Lafcadio Hearn – A Short Story Collection: 'Then the folk were afraid, and left the room''

Lafcadio Hearn was born on the 27th June 1850 on the Ionian isle of Levkás in Greece to a British Army officer and a Greek Mother.

His father, fearing for his career prospects at being married to a Greek Orthodox wife, sent them to Dublin whilst he continued to advance his career with further postings. Life there was difficult for mother and son. His father returned, wounded and traumatised, when Lafcadio was three. He annulled the marriage and she remarried but had to give up care of Lafcadio to her sister-in law.

After brief periods for Catholic education in England and France he emigrated to Ohio in the United States when he was 19, taking on a series of casual jobs before embarking on a career as a journalist, publishing poems and essays in Cincinnati. It was whilst here that he began a side-line in translating, starting with Gautier and Flaubert. He married in 1874 to a 20 year old African-American woman in violation of Ohio's anti-miscegenation law. The marriage soon failed.

In 1877 he relocated to New Orleans to write on a variety of themes before picking up a two year assignment from Harper’s to write in the West Indies, where he also wrote his first novel.

In 1890 Harper’s sent him to Japan. Here he left journalism and took the remarkable decision to become a schoolteacher in the north of Japan. Enraptured by the culture he was driven to explain it in various Western publications to those who had little, if any, knowledge of its culture. Within the year he had fallen in love with, and married, a high-born Japanese lady, together they would have four children.

In 1895 he became a Japanese national and took the name Koizumi Yakumo, Koizumi being his wife’s family name.

The following few years, whilst a professor of Literature at the Imperial University of Japan, were his most creative and admired period.

Lafcadio Hearn died of heart failure on the 26th of September 1904, in Tokyo, Japan shortly before leaving to deliver a series of lectures at Cornell University in New York State. He was 54.

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