Weather Report: On Beauty

Post #15: "Kwaidan: Ghost Stories and Strange Tales of Old Japan" by Lafcadio Hearn

“Weather Report: A 90-day journal for reflection and well-being, with the aid of the Beaufort Wind Scale

If you have a copy of my book, Weather Report: A 90-day journal for reflection and well-being, with the aid of the Beaufort Wind Scale, you might have noticed two things; that you are daily invited to write or draw, 'one thing you found beautiful today', and a list of reading resources at the back. These are not unconnected.

This is a year-long project to write regularly, choosing one of the books from that list with a few wildcards too. I want to go deeper into the subject of beauty and, together with you who join me here, to deepen my own understanding of why it is important. Some of the books on the list are very recent; others are long-standing companions that I return to over and over. To me these are the kind of books that, having read them, I can gain solace simply from having them on my shelves.

Kwaidan: Ghost Stories and Strange Tales of Old Japan by Lafcadio Hearn

I have long had a fascination with the writer Lafcadio Hearn and was surprised and pleased to learn relatively recently that his writings were an influence on Nan Shepherd, the subject of ‘On Beauty’ #14. (I love how these books in Weather Report are beginning to talk to each other.) According to Kathryn Aalto¹ it was through reading Hearn that, ‘Shepherd began to lean toward the natural world as a source of spiritual energy.’ Yet, there could hardly be more of a contrast between the lives of the peripatetic Hearn and the grounded-in-place Shepherd.

The mixture of cultures in Hearn’s background, as the son of a Greek mother, Rosa Kassimati and an Anglo-Irish father, Charles Bush Hearn, marked him out early in life as an outsider. He was born on the Greek island of Levkos, hence his forename, while his father, a British Army Officer was stationed there. Due to his parents’ early separation he was subsequently reared in Dublin by his elderly grand-aunt Mrs. Brenane. Although seemingly a well-intentioned woman she had little understanding of the emotional needs of a young child. There are reports of his being locked into his bedroom at night and, because of religious differences, he had little contact with his young cousins in Dublin. It was, in the main, a solitary childhood but with plenty of opportunity for reading and listening to stories and folk-tales from the servants. These would fuel his imagination and influence his later interest in the strange and exotic

“Mujina”, one of the stories in Kwaidan

Lafcadio Hearn, who became Koizumi Yakumo in Japan, is captured in these lines by the Waterford-born poet, the late Seán Dunne²:

Like Hokusai painting on rice grains,

He tried to trap Japan in a story:

His one good eye so close to the page

He might have been a jeweller with a gem³.

It was close to Dunne’s native city of Waterford that Hearn spent some happy summers as a boy, in the seaside town of Tramore⁴ where he learnt to swim. But the truth is that there wasn’t a lot of happiness or stability in Hearn’s boyhood or youth as he was shuttled from Greece to Dublin to Paris, to boarding school in England. He suffered the loss of sight in his left eye due to an accident at his boarding-school at the age of sixteen, and this exacerbated his lifelong self-consciousness.

He was sent to the United States at the age of 19 by his relatives and on the far side of the Atlantic his peripatetic lifestyle continued. He developed his skills as a writer while working as a journalist first in Cincinnati, then Memphis and later in New Orleans. Working as a newspaper reporter allowed him to develop his talent for writing and also gave him an entrée into the exciting melting-pot that was the emerging society of the United States at the time. Even in his early days in the States he was drawn towards cultures of difference. But his marriage to Mattie (Althea) Foley cost him his job as a reporter with the Cincinnati Enquirer. Mattie Foley was black and such a union was illegal at the time. This marriage was short-lived and he continued his career in the newspaper world moving from Cincinnati to Memphis and then on to New Orleans with a brief spell in the West Indies.

It was in New Orleans that a chance meeting happened which hinted at the future trajectory of his life. While there in 1884 to attending the World Industrial Exhibition, he was particularly attracted to the Japanese pavilion and made personal contacts there which were to serve him well six years later. So it was that on St. Patrick’s Day, 1890, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn sailed from Vancouver to Japan on a journalistic assignment, never to return to the West.

