Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, With Sundry Cobwebs

Lafcadio Hearn lived a wandering life. Born in Greece in 1850 and raised in Ireland, he emigrated at a young age to the U.S. and became a successful newspaper writer, living in and writing about Cincinnati and New Orleans. Defying a law against interracial marriage, he married an African American woman in his early 20s (1874). He then divorced and made his way to Japan, where he had a family and is well known to this day as Koizumi Yakumo. The Paris Review published an article about Hearn on its website on July 2, 2019, which gives a much broader account of his life, interests and achievements.

Hearn's 1902 book, Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, With Sundry Cobwebs, is a miscellany of old tales, poetry and short essays. It was released a couple years before he died at age 54, and in it he touches on various philosophies connected to Buddhism, Shinto and the East in general, and at times it seems with some prescience of his own death.

The first nine tales, Hearn tells us in the preface, are his own translations from "old Japanese books." And the first of these, "The Legend of Yurei-Daki," is a four-page story about a woman who—on a dare—goes off at night with her baby wrapped up and on her back to a haunted waterfall, Yurei-Daki ("The Cascade of Ghosts"). She makes it there, and although she hears a spirit calling out her name, she makes it back unharmed, to where her friends have been anxiously awaiting her return. Everything seems fine. Except the clothes on her back are sopping wet. As her friends take a closer look in the dull lantern light, they discover it is not water that has soaked her. The story ends: And out of the wrappings unfastened there fell to the floor a blood-soaked bundle of baby clothes that left exposed two very small brown feet, and two very small brown hands—nothing more. The child's head had been torn off!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!

The second tale, "In a Cup of Tea," is also the fourth story in Masaki Kobayashi's film Kwaidan (1965). Next, in Kottō, a few more ghostly tales, mostly about human interaction with the spirit world and not tales of horror like the one with the missing baby head.

The book then takes sharp turns. "A Woman's Diary" is, as you might expect, a series of excerpts from a woman's diary. Very personal and sad. She writes about losing her baby daughter and son soon after they were born. She considers herself a wretched failure to her husband and to their arranged marriage, and we're left to wonder if her diary entries suddenly come to an end because she herself came to an end by her own hands. Her descriptions of areas in Tokyo are interesting and include Shinjuku, Yotsuya and Okubo. Reading these, you get a feeling that Tokyo of the late 1800s isn't so far off.

Hearn next tells us about crabs and insects, writing about the latter:

Even the little that we have been able to learn about insects fills us with the wonder that is akin to fear. The lips that are hands, and the horns that are eyes, and the tongues that are drills; the multiple devilish mouths that move in four ways at once; the living scissors and saws and boring-pumps and brace-bits; the exquisite elfish weapons which no human skill can copy, even in the finest watch-spring steel—what superstition of old ever dreamed of sights like these? ―"Gaki" (III)

He also gives us translations of haiku on the theme of fireflies. And searches for links between the microcosmic (insects, tiny spirits, a dewdrop) and the macrocosmic . . .

But I cannot rid myself of the notion that Matter, in some blind infallible way, remembers; and that in every unit of living substance there slumber infinite potentialities, simply because to every ultimate atom belongs the infinite and indestructible experience of billions of vanished universes. ―"Fireflies" (VII)

Something I didn't know until recently is that Hearn's grave was a few blocks north of where I lived in Bunkyō-ku in the 1990s, where I first read some of Hearn's books. I used to take walks around the area but somehow missed Zōshigaya Cemetery, where he rests in the area of Minami-Ikebukuro.

Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, With Sundry Cobwebs can be downloaded here legally and free thanks to Project Gutenberg.

Lafcadio Hearn / Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲)

A Tokyo Romance

A Tokyo Romance (2018) is Ian Buruma's memoir of his six years in Japan. He moved to Tokyo in 1975 when he was 23 and studied cinema at Nichidai in Ekoda, then met author and film historian Donald Ritchie, director Akira Kurosawa, Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi, and a hodgepodge of other artists and avant-garde theater performers as he refined his spoken Japanese. Buruma covers an array of topics, including the "role" of the gaijin in Japan and also immersion of the outsider into Japanese culture (or inevitable failure to achieve this and resultant disillusionment) versus remaining on the periphery as a sort of voyeur, which he describes as a radical type of freedom.

The first chapters are imbued with nostalgia as Buruma recalls a more raucous theater scene and much edgier city. I came to Japan about twenty years after Buruma and also lived and worked around the Ikebukuro area, and while Buruma's experience was much different from mine, parts of his memoir brought me back to the wilder Tokyo of the 90s.

Buruma shares anecdotes about outrageous times with eccentrics and outsiders, and dabbles once or twice in their performances. He writes about bizarre carnival acts, romance porn films (roma porn), fashion photographers, tattoo artists, and his short documentary on the training and work of a department store elevator girl. I read a review that referred to the book as a journey into Tokyo's underworld, but outside of the arts it's not. While Buruma encountered underworld figures, he didn't enter their realm; he rather brushed by it occasionally—his preference it seems. He didn't move to the "plebeian shitamachi" (lower city) despite part of him wanting to, he left the cabarets to acquaintances, and he met a few who were perhaps connected to yakuza crime families or the Japanese Red Army but didn't hang out with the underworld figures himself. Nevertheless, his relationships with those in experimental theater troupes and traveling players, belonging to a weird world of their own, would have been quite a feat for a foreigner.

Buruma paints a vivid picture of a Tokyo that has changed over the past forty to fifty years, particularly its avant-garde theater scene, and seems to lament the city's east-to-west shift of its nightlife and fashion hubs. He mentions a number of important Japanese and French films, but each time Donald Ritchie's name popped up, I got the impression Buruma was reluctant to delve into Japanese cinema in this book, perhaps because that was Ritchie's area of expertise.

Something that surprised me was Buruma lived in Japan for only six years. I read his The Missionary and the Libertine in 1996, the year it was released and the same year I moved to Japan. This collection of essays shaped many of my initial views of the Japanese and relationships between East and West. At the time and since then, I've thought Buruma lived in Japan for decades because of his wide understanding of its history and culture. At the end of A Tokyo Romance he explains why he had to leave after those six years and how the experience shaped him and made him who he is today.