Even by the standards of the Victorian era, when men of letters were expected to be widely accomplished, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was an extraordinary figure. Born in Greece and raised in Ireland and England, Hearn moved to the United States in 1869 and worked as a crime reporter, travel writer and translator. He penned the first English-language Cajun cookbook and contributed to magazines like The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's before accepting a writing assignment in Japan in 1890.
Settling in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture, Hearn was struck by the simple dignity of a country not yet blighted by industrialization, and he put these feelings into books that won him a role as Japan's foremost Western chronicler. His best-selling accounts of Meiji-era life satisfied American and European appetites for stories about this remote and mysterious land, especially the two-volume Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) and the posthumous Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1906). In 1891, Hearn married a samurai's daughter and changed his name to Yakumo Koizumi, going on to work as a professor of English at Tokyo University. He became a Japanese citizen in 1896 and fathered four children before his death of a heart attack in Tokyo at age 54. metropolis.japantoday.com
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