American Writings
By Lafcadio Hearn
(Library of America, 848 pp., $40)
In 1854, Commodore Perry steamed into the port of Yokohama and opened Japan to international trade. The subsequent era of the Meiji Restoration, which lasted until 1912, saw Japan begin slowly to transform itself from an insular, somewhat feudal society into a modern nation. Western envoys sent back dispatches about this mysterious country, whose traditions aroused fascination and suspicion in equal quantities. In the West, Japanese art and culture became all the rage, a vogue that reached its apotheosis in 1885, when Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado became a huge hit on the London stage.
The few from Japan who travelled abroad sent back their own reports about Western traditions and ideas. Chief among them was the writer Natsume Soseki, who journeyed to Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, but found it difficult to understand these tall, gangly strangers. Soseki’s stay in London was miserable. Upon returning to Japan in 1903, he was offered a position at Tokyo University. He was both pleased and perplexed: pleased, because it was a distinguished professorship which recognized his achievements as a scholar and teacher; perplexed, because the writer he was replacing, Lafcadio Hearn, was held in high regard as the chief reporter to the West of all things Japanese. Hearn was married to a local woman, and he was the father of four children born in Japan. The non-renewal of his contract was as much a shock to Tokyo University’s outraged students and faculty as it was to Hearn, who never really recovered from the blow. A little over a year later, the fifty-four-year-old author died in Japan, a somewhat broken man.
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 on the Greek Ionian island of Lefkas to a Greek mother, Rosa Cassimati, and an Anglo-Irish army doctor, Charles Hearn. When he was two the infant was sent to Ireland with his mother, and they took up residence in Dublin with a great-aunt, Sarah Brenane. Two years later his increasingly unstable mother left Ireland for Greece, and two years after that his parents divorced. After his mother’s departure, Hearn never again laid eyes on her, and eventually she died in a mental asylum on Corfu. Hearn was now the ward of his sternly religious great-aunt, and his relationship with his peripatetic father was, in all senses of the word, distant.
A small, shy boy, Hearn attended a series of rigorously disciplined Catholic boarding schools in Ireland and England, where his experiences were uniformly miserable. His unhappiness was compounded by a playground accident that resulted in the loss of sight in his left eye when he was sixteen. Soon after, Hearn’s estranged father died, and a year later his great-aunt declared bankruptcy. The publicly shamed boy was forced to withdraw from school. No longer able to contemplate attending university, young Paddy Hearn lived for a short while in great poverty in Dickensian London before, at the age of nineteen, boarding a ship bound for the United States.
After some months as a semi-destitute waiter and dishwasher in New York, Hearn set out for Cincinnati, hoping to find a family contact in the great riverfront city. Instead he happened upon work in a printing shop that was run by an Englishman named Henry Watkin, who offered Hearn a place to sleep in exchange for keeping the shop clean and running errands. Watkin was a great raconteur, and a lover of Eastern philosophy and the generally bizarre, and he discovered in Hearn a young man whose eccentric tastes matched his own.
Hearn’s profoundly unhappy memories of school, and then London’s filthy underworld, had led the young immigrant to cultivate a sense of himself as an outsider. He adopted a new and somewhat Gothically inspired identity in which he imagined himself to be a maverick whose tastes were rooted in the culture, folklore, and mysticism of the past, as opposed to the crass materialism of the contemporary world. He found inspiration in the work of Edgar Allan Poe; but his true spur to self-definition was not literature, it was his unhappy life experience. Society never seemed to recognize this small, dark, displaced boy, and if the world would not recognize him, then he saw no reason why he should recognize it.
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