Lafcadio Hearn's Japan

Lafcadio Hearn or Yakuma Kiozumi, the name he took as a Japanese citizen, was an impressionist and converted to Buddhism. He was living in Japan for 15 years and deeply involved in the culture. He married into a Japanese local samurai family named Setsuko and could experience country life and as well city life in many facets. He was humble and knew that he never would understand the Japanese culture, but he wanted to absorb all the peculiar things and report them in a living writing to the English-speaking community worldwide. He had to make his living with teaching and mainly with writing as a journalist for a newspaper in Kobe.

The Daibutsuden (Big Buddha Hall) at Todaiji's main hall in Nara

His stories and revelations are immerging us into the alien culture. We learn the Japanese respect the people and the nature. They feel the divine in the natural objects and appreciate the living beings. Superstitions and Buddhist customs are often very close together The culture has deep roots in the past, in the myths, in the tradition of the ancestors. The past is always at the present. For us as non-Japanese it is difficult to reach the inside of the human thinking and feeling of a Japanese human being. Understanding is a long process and will never be completed. The limit is the language which is the key for understanding to follow the hermeneutical process.

Small jizo statues at famous Daitokuji Temple in Kyoto, Japan

Hearn could not speak or read Japanese. He was a beginner in that matter, but he was asking for the meaning of the words and gave not up until he achieved the true insights. From this working with the people, he could write the stories. For example, he describes the hair dress of the Japanese ladies and discovers many superstitions and myths about the coiffure. Hairs can transform the shape and evolved into vipers showing the relationship between a wife and the concubines who are living under one roof.

The book opens the world of the Japanese culture. The writing was done more than 100 years ago, nevertheless the narratives are still valid. Natural places like around Matsue where Hearn was living for the first years in Japan, were described very romantic. In the writing a strong reverence for the nature is palpable. Maybe today, it is difficult to find such natural remained places but the connection between the human being and his surrounding nature is still the same. The Japanese love for a landscape garden is shown in the modelling of a charming and living garden in minuscule forms in the cities where the private space is very tiny.

Donald Richie guides us through the selected writings by adding many biographical background information to understand the motivation of the writer and his necessity of the telling the stories. He states “He reported was he saw. It is for this reason that we read him now”. Richie is gifted more than any other foreign writer living in Japan to collect the most essential writings about Japanese people and its country by Lafcadio Hearn.