The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 9 | Issue 15 | Number 3 | Article ID 3513 | Apr 11, 2011

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The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn　　ラフカディオ・ハーンの夢

Roger Pulvers

The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn

Roger Pulvers

Roger Pulvers’ novel The Dream of LafcadioHearn brings to life the encounter of the Greek-Irish expatriate journalist-writer with Japan andthe Japanese. Arriving in Japan in 1890 aftertwenty years in the United States, PatrickLafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) (小泉八雲)’sfourteen-year immersion in Japanese lifeprovided the basis for a series of books thatestablished him as the most influentialinterpreter of Japan in the West. But whatJapan? The novel brings out the clash betweenHearn’s idealized vision of a society rooted inancient lore of the grotesque, the macabre andthe quaint, and the thrust of industrializationand war that was transforming a rising imperialpower. Drawing on his experience of immersionin Japanese literary, theatrical and filmic lifefor much of the last forty years, Pulvers limnsthe extraordinary life and times of LafcadioHearn. The following introduces readers toHearn’s biography and an excerpt of the novel. Mark Selden

The following excerpt from the introduction toThe Dream of Lafcadio Hearn deals withHearn’s life. A selection from the novel follows.

He came to Japan at a time when the Japanesewere eagerly embracing the West in all itsindustrial and imperialistic trappings (althoughrejecting its monotheistic religion). This givesrise to the essential paradox of Lafcadio Hearn:He became the interpreter of a Japanese soulthat the Japanese themselves were loath toexpose or recognize until, once safelymodernized, they could take it up again and

rediscover him as the emperor of their bruisednostalgia.

Lafcadio Hearn was born on June 27, 1850 onthe Greek island of Lefkas, one of the IonianIslands that were, from 1815 until 1864,occupied by the British Imperial ArmyProtectorate Forces. His father, Charles BushHearn, a staff surgeon in the British Army, wasstationed temporarily on the island. Hearn’smother was Rosa Kassimati, originally ofKythera. Hearn’s elder brother, George, died atage one, not two months after Hearn’s birth;and with Charles off at sea, the trauma forRosa must have been considerable. The Hearnfamily of Dublin were well-to-do ProtestantIrish, and it was to that city that Lafcadio wastaken by his mother in 1852, when he was twoyears old.

Charles was soon dispatched to the WestIndies, then later to the Crimea; and the coupleeventually divorced . . . or, more precisely, themarriage was annulled on the grounds thatRosa had not signed the marriage certificate.Being functionally illiterate, needless to say,she hadn’t been able to. It is clear fromrecollections of Hearn’s relatives in Dublin thatRosa suffered from rather severe depression.One can imagine this woman, a native ofLefkas, the “Jewel of the Ionian Islands,”latitude 38 degrees, accustomed to warm sunnyskies, thrust into the gloomy and dampatmosphere of Dublin, located a full 15 degreesnorth.

Ireland was just emerging, when she arrivedthere, from the Great Famine. Though thecountry had lost approximately one-quarter ofits population through death and emigration,

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the population of Dublin had actually increasedduring the famine years of 1845–1852. Rosa,whose command of English was apparentlyminimal, must have suffered greatly. Shereturned to Greece pregnant, giving birth toanother boy, James, in her home country inAugust 1854. Lafcadio never saw her again andnever met his brother. (James, who emigratedto the United States in 1871, just two yearsafter his elder brother, made an attempt tomeet up with him, but the latter refused to seehim.)

With no clear recollection of his mother andonly fragments of memory of his father, whovisited him in Dublin when he was little,Lafcadio was brought up by his great-auntSarah Brenane. She was a fervent convert toCatholicism, living in Rathmines,then and nowa fashionable district of Dublin. She sent himoff to a Catholic school in France, though it isunclear where exactly in France this was, andin 1863 to Ushaw College (also called St.Cuthbert’s College), a Roman Catholic school inCounty Durham, northeast England, where heremained until he was seventeen. It was therethat Hearn lost his sight in one eye, apparentlyin a game called “Giant’s Stride,” in which astick is swung on a rope around a pole.Whether this was a true accident, one cannotknow. It was also at school in England thatHearn started to build his muscles, a defenseagainst the isolation and estrangement heincreasingly felt. Hearn’s mistrust of thechurch and disdain for missionaries that wereto become so blatant in Japan no doubt hadtheir origins here and at his Catholic school inFrance.

At school in England, where he was deeplyunhappy, he endured, in addition to the austerea n d d o c t r i n a i r e t r a i n i n g b y s t e r nschoolmasters, the most conventional bullyingby his peers. That “Paddy” (as Irish males werewont to be called by the English) took refuge intwo things that would later stand him in goodstead was understandable, those two things

being his physical prowess and his refractiveimagination. As an adult, he stood just 160 cmhigh, but his well-developed muscles, timidity’sarmor, protected him. He was painfullyintroverted, and the deforming loss of sight inone eye only exacerbated his shyness. Inparticular, he came to feel that no woman of hisown kind would look favorably on him, with hisexophthalmic stare and his gloomy perceptionof the twisted realities of human nature.

