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an enduring hatred for the Catholic religion and
a deep interest in exotic alternatives. Existing school records show that, between his arrival in September 1863 and his departure in October 1867, he excelled in English and French, two subjects that would shape his future literary destiny. In September 1869, aged 19, Lafcadio was packed off to the USA, ostensibly to stay with some distant relations with whom the arrangements never worked out. Following on from some difficult experiences in New York, including temporary homelessness, he eventually made his way to Cincinnati, where, after some challenging years, he created for himself an important career in writing and journalism, most particularly by reporting on and sometimes illustrating vivid accounts of horrific accidents and gruesome murders, such as the notorious ‘Tan Yard Case’. Moving on to New Orleans in November 1877, aged 27, he was quickly appointed as associate-editor of the Daily City Item. Living initially on the now-famous Bourbon Street, his experiences of the city’s cultural and spiritual diversity inspired him greatly, particularly in regards to the Creole peoples, and especially in relation to voodoo and food, two topics about which he wrote passionately. In 1884, his Stay Leaves from Strange Literature was published, followed by Gombo Zhèbes, a Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs and La Cuisine Créole, both in 1885. After subsequent jobs with the New Orleans Commercial and the New Orleans Democrat newspapers, his stay in the city was followed by a two-year sojourn in the French West Indies, in particular in Martinique, where he again absorbed all aspects of the diverse cultural influences that were on offer. In 1890, Lafcadio emigrated to Japan, where his writings on that country gained him serious recognition for his sympathetic understanding of that country’s deep and ancient culture. In 1891 he married Koizumi Setsuko, a Japanese lady from a noble Samurai family and with her fathered three sons and a daughter. His great-grandson, Bon Koizumi, supported by his wife Shoko, currently is the Director of the highly-regarded Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum in the Japanese city of Matsue. The exhibition to be seen at Farmleigh Gallery emerged due to conversations held between the Irish artists Stephen Lawlor, Kate MacDonagh, and Ed Miliano, each of whom had spent time making prints in Japan. During visits to the country, Lawlor, who had, in 2017, been responsible for touring a major print exhibition there, based on the poetry of W.B. Yeats, kept hearing, with some disbelief, that there was an Irish writer, known there by his Japanese name of Koizumi Yakumo, who the Japanese of all ages and for over one hundred years revered. Lawlor was to learn that, following Hearn’s arrival in Japan in 1890, his output of articles and books on the country and its people, 40 and especially of its folklore and its ancient social and religious traditions, had garnered for him a reputation, both domestic and international, as a writer with a deeply sympathetic understanding of Japanese culture. During the relatively short fifteen years that he lived in Japan, the author saw published a prolific output of his books, including Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Out of the East (1895), Kokoro (1896), Gleanings in Buddah-Fields (1897), Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), A Japanese Miscellany(1901), Fantastics and Other Fancies and Kōtto (1902), and, finally, his eerie masterpiece, Kwaidan (1904). His Japan, an attempt at Interpretation was posthumously published in 1905. During the intervening years since the death of Lafcadio Hearn, his popularity as a writer has waxed and waned, and in particular he fell out of fashion following the Japanese involvement in World War II. However, he was restored to popular appreciation by the release in 1964 of the film director Masaki Kobayashi’s cinematic sensation Kwaidan. Since then, several successful feature-length films based on his ghost stories have been made, including Tokuzo Tanaka’s The Snow Woman from 1968, which was re-released last October in a three-film box set by Radiance Film called Daiei Gothic. More recent film treatments of Hearn’s stories include the director/ actress Kiki Sugino’s 2017 version of The Show Woman and the Irish-resident director/actor Jack Reynor’s 2019 supernatural short Bainne. Currently in Japan, the English actor Tommy Bastow, who appeared in the magnificent Shogun TV series, is filming a role based on Lafcadio for the upcoming TV series Bakebake, which is due to air in November. As a high-quality example of a successful cultural co-creation initiative, the Kwaidan touring exhibition has already been seen in Japan in the cities of Matsue, Yaizu, Nagoya and Kyoto, and in Ireland at the Ballinglen Museum of Art in Ballycastle, Co. Mayo, the Coastguard Cultural Centre, in Tramore, Co. Waterford, the Hyde Gallery in Sligo, and the Hunt Museum in Limerick. It will be a key feature between April and October in Ireland’s pavilion at the Osaka World Expo and at the end of this year will find a permanent home at Ireland House, the new Irish Embassy complex that is currently being constructed in Tokyo. One of the main goals of the exhibition is to raise the profile, in Ireland especially, of this most important but largely unknown writer, whose Irish roots should be celebrated and whose beautifully crafted and still relevant books and essays should be sought out and read. Through the efforts of the Tuttle book company, his original writings and several biographical appreciations continue to be published - including the recently released biography The Outsider by Steve Kemme - and are always available to purchase at the bookshop in the Chester Beatty in Dublin. He is also the focus in Tramore, Co. Waterford, of the living Previous pages: Left: Kanami Hano Mujina Right: Lafcadio Hearn, 1891, Courtesy of the Koizumi Family Clockwise from above left: Kelvin Mann The Cherry Tree of the Milk Nurse Alice Maher Rokuro-Kubi Niall Naessens Ubazakura, in the Garden of Saihoji Shoko Osugi The Dream of Akinosuke