Writer and translator, born on the island of Lefkas, Greece. He was raised in Ireland, England, and France, moved to the USA in 1869, settled first in Cincinnati, then in New Orleans as a journalist and French translator. In 1890 Harpers' New Monthly Magazine sent him to Japan to write a series of articles. He stayed there for the rest of his life, becoming a teacher, marrying a Japanese woman, Koizumi Setsuko (1891), and taking citizenship there as Koizumi Yakumo. He published a series of books that offered the West its first sympathetic view of Japanese culture, notably Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation (1904).
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (June 27, 1850 - September 26, 1904), also known as Koizumi Yakumo (小泉八雲) after gaining Japanese citizenship, was an author, best known for his books about Japan.
Biography
Early life
Hearn was born in Lefkada (the origin of his middle name), one of the Greek Ionian Islands. He was the son of Surgeon-major Charles Hearn, of King's County, Ireland, and Rosa Antonia Kassimati, who had been born on Kythera, another of those Islands.
Lafcadio Hearn moved to Dublin, Ireland at the age of 6. Artistic and rather bohemian tastes were in Lafcadio Hearn's blood. With Watkin's help, Hearn picked up a living in the lower grades of newspaper work.
Through the strength of his talent as a writer, Hearn quickly advanced through the newspaper ranks and became a reporter for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, working for the paper from 1872 to 1875.
In 1874 Hearn and the young Henry Farny, later a reknowned painter of the American West, wrote, illustrated and published a weekly journal of art, literature and satire they titled "Ye Giglampz" which ran for 9 issues.
In the autumn of 1877, Hearn left Cincinnati for New Orleans, where he initially wrote dispatches on his discoveries in the "Gateway to the Tropics" for the Cincinnati Commercial.
Harper's sent Hearn to the West Indies as a correspondent in 1889.
Later life in Japan
In 1890 Lafcadio Hearn went to Japan with a commission as a newspaper correspondent, which was quickly broken off. It was in Japan, however, that Hearn found his home and his greatest inspiration. Through the goodwill of Basil Hall Chamberlain, Hearn gained a teaching position in 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. Most Japanese identify Hearn with Matsue, as it was here that his image of Japan was molded. Today, The Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum (小泉八雲記念館) and Lafcadio Hearn's Old Residence (小泉八雲旧居) are still two of Matsue's most popular tourist attractions. During his 15 month stay, Hearn married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a local samurai family, and became a naturalized Japanese, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo.
In late 1891, Hearn took another teaching position in Kumamoto, Kyushu, at the Fifth Higher Middle School, where he spent the next three years and completed his book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). With the introduction of Japanese aesthetics, however, particularly at the Paris World's Fair in 1900, the West had an insatiable appetite for exotic Japan, and Hearn became known to the world through the depth, originality, sincerity and charm of his writings. In later years, some critics would accuse Hearn of exoticizing Japan, but as the man who offered the West some of its first glimpses into pre-industrial and Meiji Era Japan, his work still offers valuable insight today.
Legacy
While Lafcadio Hearn is no longer well-known in the West, and is even falling out of common knowledge in Japan, he still has a small, fairly devoted fanbase, and his influence on Western knowledge of Japan (though most cannot put his name to it) cannot be denied.
Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi adapted four Hearn tales into his 1965 film, Kwaidan.
Several Hearn stories have been adapted by Ping Chong into his trademark puppet theatre, included the 1999 Kwaidan and the 2002 OBON: Tales of Moonlight and Rain. It was a detailed dramatisation of Hearn's life, with four of his ghost stories woven in.
Yone Noguchi is quoted as saying about Hearn, "His Greek temperament and French culture became frost-bitten as a flower in the North."
There is also a Cultural Centre named for Hearn in the University of Durham.
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