Lafcadio Hearn's Japan Read online

  Lafcadio Hearn’s

  Japan

  Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.,

  with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont

  05759 U.S.A. and 61 Tai Seng Avenue #02-12, Singapore 534167.

  ©1997 by Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Co., Inc.

  © 1997 Donald Ritchie (Text Only)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy-

  ing, recording, or by any information

  storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission

  from the publisher.

  First edition, 1997

  LCC Card No. 96060931

  ISBN-13: 978-4-8053-0873-8

  ISBN-10: 4-8053-0873-7

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  Japan

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  Contents

  Preface Page7

  Introduction 9

  PART ONE : The Land 17

  Strangeness and Charm 23

  The Chief City of the Province of the Gods 33

  In a Japanese Garden 60

  Three Popular Ballads 92

  In the Cave of the Children’s Ghosts 98

  A Letter from Japan 113 Hōrai 127

  PART TWO : The People 131

  Bits of Life and Death 139

  Of Women’s Hair 155

  A Street Singer 165

  Kimiko 169

  Yuko: A Reminiscence 179

  On a Bridge 185

  The Case of O-Dai 189

  Drifting 195

  Diplomacy 202

  A Passional Karma 205

  Survivals 226

  Notes 235

  Chronology 246

  Glossary 248

  Bibliography 253

  Preface

  Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) spent fourteen years in Japan—he arrived in Yokohama in April 1890 and died in Tokyo in September 1904.

  If this span seems somehow short, it is because his reputation is based upon his writings on this country and because these are voluminous. Even now he remains somehow representative of Japan, and his books about the country and its people—not counting his collected letters and his uncollected articles—amount to over four thousand printed pages.

  Attempting a single-volume anthology thus means leaving out much: over nine-tenths. At the same time it offers the opportunity to create a kind of narrative that reflects Hearn’s expatriate life and what he saw and felt.

  My choices for this anthology are determined by my belief that Hearn, besides being an occasional romancer, was also a reliable observer who has preserved for us a detailed account of turn-of-the-century Japan.

  To indicate this and at the same time to illustrate the changes in attitude that informed his later writings, I have decided upon an anthology in two parts, purposely patterned after those of his time, dealing with place and people. The first half of the book is a description, Hearn’s vision of Japan during the early years of his stay. The second half is devoted to his coming to terms with the further realities of the place, the Japanese themselves. Such a structure shows Hearn subjectively describing the look of the country, and then objectively dramatizing the people he met—and the many he didn’t . . . those ghosts that so people his landscape.

  Everything selected is given in its entirety except for one section, “Three Popular Ballads,” where I include the setting and leave out the ballads. I have also retained Hearn’s original punctuation, his inconsistent spelling of place names, his treatment of Japanese words, and most of his footnotes, which often contain further information.

  —D. R.

  Introduction

  In the spring of 1890 the forty-year-old Lafcadio Hearn was offered a trip to Japan by Harper’s Magazine. He was to write about his experiences and thus inform his readers about this land then already famous for being thought quaint and picturesque.

  Just a year earlier Sir Edwin Arnold had written that if the reader wanted to know what Japan looked like, he or she should just “look at the nearest Japanese fan,” which argues for an abundance of such in England and other countries where the fad for japonaiserie continued. There were indeed so many quaint and picturesque curios loose in the West that Amy Lowell could later report that the interest in Japanese poetry which so distinguished her own verse began in the rooms of her childhood—crammed with Japanese objects that her brother Percival had shipped back while representing the United States government.

  In accepting the magazine’s terms, Hearn wrote that in a country already so well trodden as Japan he could not be expected to discover anything completely new. Rather, what he hoped to do was “to create, in the minds of the readers, a vivid impression of [his emphasis] living in Japan . . . as one taking part in the daily existence of the common people, and thinking with their thoughts. ”

  The reason that he believed anything this unlikely possible was that he had long nurtured feelings about the place. He had wandered enthusiastically through the Japanese section of the New Orleans World Exposition, read the effusions of Pierre Loti with attention, found Sir Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia profound, and pondered Percival Lowell’s The Soul of the Far East. Later he even said that he had been born Japanese, had accidentally appeared in the wrong place, but had now finally found his way home.

  What one usually discovers upon a return to longed-for origins is a utopia. Hearn consequently found in Japan surpassing beauty, an extraordinary charm, a lovable picturesqueness, and a place for himself. He was an aesthete and so, he thought, were the Japanese. He worshiped beauty and, therefore, so did they. He was tired of ugly commonplace and here was an extraordinary prettiness.

