Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn, page 1
Japanese Tales
of Lafcadio Hearn
ODDLY MODERN FAIRY TALES
Jack Zipes, Series Editor
Oddly Modern Fairy Tales is a series dedicated to publishing unusual literary fairy tales produced mainly during the first half of the twentieth century. International in scope, the series includes new translations, surprising and unexpected tales by well-known writers and artists, and uncanny stories by gifted yet neglected authors. Postmodern before their time, the tales in Oddly Modern Fairy Tales transformed the genre and still strike a chord.
Kurt Schwitters Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales
Béla Balázs The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales
Peter Davies, editor The Fairies Return: Or, New Tales for Old
Naomi Mitchison The Fourth Pig
Walter de la Mare Told Again: Old Tales Told Again
Gretchen Schultz and Lewis Seifert, editors Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories in the French Decadent Tradition
Édouard Laboulaye Smack-Bam, or The Art of Governing Men: Political Fairy Tales of Édouard Laboulaye
Michael Rosen, editor Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain
Andrei Codrescu, editor Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn
Japanese Tales
of Lafcadio Hearn
Edited and introduced by Andrei Codrescu
With a foreword by Jack Zipes
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press
All illustrations in this book except figure 1: Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. These are black-and-white versions of color illustrations by Yasumasa Fujita from an edition of Kwaidan, by Lafcadio Hearn, printed in 1932 for members of The Limited Editions Club by The Shimbi Shoin, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan.
Figure 1 is a photograph of Lafcadio Hearn from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. “Lafcadio Hearn.” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
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LCCN 2018952835
ISBN (pbk.) 978-0-691-16775-6
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Editorial: Anne Savarese and Thalia Leaf
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Cover Credit: Cover illustration by Andrea Dezsö
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Contents
FOREWORD ix
Introduction 1
TALES
From Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (1897)
The Dream of a Summer Day 31
From Shadowings (1900)
A Legend of Fugen-Bosatsu 48
The Screen-Maiden 52
The Corpse-Rider 57
The Sympathy of Benten 60
The Gratitude of the Samébito 69
The Reconciliation 75
From A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here & There (1901)
Of a Promise Kept 80
The Story of Umétsu Chūbei 85
The Story of Kōgi the Priest 89
The Story of Kwashin Koji 96
From Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904)
The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōichi 105
Oshidori 117
The Story of O-Tei 121
Ubazakura 125
Diplomacy 127
Of a Mirror and a Bell 131
Jikininki 137
Mujina 145
Rokuro-Kubi 148
A Dead Secret 161
Yuki-Onna 166
The Story of Aoyagi 171
Jiu-Roku-Zakura 183
The Dream of Akinosuké 185
Riki-Baka 194
Hi-Mawari 197
Hōrai 201
BIBLIOGRAPHY 205
Foreword
Out of the blending of the stern sense of impermanence and karma with the sensuous beauty of Japan there arises this new feeling of the weird. . . . Had it been that Mr. Hearn’s art sufficed only to reproduce the delicacy and the ghostliness of Japanese tales, he would have performed a notable but scarcely an extraordinary service to letters. But into the study of these by ways of Oriental literature he has carried a third element, the dominant idea of Occidental science; and this element he has blended with Hindu religion and Japanese aestheticism in a combination as bewildering as it is voluptuous. In this triple union lies his real claim to high originality.
—PAUL ELMER MOORE, Atlantic Monthly (1902)
As Andrei Codrescu demonstrates in his incisive analysis of Lafcadio Hearn’s life and work, there is no better adjective than “weird” to describe what Hearn did and what happened to him. Nothing appears to make sense in his life, and yet, everything has its sense. Hearn spent his life creating and collecting stories from the margins of the societies in which he lived in an effort to find a place to which he could belong. No matter how different these societies were, Hearn was always drawn to their weird aspects. As he stated in a letter written to his friend, the writer William Douglas O’Connor: “I think a man must devote himself to one thing in order to succeed: so I have pledged me to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous. . . . Enormous and lurid facts are certainly worthy of more artistic study than they generally receive.”1
It was not until 1890, however, that Hearn could finally realize his “pledge”—a devotion to Japanese culture in all its aspects. In his introduction, Codrescu reveals the difficult phases of Hearn’s life from the tiny Greek island Lefkada to Ireland, London, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and finally to Japan, where he became “mythic.” As Codrescu writes:
Hearn’s existential, intellectual, and literary adventures in the living world, were, in the end, a spiral, not circular journey. He never returned to the womb of his mother’s Lefkada but found himself at home in a patriarchal world where he was a Father, unlike his own genitor. The critical tools for the “enigma” of Hearn, as critics and biographers are fond of repeating, are still insufficient for the wealth of forms and content that Hearn produced. Hearn was loved by readers who were not concerned with the enigma. They consumed his writing in a manner one might call post-modern, like films or mysteries, and if they thought of it critically, they would have described him and his work as “exotic” and “strange.” He was that, in the same manner that fairy tales and fantastic stories are exotic and strange. . . . Lafcadio Hearn lived many lives, experienced miraculous encounters, overcame numerous dragons, and triumphed in the end. His life resembled a fairy tale, but far from ending like some fairy tales do, with disintegration into dust due to a sudden attack of nostalgia, Hearn did not succumb to the temptation to look backward and grew into a myth for the people of Japan, his last place of wandering.
