Lafcadio Hearn

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (27 June 1850 – 26 September 1904), known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲), born in Kythira island (Greece), but he was an international writer, known best for his books about Japan, especially his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. In the United States, Hearn is also known for his writings about the city of New Orleans based on his 10-year stay in that city.

In 1890, Hearn went to Japan with a commission as a newspaper correspondent, which was quickly terminated. It was in Japan, however, that he found a home and his greatest inspiration. Through the goodwill of Basil Hall Chamberlain, Hearn gained a teaching position during 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. The Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum and his old residence are still two of Matsue's most popular tourist attractions. During his fifteen-month stay in Matsue, Hearn married Koizumi Setsu, the daughter of a local samurai family, and became a naturalized Japanese, assuming the name Koizumi Yakumo.

During late 1891, Hearn obtained another teaching position in Kumamoto, Kyūshū, at the Fifth Higher Middle School, where he spent the next three years and completed his book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). In October 1894 he secured a journalism job with the English-language newspaper Kobe Chronicle, and in 1896, with some assistance from Chamberlain, he began teaching English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, a job he had until 1903. In 1904, he was a professor at Waseda University. On 26 September 1904, he died of heart failure at the age of 54 years. His grave is at the Zōshigaya Cemetery in Toshima, Tokyo.

In the late 19th century, Japan was still largely unknown and exotic to Westerners. However, with the introduction of Japanese aesthetics, particularly at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, Japanese styles became fashionable in Western countries. Consequently, Hearn became known to the world by his writings concerning Japan. In later years, some critics would accuse Hearn of exoticizing Japan, but because he offered the West some of its first descriptions of pre-industrial and Meiji Era Japan, his work has historical value.

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (1895), Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896), Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East (1897), The boy who drew cats (1897; Houghton Mifflin, Boston), Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), Japanese Fairy Tales (1898) and sequels In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), Japanese Lyrics (1900) - on haiku

A Japanese Miscellany (1901), Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs (1902), Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1903) (which was later made into the movie Kwaidan by Masaki Kobayashi), Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904; published just after his death), The Romance of the Milky Way and other studies and stories (1905; published posthumously),Japan's Religions: Shinto and Buddhism (no date)