Exotics and Retrospectives

Exotics and Retrospectives (1898) is among Lafcadio Hearn’s earlier works on Japan. It opens with the author’s account of his arduous climb up Mount Fuji (3,776 meters). Because it’s more personal in nature, I preferred it to the dozen or so other essays in the collection, which, in Hearn’s oftentimes meandering yet lucid style, cover a wide range of subjects—from Japan’s singing insects and frogs, and reflections on death and Buddhism, to his notions and flights of fancy on memory, evolution, the nauseating orange-red of sunsets, beauty in sadness, and even the color azure.

I’ve actually enjoyed Hearn’s later works on Japan more than this collection, especially his retellings of ghost stories and other strange tales. His fascination with insects, which shows up here too, is pretty unique. What I find most interesting isn’t just how he describes them, but how he personifies them, sometimes tying their traits to aspects of Japanese culture.

Hearn was born in Greece in 1850 and raised in Ireland. He emigrated at a young age to the United States, where he 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 twenties (1874), later divorced, and then moved to Japan, where he started a family and became well known as Koizumi Yakumo. The Paris Review published a good article about him in 2019, giving readers a broad picture of his life, interests and achievements.

Also, something I didn’t know until recently: Hearn’s grave was only a few blocks north of the building where I lived in Bunkyo-ku in the 1990s, where I first read his work. I took many walks in that area but somehow overlooked Zoshigaya Cemetery in Minami-Ikebukuro, where his grave is located.

Exotics and Retrospectives can be downloaded for free via Project Gutenberg.