After his great-aunt fell on hard times, Hearnwas forced to leave school and travel toLondon, where he lived for a time with a maidwho had once worked in the Dublin household.He detested London with a passion all his life,having experienced there only extremeindigence. Then, when he was nineteen, camethe opportunity to go to America. He was sentaway, actually fobbed off. By now his great-aunt was virtually destitute and could no longercope with the burden of looking after her ward.She passed away two years later, in 1871.

Hearn set foot on Japanese soil for the firsttime at Yokohama on April 4, 1890. It is fair tosay that he felt at home from the beginning.

Unlike virtually all other visitors to Japan fromthe West, he did not see himself as a preachingrepresentative of a superior culture. He was inJapan to absorb its culture, not to sermonize hisown. He threw himself into his new exoticgarden with a genuine sense of wonder anddiscovery, setting out a patch for himself thatother Westerners had little interest in, and thencultivating it with an intense passion.

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He gravitated naturally, given his predilections,to the esoteric and mystical, introducing themas exemplary and representative. And as heobserved, examined and wrote, he realized thathe had finally found an identity for himself:Lafcadio Hearn—Chief Recorder of theVanishing Japan.

As such, Hearn established a pattern of writingabout Japan that lasted a century. A host ofWestern writers on the life of the Japanesecontinued in the Hearnian tradition, bewailingto their readers, and to any Japanese peoplewho would listen, the tragic loss of all thingsgood, quaint, mysterious, odd, macabre and“Japanese.”

Thanks to the good offices of Prof. Basil HallChamberlain of Tokyo Imperial University (nowthe University of Tokyo), who was to help himget a position some six years later in Tokyo aswell, Hearn landed a job teaching English at amiddle school in the town of Matsue, arrivingthere for the autumn term that began inSeptember 1890. Though he spent only about ayear there as a teacher, he has been associatedwith this town on the Sea of Japan coast eversince. In a way this makes sense, for it was inMatsue that he first delved into those areas ofreligious practice, provincial custom andfolklore that were to form the vantage points ofhis outlook on Japan.

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With Koizumi Setsu

His view of Japan was set in its mold there,changing in the future only in the variety of itsglazes. In Matsue he cast himself as a collectorof miscellany, the same kind of transcriber oflocal mentalities that he had been in America.He was drawn to everything that the Japanesewere tossing away, countless bits ofinformation on cultural mores and religiousritual, from the gestures of Bon dances,Buddhist festivals, and pipe stems for malesand females to the number of flickers made byan excited Japanese firefly. He was interestedin ceremonial food, dress, poetry, music, thegeisha, philosophy, flora and fauna, suicide, theJapanese smile, the Japanese tear, the Japanesesigh. Name a field of study of traditional art orlife and Lafcadio Hearn was intrigued by it,

swept away by it. He is the founding father ofthe school of Japanese uniqueness, the fountainthat provides the spiritual and estheticnourishment, flowing whenever turned on, thatJapanese people required to convincethemselves that they were more than the sumof their borrowed and mechanical lytransformed parts.

FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM “THEDREAM OF LAFCADIO HEARN.” In this part,Hearn has gone to Osaka in search of Yone,whom he had met some years earlier inMatsue….

Some time later, I was walking along anunpaved side road in Osaka, in a district thatthe Americans would call the "back slums." Ipassed a ramshackle building with a woman inragged Occidental dress standing outside. Above the building's door was a red sign inpeeling paint that read ... GLAND HOTEL.

I soon arrived at a nearby two-storey houseafter asking an old woman in the area the way. The house itself was an old one, but, judgingfrom the shine of paint, the front window hadobviously been covered in recent months withnarrow crimson slats. I knocked twice on thefront door and entered. The darkness insidewas nearly total, and my eye could discern onlythe vague outline of a figure halfway along thehall.

"What do you want?" said the figure, awoman's.

"Um, excuse me. I am sorry, but I am lookingfor a woman."

"Nothing to be sorry about. If you had eyesyou'd see them in front of you."

With my eye slightly more accustomed to thedarkness I could see that there were five or sixwomen sitting in a circle in a small tatami-mat

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room near the entryway.

"Um, no, I am sorry," I repeated. "I am lookingfor a ... particular woman."

The figure's face gradually appeared in ever-increasing grey detail, before me a middle-agedand heavily made-up woman. She led me up aflight of stairs and along a corridor. Sheopened a door, releasing into the hall a rush ofhorridly foul air.

"In there," she said. "And stop wincing."

In the room there were about two dozen younggirls, all fast asleep, large fetuses, theirrounded sides neatly pushed against each otherlike birds in a poulterer's window. I gave whatmust have seemed to the woman a helplesslook, taking from my pocket a one-yen note andhanding it to her.

"All right, just a minute, stay here," she said,entering the room.

I watched as she stepped effortlessly over thebodies. She was now crouched in a corner,shaking the shoulders of one of the girls. Thegirl woke up abruptly and turned her facetoward me. It was, for certain, Yone, Akira'slittle sister. She must have been 20 by then,but she looked much older. I squinted my eyeto see her more clearly and moved to one sidein the doorway. The only light in the roomcame from the hallway.