Since it is virtually impossible to capture the manner in which Hearn conveyed a weird sense and atmosphere in the Japanese tales that he translated, adapted, and re-created, Codrescu has collected some of Hearn’s most poignant stories from four major works: Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (1897), Shadowings (1900), A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here & There (1901), and Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). All of the stories have a unique hybrid quality to them. Though they were based on Japanese legends, myths, and fairy tales, Hearn took great poetic license and honed them into weird narratives. They cannot be considered authentic Japanese tales: they are estranged from Japanese tradition in the way that Bertolt Brecht used the estrangement effect in the theater. Hearn sought to stun readers by intensifying the unpredictable in life so that they would question the accepted social norms in Western and Eastern societies at the same time. He honed and changed the Japanese stories he retold for two audiences while at the same time providing factual notes about places, people, and history. The footnotes and commentary with the texts make the tales seem more realistic and yet allow for departures from reality. Chance, death, diverse gods, and reincarnation haunt Hearn’s literary versions of Japanese oral and literary works. Endings are rarely happy. Instead they unseat readers, especially those accustomed to the traditional happy endings of Western fairy tales.
Codrescu’s introduction to the present anthology clarifies how Hearn, who had a prodigious knowledge of Japanese folklore, developed a surrealist fairy-tale style that was terse and multifaceted. There was no writer like Hearn in his day, and his oddly modern fairy tales still hold great appeal for readers accustomed to the postmodern narratives of our own time. —JACK ZIPES
Note
1. Elizabeth Bisland, The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906): 328–329. This letter was written on June 29, 1884.
Japanese Tales
o
Introduction
Lafcadio Hearn, the Ghost of Islands
At the end of the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn was one of America’s best known writers, one of a stellar company that included Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Twain, Poe, and Stevenson have entered the established literary canon and are still read for duty and pleasure. Lafacadio Hearn has been forgotten, with two remarkable exceptions: in Louisiana and in Japan. Yet Hearn’s place in the canon is significant for many reasons, not least of which is how the twentieth century came to view the nineteenth. This view, both academic and popular, reflects the triumph of a certain futuristic modernism over the mysteries of religion, folklore, and what was once called “folk wisdom.” To witness this phenomenon in time-lapse, sped-up motion, one need only consider Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-born, Irish-raised, New World immigrant who metamorphosed from a celebrated fin-de-siècle American writer into the beloved Japanese cultural icon Koizumi Yakumo in less than a decade, in roughly the same time that Japan changed from a millennia-old feudal society into a great industrial power. In other words, in the blink of an eye, in the time it takes a princess to kiss-turn a frog into a prince, or in the time it takes to burn an owl’s feathers so that only the nocturnal beautiful-girl-shape of the creature might remain.
History is a fairy tale true to its telling. Lafcadio Hearn’s lives are a fairy tale true in various tellings, primarily his own, then those of his correspondents, and with greater uncertainty, those of his biographers. Hearn changed, as if magically, from one person into another, from a Greek islander into a British student, from a penni-less London street ragamuffin into a respected American news-paper writer, from a journalist into a novelist, and, most astonishingly, from a stateless Western man into a loyal Japanese citizen. His sheer number of guises make him a creature of legend, by far more fabulous than a frog turning into a prince. Yet this life, as recorded both by himself and by others, grows more mysterious the more one examines it, for it is like the Japanese story of the Buddhist monk Kwashin Koji, in “Impressions of Japan,” who owned a painting so detailed it flowed with life. A samurai chieftain saw it and wanted to buy it, but the monk wouldn’t sell it, so the chieftain had him followed and murdered. But when the painting was brought to the chieftain and unrolled, there was nothing on it; it was blank. Hearn reported this story told to him by a Japanese monk1 to illustrate some aspect of the Buddhist doctrine of karma, but he might as well have been speaking about himself as Koji: the more “literary” the renderings of the original story, the less fresh and vivid it becomes, until it might literally disappear, like that legendary painting.
The knowable tellings of Hearn are particular, interesting, and specific to the literary personae of Lafcadio-Koizumi, insofar as one is absorbed and lost in them. But this tremendously prolific producer of literature remains, somehow, elusive. Hearn tempts, or we could say “dares,” his critics to interpret his work and his life, but, in the end, he belongs to the reader who best surrenders to his stories and his own life-reporting.
Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 not far from Ithaca, on the island of Lefkada in Greece, from the union of Charles Bush Hearn, an Irish surgeon in the British army, and Rosa Kassimatis, a beautiful Greek woman born on Cythera, Aphrodite’s island, about which Baudelaire wrote (in Richard Howard’s memorable translation): “On Aphrodite’s island all I found / was a token gallows wherein my image hung.”2 Hearn’s sorrows later in life were reflected by Baudelaire, who saw in Cythera the fatal beauty that would haunt Hearn’s life. Lafcadio Hearn was named after Lefkada, where he lived with his mother, while his father was deployed by the British army elsewhere. The island of Lefkada, said by Ovid in his “Ode to Love” to be the place where Sappho jumped to her death in the sea because of unrequited love, was Lafcadio’s paradise, the womb-island from which he was “expelled” when his father returned and took mother and child to Dublin. On that dismal northern isle, Lafcadio was expelled a second time, this time away from his mother. While his father was abroad on yet another military assignment in the West Indies, Rosa fled Dublin with a Greek man, back to her “island of feasting hearts and secret joys,”3 leaving Lafcadio in the custody of a pious Catholic aunt. Then a schoolyard accident in one of the British schools he resentfully attended left him blind in one eye. His father remarried, and his aunt’s family became bankrupt, two unrelated yet near-simultaneous disasters. A seventeen-year-old Lafcadio wandered penniless in London among vagabonds, thieves, and prostitutes. In the spring of 1869, a relation of his father’s, worried about the family’s reputation, handed him a one-way boat ticket to the United States, then overland to Cincinnati, Ohio, where another relation of the Hearns lived.
His departure for the New World was Lafacadio Hearn’s third exile. In Cincinnati, where he had imagined generous help, his relation handed him a few dollars and told him to fend for himself. A twenty-year-old Lafcadio found himself, once again, a penniless tramp. So far, with the exception of a few school exercises and some ghoulish poetry inspired by his fear of ghosts, Lafcadio Hearn had written nothing. In Cincinnati, he lived again in the underworld, until a kind angel intervened: the printer Henry Watkin allowed the young tramp to sleep on piles of old newspapers in his shop. Watkin, a utopian anarchist, encouraged the youth to read radical and fantastic literature. It was the age of socialism, anarchism, imperialism, untaxed wealth, unredeemable poverty, spiritism, snake-oil, newspapers, electricity, photography, telegraphy, telepathy, railroads, high art, and kitsch. A bounty of exotic objects and customs flowed in from the cultures of vanquished Native American tribes and recently freed African slaves. The astonished masses of immigrant Europeans, who were mostly peasants and religiously persecuted marginals, brought with them their own rich stories of folklore, customs, and beliefs. Hearn, like many new Americans, felt rightly that he was living in a time of wonder and possibility. His education took a vast leap: he underwent a kind of osmosis as if he had absorbed the spirit of nineteenth-century America from the very newspapers he slept on. He had lived variously and wanted to let the world know how cruel and wondrous life was. Clumsily, with Henry Watkin’s encouragement, he started to write.
He submitted a story to the Enquirer, a failing yellow-press daily. His story appeared in bold type on the front page. Other stories soon followed. Young Hearn’s first writings were blood-curdling reportage steeped in gothic horror. His reports about gruesome murders and exposés of German slaughterhouses in Cincinnati are still cringe-worthy. They scandalized the readers of the Enquirer and lifted the newspaper from near-bankruptcy to a prosperous business. Hearn’s ultra-realist exposés were drenched in the wounded sensibility of a writer with a merciless eye who had Greek myths and Celtic fairy tales in his blood.
Here he is, describing the murdered body of one Herman Schilling, boiled to death by two of his slaughterhouse confederates: “The brain had all but boiled away, save a small wasted lump at the base of the skull about the size of a lemon. It was crisped and still warm to the touch. On pushing the finger through the crisp, the interior felt about the consistency of banana fruit, and the yellow fibers seemed to writhe like worms in the Coroner’s hands. The eyes were cooked to bubbled crisps in the blackened sockets.”4
For all its facticity, the passage feels like the elaboration of horror in a fairy tale by a storyteller scaring children around a campfire. Young Hearn is telling a story for an audience safely snuggled in the parlor of a Victorian home, usually lit by gas lamps, but candle-lit for the occasion. The vivid prose of his newspaper crime-writing was soon employed in no-less-vivid accounts of life on the other side of the tracks, in the Black Quarter, where a different life, language, and time prevailed. Hearn noted the sounds of nightlife, the slang of dockworkers, the rhythms of the street, the strength of language of an underclass whose existence was barely acknowledged or, until then, completely ignored by readers of the Enquirer. Hearn wrote passionately about the rough experiences and traumatic lives of his friends and acquaintances.
