gipsies are bad people —and they are wizards...Letus go back to the wood’.
We climb again to the pines, and there squat down
upon the sunflecked grass, and look over town andsea. But we do not play as before: the spell of the
wizard is strong upon us both... ‘Perhaps he is agoblin’, I venture at last, ‘or a fairy?’‘No’, says Robert, ‘Only a gipsy. But that is nearly as
bad. They steal children, you know...’‘What shall we do if he comes up here?’ I gasp, insudden terror at the lonesomeness of our situation.
‘Oh, he wouldn’t dare’, answers Robert—‘not by
daylight, you know...’ [9]Hearn tells us in his draft autobiography that hehad long been left alone on the subject of religion
while in Mrs Brenane’s care but this state of
infantile ignorance was altered by a privilegedvisitor, said to be a cousin, who stayed each winterat the Brenane household. A young girl, emanating
sorrow, dressed always in black, young Patrick
Lafcadio never saw her laugh or smile. She was kindto him but was so sombre that he was nevercomfortable with her. This discomfort would
increase immeasurably when ‘Cousin Jane’ raised
the subject of religion and was horrified to discover
his ignorance on the subject:
After looking all about the room, she fixed her eyeson mine with such curiousness that I was frightened.
‘My child, is it really possible you do not know who
God is?’
I remembered answering: ‘No’.
‘God—who made the world, the beautiful sky, thetrees, the birds—you do not know this?’‘No’.
‘Do you not know that God made you and yourfather and mother and everybody,—and I who amtalking to you?’‘No’.
‘Do you not know about heaven and hell, — and that
God made you in order that you should be happyin heaven if you are good?’‘No’.
The rest of the conversation has faded out of mymind—all except the words—‘and be sent to hell,
to be buried alive in fire for ever and ever—always
burning, burning, burning, always—never forgiven,
never. Think of the pain of fire—to burn foreverand ever.’This picture of the universe gave me a shock thatprobably preserved it in memory. I can still see theface of the speaker as she said those words—thehorror upon it,—the pain,—and then she burst
into tears. I do not know why, we kissed eachother; and I remember nothing more of that day.
But somehow or other from that time, I never
liked my so-called cousin as before. She was kinder
to me than any other being; but I felt an
instinctive resentment towards her because of what
she had told me.
It seemed monstrous, ugly, wicked. She became forme a person who thinks horrible things. My world
had been horrible enough before. She made it worse.
I did not doubt what she said, and yet I was
angry because she had said it. After she wentaway in [the] spring I hoped she would nevercome back again.

She did indeed come back, the first time under‘curious circumstances’. Lafcadio went upstairs one
autumn evening and saw her pass from her own room
to the one next door. He could not see her face. He
called out her name but she did not answer. He
followed her into the room. She went to the other sideof the bed and looked towards him. She had no face,
only a pale blur. In the same instant, the figure
disappeared and he was alone in the room. So great
was his panic to escape that he fell headlong down thestairs. When picked up and questioned, he was afraid
to say what he had seen.
The next month she returned in the flesh, bringing
presents of toys. She caressed him fondly, took him out
for a walk and bought him ‘a multitude of things’. They
passed a pleasant day together. Next day he heard she
was sick; she died in the room from which he fancied
he had seen her ghoulish form pass. She left her money
to a convent and her books to him. It was a bequest helearned in time to value. [10]While Hearn’s memories of childhood in Dublin
were mostly horrific, they also recalled another reality,
when he was the privileged heir to a great fortune,
much loved by Mrs Brenane and allowed to behave sobadly that he was known as the ‘Devil’s Boy’, dreadedby her friends and visitors.
It may have been this contrast, between forms ofheaven and hell, as well as the prevailing climate in the
United States which caused Hearn to suppress his Irish
given name, Patrick or Paddy, after his move to New
Orleans. By 1901 when he identified himself to W.B.
Yeats as someone who had grown up in Dublin andloved ‘Irish Things’, [11] he had forged a new identity as aJapanese citizen. It may well have been the experience ofbeing surrounded by a loving Japanese family that
prompted him to begin probing his childhood memories
and to become reconciled to the reality on which they
were based. It resulted in a reconnection between his
early and last years: rather like the tales of ghostly
possession that he quarried from the Japanese kwaidan,
his earlier identity as Patrick Lafcadio had reasserted
itself, driven by a maelstrom of turbulent emotions froma conflicted childhood that just would not go away.
[1] Lafcadio Hearn, “Vespertina Cognito”, Exotics
and Retrospectives, Little, Brown and Co., Boston:
Little, Brown, and Co., 1898, Reprinted, Rutland,
Vermont, and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company,
Inc., 1971, pp 280–87[2] William R. Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions,
Dublin: James McGlashan, 1852

