translations of romantic fiction and accounts of ceramic artisans by Stanislas Julien and Hervey Saint-Denis; and he located an account of the Taiping rebellion by the early Jesuit Missionary, Pere D’Entrecolles. Harper’s Bazaar supplied him with another of his sources. This popular magazine published the early work of the translator Herbert Giles, then in China, just beginning his career. Hearn in these tales is like them, hard at work: the intrepid explorer.
Hearn attempted to colonize the sounds of Chinese stories as well. Remarkably, he included in the tales transliterations of Chinese syllables: lines of poetry, lines of scripture, lists of ceramic types, song lines, multiple phases, etc. These sounds could only be read as noise, for it is only in his notes that he provides translations. But this was part of his high experiment, for his readers’ benefit, whether they liked it or not. “Why should people not be forcibly introduced to foreign words?” he retorted pedantically.13 He argued further that, with the sounds themselves, the reader could sense: “the whispering of words, the rustling of the procession of letters,… the raging and racketing and rioting of words.” Not that he was alone in this fascination. J. R. R. Tolkien found an incantatory charm in the orality of Faerie destinations. “ ‘The bridge to Platform 4’ is—to me—” said Tolkien, “less interesting than ‘Bifrøst guarded by Heimdall with the Gjallarhorn.’ ”14 These intellectuals sent out their literary roots into a Library of Babel.
Experiments aside, however, these tales were not just from the laboratory. Hearn loved Chinese ghosts. Four of his Chinese ghost stories detail personal sacrifice and the deep sense of pious awe for ancestors, family and emperor. Ancestral voices became increasingly of interest to Hearn. He observed later when he lived in Japan:
In this nineteenth century the Occidental family is almost disintegrated.… The Oriental family means not only parents and their blood-kindred, but grandparents and their kindred, and great-grandparents, and all the dead behind them. This idea of the family .… may extend, as in Japan, to many groups and sub-groups of living families,… to the whole nation as one great family: a feeling much deeper than what we call patriotism. As a religious emotion the feeling is infinitely extended to all the past.…15
As exotic and distant as they were, these ghosts had for Hearn a personal resonance: “The mystery of the universe is now weighing upon us,” claimed Hearn,
and it is especially a ghostly mystery.… That is why I say that all great art has something ghostly in it. It touches something within us which relates to infinity.16
In 1890 Hearn landed in Japan. He married Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of an old samurai family and, per custom, he was adopted by his wife’s family. They had three sons and a daughter and all lived together, three generations under one roof. He taught English literature and dedicated the last fourteen years of his life to essays, folktale and fiction; Kwaidan, Stories and Studies of Strange Things is his most famous. In these stories he shed the voice of bookish foreigner, for he was among his subjects. No longer confined to his library for sources, he had family rituals, ancestral ghosts and local demons spread out before him. His accounts became direct and simple, suggesting not the Irish intellectual, but the Irish story-teller.17 The narrator for these tales is the fresh persona of a charmed innocent, an alarmed believer, a boy.
His best source for stories was his wife, Setsu. She described her role as Hearn’s informant:
When I tell him stories I always told him at first the mere skeleton of the story. If it is interesting, he puts it down in his note-book and makes me repeat and repeat several times. He instantly becomes exceedingly serious; the color of his face changes; his eyes wear the look of fearful enthusiasm. His face gradually changed pale; his eyes were fixed; I felt a sudden awe. When I finished the narrative he… asked me several questions regarding the situations, actions, etc., involved in the story.… ‘What do you think of the sound of “geta” (clopping of footsteps) at that time? How was the night? I think so and so. What do you think?’ etc. Thus he consulted me about various things besides the original story.… If anyone happened to see us talking from outside, he would surely think that we were mad.18
Footnote:
1 Beongcheon Yu, An Ape of Gods: The Art and Thought of Lafcadio Hearn, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1964, p. 100.
2 Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p. 177.
3 Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p. 176.
4 Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p 174–5.
5 Paul Murray, p. 25.
6 W. K. McNeil, “Lafcadio Hearn, American Folklorist,” Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 91, Oct–Dec. p. 949.
7 Paul Murray, Lafcadio Hearn: A Fantastic Journey, The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn, Japan Library, Folkstone, Kent, 1993, p. 31–33.
8 Also see Paul Murray, pp. 32–33 for discussion of contemporaneous interest in folklore and legend.
9 Paul Murray, p. 34.
10 Paul Murray, p. 82.
11 His first collection of non-European material was Stray Leaves from Strange Literature, published in 1884—also while he was in New Orleans.
12 Beongcheon Yu, p. 292.
13 Letter to Chamberlain, in Jonathan Cott, Wandering Ghost, p. 372.
14 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” Tree and Leaf, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965, p. 62.
15 Lafcadio Hearn, “Some Thoughts About Ancestor Worship,” Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, p. 290.
16 Jonathan Cott, p. 345.
17 Sukehiro Hirakawa, “Introduction: Lafcadio Hearn: Towards an Irish Interpretation: in Paul Murray, pp. 5–8.
18 W. K. McNeil, “Lafcadio Hearn, American Folklorist,” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 91, No. 362, Oct–Dec. p 962.
Victoria Cass
Baltimore, Maryland
