Preamble
As part of collecting all my writing in one place, this is a repost of a Medium post from 2021.
Review (4 out of 5)
Lafcadio Hearn (later known by the name Koizumi Yakumo) was a well-travelled man. Born on the Ionian Islands to an Irish father and a Greek mother, he lived in Ireland and England during childhood. He began his career in journalism in Cincinnati, still a teen, and subsequently moved to the West Indies while writing for Harper’s, which has online some of his work for them. From there, he moved to Japan, intending to write for Harper’s, but quickly falling out with them, instead becoming a teacher, and settling permanently in Japan.
This makes reading Hearn’s work an interesting geographical tour! The majority of his books were written from and about Japan, however, and that’s where this review takes us today.
In Ghostly Japan was published in 1899, one of the 10 books that Hearn published on Japanese life and culture, beginning with Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). Ghost stories dominate his outputs, and In Ghostly Japan is a nice example of this work, including some attractive illustrations in the Project Gutenberg e-books, like this one.
I find In Ghostly Japan particularly interesting because, whileHearn drew heavily from traditional folklore, this is more evident in his later books (including the more famous Kwaidan, used as a basis of a film of the same name in the ‘60s). But in some of his earlier books, like In Ghostly Japan, Hearn presents a stronger narrative voice, both in the stories and in the footnotes, which I really enjoy.
There are lots of points of stylistic interest in so many of the actual stories, as a writer of short fiction and someone who loves reading it, and reading Hearn’s writing is an interesting masterclass for anyone interested in working with the gothic, the ghostly, folklore, and horror in shorter genres.
Take “Fragment”, for instance, which ingeniously starts the collection (and itself) with the word “And”. Because of course it does. It’s a fragment, with something unspecified having gone before. It reminds me of so many of the Sappho fragments (try the Sappho Bot). But throughout the story there’s interesting syntax and punctuation that builds an atmosphere as well as a story, the use of colons and the placement of verbs doing things that keep us a little alienated from this story of a mountain climb that ends in existential distress.
Some of the tales are more strictly ghostly than others. The longer “A Passional Karma” offering a ghost story, drawn from a play, within a critical narrative that also gives us a flavour of how ghost stories continued to live in Japanese culture as Hearn knew it. The shorter “Ingwa-banashi” (perhaps translatable as “A tale of evil karma”) is more horror than ghost story, but is particularly troubling and will stay with you.
As well as stories per se, In Ghostly Japan includes some interesting essays, including one about incense (from which the illustration is taken), where Hearn talks about the religious, luxurious and ghostly uses of incense, including incense games and a recipe for “Guest Incense” or “Dew-on-the-Mountain-Path”. There are sections on Japanese poetry and proverbs, and on debunking so-called expert opinions about Japan (“Footprints of the Buddha”).
The diversity of the collection makes it an interesting read that presents Japan and Japanese culture, which Hearn loved so much, from different angles to build a fascinating picture of the culture, but also its relations to Hearn’s nineteenth-century British milieu. Because the distinct genres of the pieces are blended by their shared theme, it can be fun to read the first few paragraphs of something and try to figure out whether it’s going to turn into story, cultural commentary, or meditation!
If you enjoy In Ghostly Japan, you can read lots more from Hearn, about Japan, but also some of his translations of French literature and his work from the West Indies, on Project Gutenberg. And, if you’re interested in the history of Japan around the period Hearn lived there, you can try Christopher Harding’s Japan Story (2020), which covers the mid-nineteenth century (the “opening up” of Japan) through to the modern day.
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: preorder now!
Dominique Gracia 
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