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

59[3] Lady Jane F.S., (‘Speranza’) Wilde, Ancient
Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of
Ireland, with sketches of the Irish past, London:
Ward and Downey, 1887, 2 vols
[4] Lady Jane F.S. (‘Speranza’) Wilde, Ancient Cures,
Charms, and Usages of Ireland, Contributions to
Irish Lore, London: Ward and Downey, 1890
[5] Paul Murray, A Fantastic Journey: The Life andLiterature of Lafcadio Hearn, London: Japan
Library, 1993, p 190; Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic
Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, Vol 1, p 12
[6] Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: a Lifeof Bram Stoker, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004,
pp 193–97[7] Lafcadio Hearn, “Nightmare-Touch”, Shadowings,

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Gothic Horror

Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1900, Reprinted,
Rutland, Vermont, and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle
Company, 1971, pp 241–44[8] “Gothic Horror”, ibid, p 222[9] Lafcadio Hearn, “Hi-Mawari”, Kwaidan, Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904, Reprinted,
Rutland, Vermont, and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle
Company, Inc., 1971, pp 165–68[10] Lafcadio Hearn’s MSS Autobiography,
Manuscripts Department, University of Virginia
Library, Charlottesville, Virginia[11] MSS Letter, Lafcadio Hearn to W.B. Yeats,
24/9/1901, Tokyo, photocopy provided by Dr
John Kelly, St John’s College, Oxford

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

61

ALAN ROSEN

Αλαν Ρόζεν
アラン
・
ローゼン

Japan/USA | Former Professor, Kumamoto UniversityΙαπωνία/ΗΠΑ | Πρώην Καθηγητής στο Πανεπιστήμιο Κουμαμότο

日本／アメリカ｜元熊本大学教授

Concluding RemarksΤελική παρατήρηση
結びにO

ne proof that Hearn’s mind was nearly
always open is that he allowed himself tochange it, back and forth if necessary. As
Ralph Waldo Emerson said in “Self Reliance” (1841),“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers anddivines. With consistency a great soul has simply
nothing to do. …Speak what you think now in hardwords, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks
in hard words again, though it contradict every thing
you said to-day. —‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be
misunderstood.’ —Is it so bad, then, to be
misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, andSocrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, andGalileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spiritthat ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.” Whatever human flaws Hearn may
have had, a foolish consistency and small-mindedness
were certainly not among them.
In yesterday’s and today’s presentations, though allon quite separate aspects of Hearn’s open-mindedness,each panelist shed light on Hearn the man and theartist, albeit from different angles and through theirown particular lenses. One feature they all seem tohave in common, however, is that all of the speakers
see Hearn as multiple, as a composite, sometimes
almost as a blur. His life and thinking crossed manylines and erased many borders. Indeed, he usuallyrefused to accept, and at times even to acknowledge,
the boundaries and categories that others and society
as a whole had set: E.g. In racially segregatedCincinnati he sought out the blacks and valued highly
their songs and customs; in Martinique he praised thebeauty of the mixed-race inhabitants, their physiques,

