| Patrick Lafcadio Hearn Koizumi Yakumo (小泉八雲) |
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|---|---|
| Born | June 27, 1850 Lefkada, Greece |
| Died | 26 September 1904 (aged 54) Tokyo, Empire of Japan |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | Irish, Greek, Japanese |
| Alma mater | Ushaw College |
| Spouse(s) | Alethea ("Mattie") Foley Koizumi Setsu |
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (27 June 1850 – 26 September 1904), known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲), was an international writer, known best for his books about Japan, especially his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. In the United States, Hearn is also known for his writings about the city of New Orleans based on his 10-year stay in that city.
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Hearn was born in Lefkada (the origin of his middle name), one of the Greek Ionian Islands. He was the son of Sergeant Major Charles Bush Hearn (of County Offaly, Ireland) and Rosa Antoniou Kassimati, a Greek woman of noble Kytheran lineage through her father, Anthony Kassimati.[1] His father was stationed in Lefkada during the British occupation of the islands. Lafcadio was baptized Patricio Lefcadio Hearn in the Greek Orthodox Church. It is not known whether Hearn's parents were ever legally married, and the Irish Protestant relatives on his father's side considered him to have been born out of wedlock. This may, however, have been because they did not recognize the legitimacy of a Greek Orthodox marriage ceremony for a Protestant.[2]
Hearn relocated to Dublin, Ireland, at the age of two years, where he was brought up in the suburb of Rathmines. Other members of his family also had artistic interest. His father's brother Richard was at one time a well-known member of the Barbizon set of artists, although he did not become well known as a painter, possibly due to a lack of personal ambition. Young Hearn had a rather casual education, but in 1865 was attending the Roman Catholic Ushaw College, Durham. He was injured in a playground accident during his teens, causing loss of vision in his left eye.
The religious faith in which he was indoctrinated was soon lost, and at 19 he was sent to live in the United States, where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. For a time, he was impoverished. He eventually befriended the English printer and communalist Henry Watkin. With Watkin's help, Hearn did low-grade journalism work.
By the strength of his talent as a writer, Hearn soon obtained a job as a reporter for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, working for the newspaper from 1872 to 1875. Writing with creative freedom in one of Cincinnati's largest circulating newspapers, he became known for his lurid accounts of local murders, developing a reputation as the paper's premier sensational journalist, as well as the author of sensitive accounts of some of the disadvantaged people of Cincinnati. The Library of America selected one of these murder accounts, "Gibbeted," for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime, published in 2008.
Hearn continued to occupy himself with journalism and with observation and reading, and meanwhile his erratic, romantic, and rather morbid idiosyncrasies developed. While in Cincinnati, he married Alethea ("Mattie") Foley, a African-American woman, an illegal act at the time. When the scandal was discovered and publicized, he was dismissed from the Enquirer and went to work for the rival newspaper The Cincinnati Commercial. Hearn divorced in 1877.
In 1874 Hearn and the young Henry Farny, later a renowned painter of the American West, wrote, illustrated, and published a weekly journal of art, literature and satire they titled Ye Giglampz that was published for nine issues. (The Cincinnati Public Library reprinted a facsimile of all nine issues in 1983).
During the autumn of 1877, Hearn left Cincinnati for New Orleans, Louisiana, where he initially wrote dispatches on his discoveries in the "Gateway to the Tropics" for the Cincinnati Commercial.
He lived in New Orleans for nearly a decade, writing first for the newspaper Daily City Item and later for the Times Democrat. The vast number of his writings about New Orleans and its environs, many of which have not been collected, include the city's Creole population and distinctive cuisine, the French Opera, and Louisiana Voodoo. His writings for national publications, such as Harper's Weekly and Scribner's Magazine, helped create the popular reputation of New Orleans as a place with a distinct culture more akin to those of Europe and the Caribbean than to that of the rest of North America. His best-known Louisiana works are Gombo Zhèbes, Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs in Six Dialects (1885); La Cuisine Créole (1885), a collection of culinary recipes from leading chefs and noted Creole housewives who helped make New Orleans famous for its cuisine; and Chita: A Memory of Last Island, a novella based on the hurricane of 1856 first published in Harper's Monthly in 1888. He also published in Harper's Weekly the first known written article (1883) about Filipinos in the United States, the Manilamen or Tagalags, one of whose villages he had visited at Saint Malo, southeast of Lake Borgne in Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana.
