Lafcadio Hearn was named after the place he was born, Levkás, in the Ionian Islands in Greece in 1850. As a child he moved from Greece first to Ireland and then to the United States where he worked as a journalist for local newspapers. He became increasingly disenchanted with western society and moved to Japan, where he married a local woman and railed against the loss of Japanese culture after the Meiji Restoration. He spent his life attempting to document the culture he loved in both fiction and carefully researched non-fiction studies.