62

Concluding Remarks

their dark skin color; in Christian-dominatedCincinnati he extolled the superior humanity andcleanliness of the Jewish slaughter-house, contrasting
it with the cruelty and filth of its gentile counterpart.
Hearn’s mental doors were nearly always open. Thus,
he was able to see the beauty of all skin colors, eyeshapes, and all types of people. In fact, he saw it in allliving things—human, feline, equine, canine, even in
insects. While others separated religion from science,
Hearn focused on how and where they overlapped andmerged, how they were merely different paths goingup the same mountain that led ultimately to the same
truth. Where some believed with Kipling that “East is
East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,”Hearn instinctively promoted their mutual
understanding and inter-relatedness. Indeed, hewitnessed the blending of East and West every day ofhis paternal life: all he had to do was look into thefaces of his own children.
As several speakers emphasized, Hearn himself wasa blended being. In him, Greece met and blended with
Ireland, and both of these would later become further
blended with North America, and later on these would
blend with Martinique and Japan, each new encounter
adding something to the former culture, until his mind
had become a kind of cultural palimpsest.
In conjunction with his interest in overcoming anddisregarding boundaries, he was also fascinated by thesmudging of boundaries, and he liked to contemplate
the edges and margins where one thing faded out andanother faded in—e.g., the middle state between
waking and sleeping, between consciousness andunconscious, when the mind drifts from one state ofconsciousness and begins to enter another. It wasalways the intersection of mental states that mostintrigued Hearn, the places in the mind where reality
and fantasy began to merge, where sleeping andwaking yielded to each other to create a new, fertile,
middle ground. Think of the end of “My First Day in
the Orient,” where the newly arrived Hearn describes
his mind drifting into sleep, recalling the day’s
continuous barrage of slightly menacing, insect-likekanji flying at him but also the dancing hat of his
kuruma-ya Cha, the former tinged with anxiety about
Japan and the other anticipatory of possible future
pleasures. Dreams and day-dreams, in which one isboth aware and asleep, especially interested him, andmany of his works use dreams as an essential
ingredient: e.g. “The Dream of a Summer Day,” “TheDream of Akinosuke” that ends Kwaidan. Think of
the sketch “Sayonara!” that ends Glimpses, when hedescribes how the ship carrying him away from his
beloved Matsue turns the corner and in that instant
the here-and-now reality of his Matsue days suddenlytransforms irrevocably into the stuff of memory. As hisboat turns a corner, the present turns into the past,and suddenly what existed has been transformed into amemory, a mental photograph. He is fascinated bycrossing the boundary.
Think of “The Dream of a Summer Day,” where theblue of the sea merges with the blue of the sky and
Hearn has them become each other, where the present
and past, fact and fiction, weave in and out so
intricately that they too seem to turn into each other,and the hotel’s proprietress and Urashima Taro’s
princess become indistinguishable in Hearn’s mind.
Think of Hearn’s illustration of the head of
Elizabeth Bisland swimming at Grand Isle, where her
blowing long hair and the ripples of the sea she isimmersed in up to her head blend perfectly into eachother. The focal point of the illustration is not her face
but that nexus, the place where the wavelets of her hair
become indistinguishable from the wavelets of the sea;that is the place to which Hearn’s imagination
naturally gravitated and paused to reflect. The change
itself—the delicious moments when what was andwhat will be simply melt away into something that is atonce both and neither—that phenomenon is what
always stimulated his artistic imagination. Perhaps thisis one reason he loved Buddhism, where all things areseen as being always in a state of transition andtransformation. He called Japan the land ofimpermanence, an aspect of the country that surely

engaged his interest. If he had become a scientist, hewould probably have made an excellent chemist, which
is, after all, the science of change.
His example of open-mindedness is inspiring
indeed. But today, as we celebrate and try to illuminate
the open mind of Lafcadio Hearn, it might help us in
making a fair and balanced assessment of him toremember that his mind was not always pure inthought and not always as open as we might wish. If by
open minded we mean to include the complete
absence of all prejudice or discrimination, then we aremaking this most human of writers into a saint that henever was or wanted to be. In his writings we can findtraces of closed-mindedness that seem terribly out ofcharacter. Fortunately, however, these examples are rare
exceptions, and Hearn remains a man who continually
strove to keep his mind open to all peoples, cultures,and ways of thinking. Perhaps more importantly, hedared to care deeply about the weak, the marginalized,
the downtrodden, the misjudged, and the ignored. He
found beauty and inspiration where few others evendeigned to look. It is this spirit of open-mindedness
that we honor with this symposium.
In closing, let me add that just as Hearn himself
was a kind of living nexus where Greece, Ireland,
England, France, the US, and Japan all came together,so is this symposium: Hearn has brought all of us
together, to this spot, from Greece, Ireland,Martinique, the US, Japan, and other places. In a sense,
we ourselves comprise the symbolic strands of his
multiculturality. And if we have come to learnsomething new, to let ourselves be changed by what wehave seen and heard, and by the people we have met
and the ideas we have exchanged, then we ourselves are
the ghosts of his spirit of open-mindedness and openheartedness. Maybe this symposium has been an
example of, a microcosm of, the “symbiotic society”
that Bon mentioned in his opening speech.
Hearn once wrote, “I... an individual soul! Nay, I
am a population.... Countless times the concourse now
making me has been scattered, and mixed with otherscatterings.... Perhaps, after trillions of ages... the very
best of me may come together again” (“Dust,”
Gleanings). Although it has only been 110 years, I liketo think that, perhaps, through this international
symposium, somehow some of the best of him reallyhas come together again. Thank you.

Proceedings: International Symposium on “The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn: His Spirit from the West to the East”

63The Planning Committee
for the Memorial Events in Greece
to Commemorate the 110th Anniversary of
Lafcadio Hearn’s Deathhearn2014.yakumokai.org
www.facebook.com/hearn2014