HEARN, LAFCADIO

(1850–1904)

   Lafcadio Hearn (Japanese citizenship name Koizumi Yakumo) was an American newspaper correspondent and Japanese author. He was born in Greece and moved to Ohio in the late 1860s. He worked as a correspondent for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer but later moved to New Orleans. While there he also contributed many publications to national periodicals, such as Harper’s Weekly and Scribner’s Magazine. In 1890, Hearn moved to Japan on assignment and taught school in remote Matsue, Shimane Prefecture. There he married Koizumi Setsu (1868–1932) and became a naturalized Japanese citizen before moving to Kumamoto just over a year later, where he completed his most famous work, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, in 1894 (later translated into Japanese as Shirarezu Nihon no omokage). After a short stint in Kobe at a newspaper, he taught English literature at Tokyo University from 1896–1903, and there penned the books In Ghostly Japan (1899) and Kaidan (1904), both collections of Japanese ghost stories. He died of heart failure in Tokyo. His writings had an influence on Japanese writers Kawabata Yasunari and Mishima Yukio.

   See also FOREIGN AUTHORS WRITING IN JAPANESE; JAPONISME.