Hearn was little known then, and even now he is little known for his writing about New Orleans, other than by local cultural devotees. However, more books have been written about him than any former resident of New Orleans other than Louis Armstrong.[3]
Hearn's writings for the New Orleans newspapers included impressionistic descriptions of places and characters and many stern, vigorous editorials denouncing political corruption, street crime, violence, intolerance, and the failures of public health and hygiene officials. Despite the fact that he is credited with "inventing" New Orleans as an exotic and mysterious place, his obituaries of the vodou leaders Marie Laveau and Doctor John Montenet are matter-of-fact and debunking. A selection of Hearn's writings were collected in S. Fredrick Starr's book Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, published by the University Press of Mississippi.[2]
Harper's sent Hearn to the West Indies as a correspondent in 1887. He spent two years in Martinique and produced two books: Two Years in the French West Indies and Youma, The Story of a West-Indian Slave, both in 1890.
In 1890, Hearn went to Japan with a commission as a newspaper correspondent, which was quickly terminated. It was in Japan, however, that he found a home and his greatest inspiration. Through the goodwill of Basil Hall Chamberlain, Hearn gained a teaching position during the summer of 1890 at the Shimane Prefectural Common Middle School and Normal School in Matsue, a town in western Japan on the coast of the Sea of Japan. The Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum and his old residence are still two of Matsue's most popular tourist attractions. During his fifteen-month stay in Matsue, Hearn married Koizumi Setsu, the daughter of a local samurai family, and became a naturalized Japanese, assuming the name Koizumi Yakumo.
During late 1891, Hearn obtained another teaching position in Kumamoto, Kyūshū, at the Fifth Higher Middle School, where he spent the next three years and completed his book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). In October 1894 he secured a journalism job with the English-language newspaper Kobe Chronicle, and in 1896, with some assistance from Chamberlain, he began teaching English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, a job he had until 1903. In 1904, he was a professor at Waseda University. On 26 September 1904, he died of heart failure at the age of 54 years. His grave is at the Zōshigaya Cemetery in Toshima, Tokyo.
In the late 19th century, Japan was still largely unknown and exotic to Westerners. However, with the introduction of Japanese aesthetics, particularly at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, Japanese styles became fashionable in Western countries. Consequently, Hearn became known to the world by his writings concerning Japan. In later years, some critics would accuse Hearn of exoticizing Japan, but as the man who offered the West some of its first descriptions of pre-industrial and Meiji Era Japan, his work has historical value.[4]
Admirers of Hearn's work have included Ben Hecht [5], John Erskine, and Malcolm Cowley. [6]
The Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi adapted four Hearn tales into his 1965 film, Kwaidan. Some of his stories have been adapted by Ping Chong into his puppet theatre, including the 1999 Kwaidan and the 2002 OBON: Tales of Moonlight and Rain.
Hearn's life and works were celebrated in The Dream of a Summer Day, a play that toured Ireland during April and May 2005, which was staged by the Storytellers Theatre Company and directed by Liam Halligan. It is a detailed dramatization of Hearn's life, with four of his ghost stories included.
Yone Noguchi is quoted as saying about Hearn, "His Greek temperament and French culture became frost-bitten as a flower in the North."[7]
There is also a cultural center named for Hearn at the University of Durham.
Hearn was a major translator of the short stories of Guy de Maupassant.[8]
In Ian Fleming's 1964 novel You Only Live Twice, James Bond retorts to his nemesis Blofeld's comment of "Have you ever heard the Japanese expression kirisute gomen?" with "Spare me the Lafcadio Hearn, Blofeld."