Japanese Ghost Stories Read online

  Rosa and Charles’s first son, George Robert, was born in July 1849 but died in August the following year. Patrick Lafcadio was born after his parents had moved to Lefkada (from which his middle name derives), by which time they had married, just before his father transferred with his regiment to the West Indies. He left his wife and infant son behind on Lefkada. Two years later, Rosa arrived in Dublin with her son and stayed with her mother-in-law at 48 Lower Gardiner Street.

  In late 1853 Charles returned from the West Indies and stayed for six months in Dublin before departing in March 1854 to participate in the Crimean War. While in Dublin, he rekindled a former romance with a woman who would become his second wife, and Rosa departed, pregnant, to Kythira in mid 1854. She and Charles had agreed to terminate their marriage and Rosa was subsequently paid a considerable sum of money as part of the settlement.4

  Patrick Lafcadio remained in Dublin under the care of a well-off, widowed great-aunt, Mrs Sarah Brenane. He never saw his mother again. Nor did he see his father after 1857, when Charles Hearn left Ireland for a posting in India with his new wife. Despite having been abandoned by both parents, Patrick Lafcadio grew up in privileged, upper-middle-class circumstances, surrounded by servants and the trappings of wealth. Records going back to the early eighteenth century show the Hearns as having a tradition of land ownership, education at Trinity College Dublin, service to the minority (Protestant) Church of Ireland and to the officer corps of the British Army. They also had significant artistic tendencies, exemplified by Patrick Lafcadio’s uncle, Richard Hearn, a painter who passed much of his life in France.

  Terrors on Leeson Street

  Patrick spent the ages of four to thirteen under Mrs Brenane’s care, mostly at her house at 73 Upper Leeson Street in Dublin. These years were crucial to the formation of Lafcadio Hearn the writer. He appears to have been privately educated at home and, most importantly, had untrammelled access to a substantial library of books, which he devoured with precocious ease. From Milton, he acquired a ghostly vocabulary and from Matthew Lewis, author of the scandalous horror novel The Monk (1796), concepts of terror unsuited to his tender years. Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1801) was a specific influence and the resultant nightmares terrorized his sleep.

  Many disturbing shapes vexed young Patrick Lafcadio’s dreams. He begins his essay ‘Nightmare-Touch’ (published in 1900, it is included as an appendix here) by posing the question: ‘What is the fear of ghosts among those who believe in ghosts?’ (p. 207). His answer, ‘that the common fear of ghosts is the fear of being touched by ghosts’ (p. 208), is illustrated by recounting the terrible nightmares he had endured in the ‘Child’s Room’, his bedroom in Mrs Brenane’s house in which he was locked without light to cure his fear of the dark, viewed by his guardian and her servants as a mental disorder. This may have been related to the fact that his mother had revealed symptoms of mental illness during her stay in Dublin and would indeed spend the last decade of her life in a mental hospital in Corfu. If so, this ham-fisted attempt at a remedy failed dismally and only made the problem worse.

  In later life, Hearn described how religious terror also affected his youthful imagination. In draft autobiographical fragments that he wrote in his Tokyo years but never published, he makes it clear that Mrs Brenane had left him alone on the subject of religion at a time when a rigid Catholic–Protestant divide was a dominant fact of Irish life. Mrs Brenane’s own conversion to Roman Catholicism, the religion of her late husband, appears to have been nominal, and Patrick Lafcadio’s religious education was minimal. This state of affairs was drastically altered by a visitor to the household, called ‘Cousin Jane’ by Hearn, a young lady of strongly Roman Catholic views, who reacted with horror when she discovered his profound ignorance of Christianity:

  She stooped and lifted me upon her knees; and after looking all about the room, fixed her eyes on mine with such curiousness that I was frightened. Then she asked: –

  ‘My child, is it really possible you do not know who God is?’

  I remembered answering

  ‘No’.

  – ‘God – who made the world, the beautiful sky, the trees, the birds – you do not know this?’

  – ‘No’.

  ‘Do you not know that God made you and your father and mother and everybody, – and I who am talking to you?’

  – ‘No’.

  ‘Do you not know about heaven and hell, – and that God made you in order that you should be happy in heaven if you are good?’

  – ‘No’.

  The rest of the conversation has faded out of my mind – all except the words – ‘and be sent to hell, to be buried alive in fire for ever and ever – always burning, burning, burning, always – never forgiven, never. Think of the pain of fire – to burn forever and ever.’

  This picture of the universe gave me a shock that probably preserved it in memory. I can still see the face of the speaker as she said those words – the horror upon it, – the pain, – and then she burst into tears. I do not know why, we kissed each other; and I remember nothing more of that day.

  But somehow or other from that time, I never liked my so-called cousin as before. She was kinder to me than any other being; but I felt an instinctive resentment towards her because of what she had told me. It seemed monstrous, ugly, wicked. She became for me a person who thinks horrible things. My world had been horrible enough before. She made it worse. I did not doubt what she said, and yet I was angry because she had said it. After she went away in [the] spring I hoped she would never come back again.5

  Traditional Irish folklore provided further tales and images of supernatural horror that terrified and enthralled the young Hearn. Several of these would find later expression in his Japanese stories. The Irish mythological tale of Tír na nÓg (Land of Youth, a name for the Celtic Otherworld), for instance, has an almost exact counterpart in the Japanese legend of Urashima Tarō, in which a mortal man is lured to an enchanted underwater kingdom to be the husband of a beautiful supernatural woman; Hearn uses the Japanese version in both ‘The Dream of a Summer Day’ (1895) and ‘The Story of Chūgorō’ (1902).

