Hearn was born in 1850 on the Mediterranean isle Leucadia to a Greek mother and an Irish father. His parents' marriage was miserable and they quickly separated, sending their son to be raised by a widowed aunt in Dublin. The aunt, however, was soon swindled out of her fortune by an unscrupulous cousin. Set adrift at a tender age, Lafcadio was shipped first to London and then to Cincinnati with barely a dollar in his pocket. After a period of homelessness, he became a newspaper reporter, journeying then to New Orleans, to the West Indies, and ultimately to Japan.
By the time Lafcadio reached Japan, he was aching for a home. Thus, like his close friend and contemporary, Basil Hall Chamberlain, Hearn was not content to go for his scheduled six weeks and scribble a few articles. As he wrote later, the exoticism of Japan captivated him with "the same kind of madness as the first love of a boy." It led him to quit Harper's, cancel his return journey to New York, and adopt Japanese citizenship and a Japanese name. He married the well-to-do daughter of a samurai, he thought seriously of converting to Buddhism, and he settled down to all extents and purposes to lead a Japanese life. Strolling about his old samurai house in a dragon-print yukata, smoking slowly an old temple pipe, Lafcadio (now Koizumi Yakumo) composed the searching essays on Japanese culture and society which were to fill a dozen volumes in the 1890s.
Yet how real was the Japan about which Lafcadio Hearn wrote? Formerly a translator of exotic, dreamy Eastern stories by Gautier and Flaubert when he lived in New Orleans, Hearn saw travel as a living fantasy. His highly romanticized version of Izumo inevitably flattered Japan. Many of his essays, but particularly those which deal with religion and the supernatural, thus open up theoretical questions along the lines of Chris Bongie's "Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siecle": Hearn's exoticism was most likely but a discursive practice intent on recovering "elsewhere" values "lost" within the modernization of Western society. His writing registers the exotic as a space of absence, a dream already given over to the past, if not to another world (of the dead) entirely. What I find particularly revealing are Lafcadio's essays on "spectral travellers," a Japanese genre he often writes of, which begins with a young traveller lost in the dark, who is guided by a lovely serving girl who is really a ghost. Inevitably, the serving girl brings him not home but to her long-dead mistress' house, where the traveller is offered luxurious hospitality and falls deeply in love with the high-born maiden. The princess extols him to keep his visits a secret and he returns every night to make love to her. In the end, however, the traveller is forced into telling of his visits, the spell is broken, the princess vanishes, and he is left with but an ink-stone or an antique parchment.
In Lafcadio Hearn's papers in Matsue, Japan, I found several more essays on this genre, in addition to the familiar ones already published, which I propose presenting at this conference. I think they offer a highly symbolic portrait of what travel meant to Lafcadio: its dreaminess, its beauty and intangibility, which, when he tried to talk about it, broke the spell. He was undoubtedly a late romantic writer, akin to Tennyson and Yeats in his sensibilities.
Following one of Lafcadio's most provocative essays in this "spectral travellers" genre, I would like to call my paper, "The Dream of Akinosuke: Lafcadio Hearn's Ghostly Journeys in Japan." Further, I believe the research I did in Lafcadio Hearn's archives in Japan would be of use to anyone studying images of the Far East in Western writing of the nineteenth century. Although he is perhaps more eccentric than most, Lafcadio Hearn wrote decades before Claude Levi-Strauss mourned that, "voyages, magic caskets of possibility, you will no longer hand down your treasures intact." The conclusions Hearn made about the nature of travel and fantasy are profoundly intriguing, particularly from a late romantic perspective.
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