Chita

Lafcadio Hearn lived an eventful life — he was born on a Greek island to a British father and a mother of noble Kytheran-Greek lineage; as a small child he was sent home to be raised in Ireland by relatives. As a young man, he went to Ohio, where he found work as a newsman, and eventually wrote morbidly yellow journalism, eventually becoming known for “florid accounts of local murders, developing a reputation as the paper’s premier sensational journalist.” He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote of local culture, and his cookbooks are still well-known. He went to the Caribbean, and wrote books on that as well. And then he moved to Japan, and that’s where he did the work that everyone remembers, even now. The last fifteen years of his life produced books like “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan,” “Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan,” “Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life,” “Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East,” “The Boy Who Drew Cats,” “Exotics and Retrospectives,” “Japanese Fairy Tales,” “In Ghostly Japan,” “Shadowings,” “Kotto: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs,” “Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things,” “Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation,” and “The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies and Stories.” And he was a teacher at several colleges in Japan while he wrote those. Quite a life.

Author Biography

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850 – 1904) known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo, 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 ten-year stay in that city.