The New Yorker - USA (2019-09-16)

62 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER16, 2019

hospitable environment of New Or­
leans. He continued writing, in more
respectable veins (editorials, short fic­
tion, translations from the French), and
he took a particular interest in Creole
cuisine, writing a book about it and
opening a restaurant in which every­
thing on the menu cost five cents. As
his authority and reputation grew, his
writing took on a certain quality of cul­
tural ownership: never hav­
ing had a real home, he
compulsively, and rather
lovingly, documented the
domestic customs of wher­
ever he was living at the
time. In New Orleans, in
addition to his culinary re­
search, he wrote sketches
about such topics as “The
Creole Character.” A two­
year stay in Martinique re­
sulted, a year later, in “Two Years in the
French West Indies,” a travelogue­cum­
cultural­ history that, tragically, became
definitive when, twelve years later, Saint­
Pierre, the city where he had lived and
written, was destroyed by a volcanic
eruption. He was building a home for
himself, a permanence, out of words;
without a culture of his own, he was
desperate to attach himself to others’.
At age thirty­nine, Hearn travelled
on a magazine assignment to Japan, and
never came back. At a moment when
that country, under Emperor Meiji, was
weathering the shock and upheaval of
forced economic modernization, Hearn
fell deeply in love with the nation’s past.
He wrote fourteen books on all man­
ner of Japanese subjects but was espe­
cially infatuated with the customs and
culture preserved in Japanese folktales—
particularly the ghost­story genre known
as kaidan. He married into a samurai
family and eventually, in order to be­
come a Japanese citizen, was adopted
by the family and took its name, be­
coming known thereafter as Koizumi
Yakumo. (One of the consequences of
his new citizenship was that the Univer­
sity of Tokyo, where he lectured, reduced
his salary, in line with its policy of pay­
ing nationals less than it paid foreign­
ers.) He died in 1904, and, by the time
his “Japanese tales” were translated into
Japanese, in the nineteen­twenties, the
country’s transformation was so com­
plete that Hearn was hailed as a kind

of guardian of tradition; his kaidan col­

lections are still part of the curriculum

in many Japanese schools.

O

ne hesitates to say that Hearn is

now being “rediscovered” by an

English­language readership, because

his output was so voluminous and so

varied that some corner of it seems to

resurface every decade or so. His haiku

and tanka translations in­

fluenced Pound, Rexroth,

and others. His “La Cuisine

Creole”—the first cook­

book of its kind—is his­

torically invaluable. There

are Hearn museums virtu­

ally everywhere he lived in

Japan, and in 2015 the Laf­

cadio Hearn Japanese Gar­

dens were dedicated, in the

seaside town of Tramore,

Ireland, near the spot where young Hearn

said goodbye to his father for the last time.

But this season there is a rare con­

fluence of books by or about him: Pen­

guin Classics has put together a Hearn

collection called “Japanese Ghost Sto­

ries”; Princeton University Press has just

issued a similar compendium called

“Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn,”

with a passionate introduction by An­

drei Codrescu; and the latest work from

the esteemed Vietnamese­American

novelist Monique Truong, “The Sweet­

est Fruits” (Viking), is a fictional recon­

struction of Hearn’s picaresque life told

in the voices of the three women—his

two wives and his mother—whose time

with him proved most formative.

What we make of Hearn now depends

on how we frame him in the volatility

of our own historical moment. Close

one eye and he is a unique tragic hero, a

victim and an outcast, who consistently

championed nondominant cultures and

tried to bind his own deep psychologi­

cal wounds by celebrating in prose the

world beyond the white, European so­

ciety that had tortured and rejected him.

Close the other eye and he is just another

nineteenth­century white man who ap­

pointed himself an expert on places and

cultures in which he was a tourist, mak­

ing a career out of depicting or inter­

preting these cultures as if they were his

to represent or to profit from. The very

premise of Truong’s novel makes a sa­

lient contemporary point: Hearn’s global

search for love and acceptance may have

been touching, but even the search was

a privilege. The women in his wake—

none of them white—suffered gravely

as well, and they didn’t have the option

of lighting out for the territories.

In his earliest Dismal Man writing,

Hearn was rewarded for going intensely

purple (a crime scene contains “masses

of crumbling human bones, strung to­

gether by half­burnt sinews, or glued one

upon another by a hideous adhesion of

half­molten flesh, boiled brains and jel­

lied blood mingled with coal”), and that

quality lingered in his prose for years. But

with the domestic, material simplicity he

embraced in Japan came a fulfillment of

his long­expressed desire to find a voice

that spoke more plainly, yet with no less

mystery or effect. It’s hard to improve on

the opening sentence of “The Corpse­

Rider,” for example: “The body was cold

as ice; the heart had long ceased to beat;

yet there were no other signs of death.”

Some of the kaidan are scary (one ends

with the sentence “The child’s head had

been torn off !”), but for the most part

that’s not their aim: they are Buddhism­

inflected folktales about interactions be­

tween the living and the dead, featuring

a complex interplay of fear and desire,

disgust and wish fulfillment. In “Of

Ghosts and Goblins,” the opening tale

in the Penguin collection, a young man

is conscripted into a distant war, and the

woman to whom he has been betrothed

“from infancy” dies before he can return

to marry her. He sets out to kill himself

on her grave, but such is the power of his

love and grief that she appears before

him, lays her hand upon his, and says, “I

am not dead. It was all a mistake. ... I

have seen your heart, and that was worth

all the waiting, and the pain ... But now

let us go away at once to another city, so

that people may not know this thing and

trouble us; for all still believe me dead.”

In their new home, they open “a little

food­shop” and raise a son; domestic bliss

blinds the man to the fact that the woman

has indeed been dead the whole time.

When her parents stumble upon the shop,

his wife vanishes again, this time for good.

Our primal fear when it comes to

ghosts, Hearn wrote, is not of seeing or

hearing them but of being touched by

them; the kaidan both exploit that re­

vulsion and offer the heroic spectacle of

characters whose passions enable them