Complete Myth Ghost & Travel History of Lafcadio Hearn

Known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲), was an international writer, known best for his books about Japan, especially his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. In the United States, Hearn is also known for his writings about the city of New Orleans based on his ten-year stay in that city.


Contents

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904)

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Vol 1 (1894)

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Vol 2 (1894)

Shadowings (1900)

Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904)

Some Chinese Ghosts (1887)

Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1895)

In Ghostly Japan (1899)

The Romance of the Milky Way (1905)

Two Years in the French West Indies (1889)

Books and Habits, from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn (1922)

Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1889)

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904)

The publication of a new volume of Lafcadio Hearn's exquisite studiesof Japan happens, by a delicate irony, to fall in the very month whenthe world is waiting with tense expectation for news of the latestexploits of Japanese battleships. Whatever the outcome of the presentstruggle between Russia and Japan, its significance lies in the factthat a nation of the East, equipped with Western weapons and girdingitself with Western energy of will, is deliberately measuring strengthagainst one of the great powers of the Occident.

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894)

Dwelling among the people, learning their language, making himself in many ways like them, Mr. Hearn has been able to seize and record a host of impressions to which the average traveler and tourist are utter strangers. . . . His volumes form a rich storehouse of delight to the reader, and material for the scholar. Some of the sacred places have been seen through foreign eyes for the first time by Mr. Hearn. He presents us a wonderful picture of the Japanese soul.

Shadowings (1900)

Hearn's spirit wonderfully bridges East and West. He has done some things which scholars could not do. The prose of learning is here transfigured in songs of illumination.

Some Chinese Ghosts (1887)

I think that my best apology for the insignificant size of this volume is the very character of the material composing it. In preparing the legends I sought especially for weird beauty; and I could not forget this striking observation in Sir Walter Scott's "Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad": "The supernatural, though appealing to certain powerful emotions very widely and deeply sown amongst the human race, is, nevertheless, a spring which is peculiarly apt to lose its elasticity by being too much pressed upon."