Hearn's Japan

“Finally the treatment these true classics deserve: thoroughly re-edited and modernized texts, with notes, glossary, index…and a beautiful layout to boot.”

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), the son of an Irish Surgeon-Major and a Greek woman of noble lineage, who settled in Japan after a checkered career in journalism in Cincinnati and New Orleans, is still considered by many the most astute interpreter of the country and its people.

In the third part of this series, we join Hearn in Kumamoto after he has taken up at the Daigo Koto Gakko, Kumamoto’s senior high school. We are introduced to his new students who reveal their ambiguous attitude to Western ideas about honor, love, and duty. And we join him again on his various excursions around Meiji Japan: to nearby Hakata, where he visits the local temple, with its large Buddha head surrounded by thousands of bronze mirrors; to the National Exhibition at Kyoto to witness the commotion around a painted nude, and to the battle cruiser Matsushima at anchor off Kobe, freshly arrived from her hard-won victory in the Battle of the Yalu River (1894), its deck still stained with the blood of war.

Led, introduced, and informed by guides and friends, with each experience, Hearn’s love for the Japanese grows, his understanding for their ways deepens. And it is this pairing of love and insight that make his Writings From a Mystical Country so compelling and enchanting—even now, more than a century after his death.