Lafcadio Hearn

 

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, By Lafcadio Hearn.

“Known primarily as an early interpreter of Japanese culture and customs, the famous writer Lafcadio Hearn also wrote ghost stories—"delicate, transparent, ghostly sketches"—about his adopted land. Many of the stories found in Kwaidan, "stories and studies of strange things," are based on Japanese tales told long ago to him by his wife; others possibly have a Chinese origin. All have been re-colored and reshaped by Hearn's inimitable hand. In this collection of unforgettably haunting stories, Hearn brings together "the meeting of three ways"—the austere dreams of India, the subtle beauty of Japan and the relentless science of the Western world.” – Amazon. “Kwaidan ("ghost story"), is a book by Lafcadio Hearn that features several Japanese ghost stories and a brief non-fiction study on insects. It was later used as the basis for a movie called Kwaidan by Masaki Kobayashi in 1964.” – Wikipedia. I resort to these quotes for the facts because it is hard to pin down the eerie effect of this book.

Ranking: Essential.

File Code: Ghost Stories. Softcover.

Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn, by Jonathan Colt.

“In 1869 a half-blind Greek-Irish teenager named Lafcadio Hearn came to Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the age of twenty-four became the city's most famous newspaper reporter on the strength of his lurid crime stories and bizarre explorations of the city's dark underside. Fired in 1877 for his brief marriage to a black woman, he wandered from New Orleans to New York to the Caribbean before finally settling in Japan where, in a unique act of self-transformation, he became a Japanese patriot and patriarch. Full of excerpts from Hearn's writing, Jonathan Cott's insightful portrayal of an extraordinary life recovers for a Western audience a unique figure of the nineteenth century.” – Amazon. I don’t know what started my recent (by which I mean in the present century) deep interest in Hearn; I only know that I read “The Boy Who Drew Cats” at least in middle school, and enjoyed the movie “Kwaidan” for years. Perhaps it was my growing interest in Japanese culture (thanks to anime), and he was a sort of gateway, an early translator of the East to the West. Interest in the tales turned into an interest in the teller, and his life story is as compelling as any he ever wrote.

Ranking: Essential.

File Code: Biography. Softcover.

Oriental Stories, by Lafcadio Hearn.

A Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural Edition. Contains the stories from ‘Kwaidan’, ‘In Ghostly Japan’, and ‘Some Chinese Ghosts’. Makes my copy of ‘Kwaidan’ obsolete, except for the parts about insects, which aren’t included here.

Ranking: Essential.

File Code: Supernatural Stories. Anthology. Softcover.

American Writings, by Lafcadio Hearn.

A Library of America Edition. “A translator of Flaubert and Gautier, Lafcadio Hearn was the master of a gaudy and sometimes self-consciously decadent literary style, but he was also a tough-minded and keenly observant reporter, with an eye for the offbeat, the sensual, and occasionally the gruesome. The writings of his American years collected in this Library of America volume—on subjects as wide ranging as comparative folklore, the history of musical instruments, French literary avant-gardes, and New Orleans voodoo—reveal an omnivorous curiosity and an always eclectic sensibility.” – Google Books. My interest in the writings in this book go in and out; perhaps I find his journalism and letters more compelling than his fictions in this volume. Just a taste of the supernatural here, but plenty of the macabre.

Ranking: Essential.

File Code: Collected Writings for a Period of the Author’s Life. Hardback.

The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Edited by Henry Goodman.

A whopping selection in a big fat block of a book which makes it hard to hold, and therefore access as a browser, which by its nature it ought to be. Still, it covers pretty much every aspect and phase of Hearn’s writing, and that is a great good thing. Hearn is one of those writers that I urge everyone to read, sometimes forgetting how hard it was for me to find the doorway in, so aware am I of the rewards of the effort.

Ranking: Essential.

File Code: Selected Writings. Softcover.