In Ghostly Japan
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Upon his arrival in Japan in 1890, Lafcadio Hearn found himself enamored with the culture, people, and stories of the country, and would make Japan his home until his death in 1904. His collections of stories published during this time became the most popular of Hearn's writings, and earned him veneration worldwide as not only a great translator of Japanese mythology, but as a sensational teller of strange and wonderfully macabre tales. "In Ghostly Japan" is a wonderful collection of twelve ghostly stories and explorations of Shinto and Buddhist proverbs: "Fragment," "Furisodé," "Incense," "A Story of Divination," "Silkworms," "A Passional Karma," "Footprints of Buddha," "Ululation," "Bits of poetry," "Japanese Buddhist Proverbs," "Suggestion," "Ingwa-Banashi," "Story of a Tengu," and "At Yaidzu." Hearn was made a professor of English literature in the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1895, and is today revered by the Japanese for providing significant insights into their own national character.
Lafcadio Hearn
The improbable life story of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) included a peculiarly gothic childhood in Ireland during which he was successively abandoned by his mother, his father and his guardian; two decades in the United States, where he worked as a journalist and was sacked for marrying a former slave; and a long period in Japan, where he married a Japanese woman and wrote about Japanese society and aesthetics for a Western readership. His ghost stories, which were drawn from Japanese folklore and influenced by Buddhist beliefs, appeared in collections throughout the 1890s and 1900s. He is a much celebrated figure in Japan.
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