  In this Hearn was a man of his times. The movement of art for art’s sake was coming to a climax, there was a growing protest against such ideals as progress and respectability, there was also a definite move toward the politics of the aesthetic; and while the teachings of Whistler and Wilde might seem too close for comfort in London, similar teachings by Hearn in far Japan were acceptable.

  Lafcadio could hold that Buddhism was superior to both Christianity and Science, and that Japan offered an Oriental refinement that London or Boston could barely even imagine. But such assertions came from a safe distance. As Earl Miner has remarked: “He offered aestheticism and unorthodoxy to his large audience at an easy remove, and flights into the strange or the exotic which were a welcome escape from the strenuous life of the late nineteenth century in England and America.”

  Also, finally, Hearn was also a short man and the Japanese were then a short people. And, though he was not in the Western sense an attractive-
looking person, in Japan few knew how foreigners were supposed to look, and his unsightly eye and the odd twist it gave to his features remained uncommented upon.

  Arriving, bent upon discovering an unspoiled utopia, he found that Yokohama and Tokyo were, from his point of view, already con-taminated by the West and were thus no longer the Japan that he had hoped to find. But fortunately, a place more fitting was awaiting him. This was a small castle town on the Japan Sea coast, the provincial capital of Matsue.

  Off the tourist path, as yet unused to foreigners and their ways, it seemed to represent all the best of that Old Japan now so swiftly disappearing. Though Hearn was in Matsue only a little over a year, it became for him a true paradise. There he found everything he wanted: his work, his wife, his home, and there he began to discover the Lafcadio Hearn we now know.

  In the process—searching out beauty imperiled by change, chronicling traditional lives so soon to disappear—he became a witness. Hearn’s is one of the few descriptions we have of what existed everywhere a century ago and is now nowhere.

  * * *

  At the same time, those eyes through which Hearn viewed Meiji Japan were singular—he had only one. Basil Hall Chamberlain, early mentor and friend, later recalled that he “saw details very distinctly while incapable of understanding them as a whole. Not only was this the case mentally but also physically. Blind of one eye, he was extremely short-sighted of the other. On entering a room his habit was to grope all around, closely examining wallpaper, the backs of books, pictures, curios, and other ornaments. Of these he could have drawn up an exact catalogue: but he had never properly seen either the horizon or the stars.”

  This was, however, a late evaluation, after Hearn had found reason to quarrel with Chamberlain—as indeed this highly irascible author did with a majority of his friends. Earlier, before the break, Chamberlain had written more generously: “Never perhaps was scientific accuracy of detail married to such tender and exquisite brilliancy of style.”

  Both descriptions are accurate in that they indicate that Hearn, while reflecting the reality of the country around him, was also con-structing his own version of that land—he was creating what Roland Barthes was later to call a “fictive nation,” a national system of one’s own devising.

  This need to construct one’s very own Japan is common—all visitors must have experienced the urge. The Orient has long been perceived as difficult for the Occidental. Even now, long after picturesqueness has been tamed, there is still talk of “culture shock,” some yet describe living there as “coping,” guides still speak of “travel survival.” To devise one’s own land is thus a way of controlling it.

  At the same time, the Orient has long seemed a haven for Westerners seeking more intense spiritual and sensual experience— something Hearn was certainly attempting. In Japan there is much that initially seems enigmatic and there is thus the tantalizing promise of something beyond our common ken. For those not daunted by difficulty, an initial reaction is that a kind of paradise has been found, a land where whatever one desires seems possible.

  There is, however unfortunately, no such place and after a time the foreigner discovers this. Initially, though, enchanted, he seeks to “understand” this attractive land, to insist upon the inscrutable, to find enigma where there is none, and to view change as destruction.

  Chamberlain offers an example of these attitudes in a letter written to Hearn in 1892 “about the variability of one’s feeling toward Japan being like the oscillation of a pendulum: one day swinging toward pessimism and next to optimism.” He had these feelings often, “but the pessimistic feeling is generally consistent with some experience of new Japan and the optimistic with something of old Japan.” This was in accord with Hearn’s own initial findings. If Matsue was heaven, then Tokyo had to be hell.

  In this he provides us with an early example of the classical Western attitudes toward Japan. Three stages have been observed. The first of these is an unreasoning infatuation, the second is an equally heedless dislike, and the third is when one accepts the country as it is—a state more like a marriage than a love affair. If one hears much less nowadays about the three classical stages it is because there is now so much less to infatuate and, consequently, to later abominate.