There he very quickly ‘found his true role, to interpret that country’s way of life to the West.’

The chronology and facts of his life do little to reveal the delicacy and sensitivity of his intellect as revealed through his writings. Matsue, ‘the queer old city’, seems to have quickly become his spiritual as well as his physical home⁵. He wrote of the ‘wonder and delight’ of his first impressions of Japan and relates in Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation that ‘[t]he wonder and delight have never passed away: they are often revived for me even now by some chance happening, after fourteen years of sojourn.’

Echoing Dunne’s line above, the collection of folk-tales in Kwaidan are gems of the form. Many of them open with a precision of time and place, settling (or maybe lulling) the reader in preparation for what is to unfold, including magic, horror, the supernatural, in the best storytelling tradition. For example:

“Eight centuries ago, the priests of Mugenyama, in the province of Tōtōmi, wanted a big bell for their temple; and they asked the women of their parish to help them by contributing old bronze mirrors for bell-metal.” (Of a Mirror and a Bell p. 35)

and…

“Three hundred years ago, in the village called Asamimura, in the district called Onsengōri, in the province of Iyō, there lived a good man named Tokubei. This Tokubei was the richest person in the district, and the muraosa, or headman, of the village.” (Ubazakura, p. 25)

The collection closes with a section on Insect Studies, where Hearn writes on ‘Butterflies’, ‘Mosquitoes’ and ‘Ants’.

In ‘Butterflies’, Hearn includes some haiku ‘to help to illustrate Japanese interest in the aesthetic side of the subject. Some are pictures only – tiny color-sketches …’ (p. 125)

“Perched upon the temple bell, the butterfly sleeps!”

“Even though it did not appear to be a windy day, the fluttering of the butterflies…”

In his essay on ‘Mosquitos’, my own favourite of the three on insects, he reveals in microcosm his feelings for his adopted country. Persecuted as he is by this ‘tiny needly thing, all silver-speckled and silver-streaked’ with a puncture as ‘sharp as an electric burn’, knowing that the source is the old Buddhist cemetery in his neighbourhood gives him pause for thought as to how to eradicate them. Each grave or tomb has a water receptacle in front, for ‘the dead must have water’, and he carefully considers the consequences of successfully addressing the problem.

To free the city from mosquitoes it would be necessary to demolish the ancient graveyards – and that would signify the ruin of the Buddhist temples attached to them – and that would mean the disparition of so many charming gardens, with their lotus-ponds and Sanscrit-lettered monuments and humpy bridges and holy groves and weirdly smiling Buddhas! So the exermination of the Culex fasciatus would involve the destruction of the poetry of the ancestral cult – surely too great a price to pay! … (p. 141)

He expresses the wish that ‘when [his] time comes, to be laid away in some Buddhist graveyard of the ancient kind’.

Hearn’s impish sense of humour is revealed in the closing lines of ‘Mosquitoes’:

I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutamé, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know.’ (p. 142

Watch the multi-award winning Mexican filmmaker, Guillermo Del Toro, discuss the film based on ‘Kwaidan’, made in 1965. He speaks of Lafcadio Hearn as one of his favourite writers.

1. See Aalto’s book, Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World (2020)

2. On Friday, 28th July 2023 the Seán Dunne Literary Trail will be launched at the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens in Tramore, honouring two great writers in one beautiful space.

3. Dunne, Seán A Shrine for Lafcadio Hearn, 1850 – 1904

4. Where you can now visit the wonderful Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens, overlooking the wide sweep of Tramore bay.

5. Hearn became a teacher shortly after arriving in Japan, married a young Japanese woman, Koizumi Setsuko, and was eventually appointed a professor of English literature in the Imperial University in Tokyo. His direct descendants continue to maintain a link with Ireland and Tramore.

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