![]() ![]() Japan, which had only recently emerged from over two centuries of relative isolation, should have been a dream assignment. “The pattern of Hearn’s life,” Christopher Benfey wrote, “was to arrive in a place just as what he loved there was on the point of disappearing.” In Cincinnati, he had written about the music of the black community that lived on the city’s riverfront in New Orleans, about the songs, food, and folkways of the Creole population (including a book that contains the first published recipe for gumbo). Just shy of forty years old, he was a popular journalist and novelist, his work marked by a hatred of modern industrial life and a fascination with what he called “survivals”-traditions or folktales that he hoped would provide a living link to a more ancient form of narrative. In 1890 Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan on a reporting assignment for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Lafcadio Hearn and his second wife, Setsuko Koizumi, circa 1891 ![]()
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