  For well over a century, however, it was common for folks to fall in love with the place and, in the early stages of the affair, to compare all other countries unfavorably. During Hearn’s first years in the country such ideas were so visible in his writings that a later author, John Paris (Frank Ashton-Gwatkin), could write that Hearn’s books were mere visions of a land where everything was “kind, gentle, small, neat, artistic and spotlessly clean,” the reverse of “our own poor vexed continent where the monstrous and the hideous multiply daily.”

  That the new Japan could not live up to the utopia that Hearn was constructing is quite true. Yet this fact does not affect the fidelity of his partial vision, and if an understanding of the impossibility of paradise undercut his early infatuation, it at the same time gave a kind of energy to his thoughts about the country.

  * * *

  This energy is reflected in the evolution of Hearn’s style. When he arrived in Japan he wrote in the heightened, sensitive style typical of his fin-de-siècle times. For him the formative influences had been the florid Shelley, his favorite poet; the romantic Poe (in his student days Hearn called himself “The Raven”); the Gothic novelist and connoisseur of bizarre cultures, William Beckford; and George Borrow, the man who traveled with the exotic gypsies and coined a style to fit his Romany encounters.

  In Japan Hearn had initially admired the writings of Pierre Loti and attempted to emulate what he took to be the French writer’s technique: “On visiting a new country he always used to take notes of every fresh and powerful impression,—a landscape,—a sunset-blaze,—an architectural eccentricity,—a bit of picturesqueness in custom. . . .”

  In elucidating this admired style, Hearn imitates it with his rhapsodic periods, his incantations, and his punctuation. The use of dashes with commas is a typical effusion—even more so is a lavish use of another mark of punctuation which lent the author the name of “Old Semi-Colon.”

  This emotive use of punctuation was matched by a word choice that sought to create an aura of general emotion rather than to give a precise meaning. The result included a number of Japanese words as well—used entirely for atmosphere rather than for precise information.

  This practice was criticized by both Hearn’s publisher, Harper’s, and his friend Chamberlain. In his defense he wrote, typically, that “for me words have color, form, character; they have faces . . . moods, humours, eccentricities. . . . That they are unintelligible makes no difference at all.”

  They were truly unintelligible to him. He never learned properly to read or write, much less speak. Japanese remained a delightfully alien tongue to him, though in time he and his wife evolved a kind of baby-talk combined from both languages, and eventually he mastered the kana syllabary and could send her notes.

  His wife read to him the stories which he, like a child, transcribed; and it was she who provided him with much of the information that became the basis of his work. It is thus quite true, as Marius Jansen writes, that Hearn “never made great progress in spoken or written Japanese . . . and he committed errors that would have been impossible had he possessed command of the language.”

  This incapacity in language can be defended. Words, as Roland Barthes later emphasized, are arbitrary. They are symbols that seek to capture the real, they are not that reality itself. Indeed, that they are notoriously ill-fitting to the object intended is common knowledge. Hence, to describe something is often to destroy it. Writers are aware of this, or should be, and consequently attempt to try out new combinations which they hope will more precisely describe the intended. To not know a language, then, is to be free of its imprecision, and to retain the ability to approach afresh.

  In addition, this lack of knowledge seems appropriat
e to someone who saw himself as so set apart. Ignorance was like a vaccination against a general contagion—one did not come down with that general inattention to reality that language inevitably breeds. Hearn was thus not only blind in Japan, he was deaf as well. Both of these qualities contributed to his happiness.

  By 1893, however, the author was changing. Romancing about things he had seen (or been told of) was not enough; something more precise was called for. The flaccid Loti was no longer an inspiration. Instead, Hearn found in Rudyard Kipling—a writer who had also been to Japan—a much more muscular model. There was also the example of Hans Christian Andersen. Later he would have his publisher send him the collected stories of the Danish author. “How great the art of the man!—the immense volume of fancy,—the magical simplicity. . . .”

  Simplicity . . . after the heightened, the complicated, the curious, Hearn had learned from Japan itself the virtues of the spare. As he wrote to Chamberlain: “After years of studying poetical prose, I am forced now to study simplicity. After attempting my utmost at ornamentation, I am converted by my own mistakes. The great point is to touch with simple words. And I feel my style is not yet fixed—too artificial. By another year of study or two, I think I shall be able to do better.”

  One of the reasons for this evolving style was his own changing impressions of the country—stage two of the classical trinity was being reached. Again writing to Chamberlain, he stated, “As for changing my conclusions—well, I have had to change a good many. The tone [of my first book] is true in being the feeling of a place and time. Since then I’ve seen how thoroughly detestable [the] Japanese can be, and the revelation assisted in illuminating things.”