I took Yone away from the house. Just as wereached a paved street, two soldiers in uniformturned a corner and came toward us. One ofthem spat at our feet. We had been walkingwithout saying a word to each other. I wasunable to speak. The foul odor of the room hadremained in my nostrils. Yone was so sickly-looking and pale, I thought that she would faintaway at the first exposure to light. It was shewho broke the silence in a voice barely above awhisper.

"You are very sweet," she said, smiling at me.

I was so moved by these words that I could onlystare at her, my stubborn Cyclops eye awash,held tightly in its bag of hardened skin. I feltcertain that this eye would burst its socket, flyoff as if catapulted by rejecting muscle. Suddenly my head pounded with a severe pain,causing my eye to bulge even further from itslids.

"I ... I ... I have ... I am now ... a Japanese," Ifinally managed to eke out.

She did not seem to understand this. Yet it didnot affect the smile on her lips. I suppose thatfrom our few encounters in Matsue, at thetemple and the hospital, she had resignedherself to puzzlement over my personality. Ilike that about the Japanese. They neverrequire explanations for those things whichpeople cannot fathom. Caucasians, on theother hand, go from explanation to explanation,embracing theories until a newer one seemsmore tenable than the last. We condemn thepast and are born once again into a newpresent, never realizing that all that wentbefore is as much an integral part of the newself as ever. The Japanese attach trait to trait,the total always being accepted into thepresent.

I pulled Yone's hand sharply, and she lurchedforward. This gesture alone instantly cured myheadache and I smiled her smile back to her. Iled her along the street as fast as she could go,with passers-by unable to ignore us or hidetheir most disapproving expressions. Therewas only one part of the city of Osaka that Iknew from my studies, the place where thewarehouses and wholesale dealers of clothwere located. We came to a likely building inthat area ... a long barrack-like structure withan elegant white facade and wide grey slatsover the windows ... and entered the open door.

Inside was a bustle of activity such as I hadnever before seen in my life in any country.

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Hundreds of men of all ages were engaged ininspecting, rolling and carrying bolts of cloth orsimply running about. Thousands of rolls offabric of every color in man's imagination werestacked along the walls of the cavernous space. Some men, no doubt the accountants andmanagers, sat in tatami-matted areas set off bylittle wooden screens. Those that I could seewere rapidly fingering the beads of theirabacuses. A few elegantly-dressed customerssat on the edge of the raised tatami-mat floor,as one man after another brought them rolls ofsilk to examine.

As Yone and I entered, one of the accountantsor managers hollered "Welcome, welcome" tous, prompting virtually all of the hundreds ofmen in the warehouse to repeat the greeting inunison. Yone flushed a bright red. I put myhand against her cheek.

I asked to be shown their most delicate andlovely fabric fit for a girl of 20. One of themanagers snapped orders in the direction ofsome young salesmen.

"Yes, sir, as you say, sir," replied the salesmen,again in unison, running off toward one of thewalls. They returned with a single bolt of cloth. Yone watched as the cloth was unrolled beforeher. I did not take my eye off of her. Thefabric was gold, with a picture in silver andorange thread of sparrows on a twisted branchadorned in plum blossom buds.

"Do you like this one?" I asked her.

She merely nodded her head once, gazing off toone side, as if afraid to look me in the eye.

"I'll take this one. Have a kimono made for herand sent to her address."

"Thank you for your kindness, sir," said themanager loudly.

Hearing the words "thank you," every singleman in that warehouse stopped what he was

doing, turned toward Yone and me andshouted, "Thank you very much!"

After taking Yone to supper at a restaurant, Idelivered her back to where she was staying. We stood at the door, once again unable tospeak. She bowed to me and I bowed back.

"Oh, I forgot to ask you," I said. "How is Akira,your brother?"

Yone opened the door, speaking with her handresting on the doorknob.

"I do not know. I do not hear from himanymore."

I stood at the closed door for some minutes,noticing for the first time that it was night. Alittle boy came running down the dirt road. After he had passed me by, without turningaround, he screamed, "Foreigner! Foreigner!"

I did not recall the train trip back to Kobe, northe reason why that memory, too, has eludedme. It must be because I detest trains sothoroughly.

Roger Pulvers is an American-born Australianauthor, playwright, theatre director andtranslator living in Japan. He has published 40books in Japanese and English and, in 2008,was the recipient of the Miyazawa Kenji Prize.In 2009 he was awarded Best Script Prize atthe Teheran International Film Festival for“Ashita e no Yuigon.” He is the translator ofKenji Miyazawa, Strong in the Rain: SelectedPoems. The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn is hismost recent book.He will speak in London onOctober 24, sponsored by The Japan Society, on"The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn: How did thisGreek-Irishman conquer Japan?"

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Recommended citation: Roger Pulvers, The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn, The Asia-PacificJournal Vol 9, Issue 15 No 3, April 11, 2011.

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Click on the cover to order.