  Hearn grew up in a time when the middle classes in Dublin were discovering the value of the folklore being collected in the Irish countryside, which would form a key component of the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the most prominent of these collectors were the parents of Oscar Wilde, Sir William and Lady Jane (‘Speranza’) Wilde; Sir William published Irish Popular Superstitions in 1852 and his wife followed with two collections of folklore in 1887 and 1890, based largely on work done by Sir William prior to his death in 1876.

  That Hearn was directly affected by this folkloric tradition is evident in a letter that he wrote to the poet William Butler Yeats in 1901, recalling his Irish childhood:

  But forty-five years ago, I was a horrid little boy, ‘with never a crack in his heart’, who lived in Upper Leeson Street, Dublin; and I had a Connaught nurse who told me fairy-tales and ghost-stories. So I ought to love Irish Things, and do.6

  It is important to remember that the fairies of the Irish tradition are man-sized, often evil beings, with grim characteristics also found in the Gothic literary tradition. At that time, a belief in fairies and ghosts as living phenomena with a real power to interact with humans was still common in the Irish countryside. As an adult, Hearn would write:

  Anciently woods and streams were peopled for him [the peasant] with invisible beings; angels and demons walked at his side; the woods had their fairies, the mountains their goblins, the marshes their flitting spirits, and the dead came back to him at times to bear a message or to rebuke a fault. Also the ground that he trod upon, the plants growing in the field, the cloud above him, the lights of heaven all were full of mystery and ghostliness.7

  Hearn’s own belief in the reality of the world of spirits, perhaps an inheritance from his Irish childhood, was not so different and remained constant throughout his life.


  England

  In 1863, when Hearn was thirteen, Mrs Brenane relocated to England, where she used her fortune to support a young, newly married English businessman, Henry Hearn Molyneux, whose mother was a member of an Irish Roman Catholic branch of the Hearn family. Mrs Brenane seems to have been something of a soft touch as Hearn’s father also borrowed heavily from her. Hearn was enrolled in a boarding school run by Roman Catholic priests at Ushaw, near Durham in the north of England. With a regime that married the monastic and the scholastic, it was not a congenial environment for him. Having lost his real mother at the age of four, he now found himself displaced in the affections of his adoptive mother by Molyneux and plunged into a structured life very much the opposite of that which he had enjoyed in Dublin.

  Once the shock of immersive religion had worn off, Hearn underwent a profound spiritual transformation, rejecting not just Roman Catholicism but Christianity as a whole, for which he substituted instead the ideals of ancient Greek civilization. This liberated him from monotheism and also provided him with a connection to his mother’s heritage. The fear he had experienced in Mrs Brenane’s house slowly dissipated and he would later write:

  The terror was not yet gone; but I now wanted only reason to disbelieve all that I had feared and hated. In the sunshine, in the green of the fields, in the blue of the sky, I found a gladness before unknown. Within myself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for I knew not what were quickening and thrilling. I looked for beauty, and everywhere found it: in the passing faces – in attitudes and motions – in the poise of plants and trees – in long white clouds – in faint-blue lines of far-off hills. At moments the simple pleasure of life would quicken to a joy so large, so deep, that it frightened me. But at other times there would come to me a new and strange sadness – a shadowy and inexplicable pain.8

  Hearn emerged from his youth having rejected organized religion but yet profoundly spiritual in outlook, and he would continue to seek deeper meanings, not only in the classical world but also in the twin religions of Japan, Buddhism and Shintō, and their associated folklore. The latter, an indigenous animistic belief system, caught his attention early on in his Japanese sojourn and would be crucial to his interpretation of Japan, although it would be Buddhism that would infuse much of his horror writing.

  A playground accident in Ushaw at the age of sixteen left Hearn without the sight of his left eye and, he believed, disfigured; he would be self-conscious about his appearance for the rest of his life (he always turned the left side of his face away from the camera when photographs were being taken). Fresh disaster struck a year later when Henry Molyneux failed in business, wiping out Mrs Brenane’s fortune. Hearn had to be withdrawn from Ushaw and he was sent to live with a former maid of Mrs Brenane in the East End of London for two years.

  While Hearn’s depiction of the East End as a place of murder and mayhem may have been exaggerated, the area was notorious for its appalling poverty, as depicted in the contemporaneous engravings of the French artist Gustave Doré, published in his London: A Pilgrimage (1872), and it would be the haunt of Jack the Ripper two decades later. Even as a youth, Hearn’s attention was attracted by the culture of the common people; in this case it was the cockney balladeers who composed songs on themes suggested by contemporary events that stirred the popular emotions – suicides, murders, political developments – and performed them on the streets. Hearn saw them as a continuation of the ‘habits and customs that gave English literature a great deal of its true and noble verse’.9 This keen interest in native traditions and local culture would be sustained throughout his later sojourn in Japan, and in his next home – America.

  America: ‘Dismal Man’ and Reinvention

  Overall, the main effect of Hearn’s stay in London was to leave him with a horror of large, industrialized cities that he would never lose. At the age of nineteen he was given the fare to cross the Atlantic and arrived in New York, another large city with which he would never come to terms, in September 1869. He quickly moved on to Cincinnati, where he was taken on by an English printer, before making a tentative start in journalism by submitting freelance articles to local newspapers, initially for the Boston Investigator, a freethought weekly, under the pseudonym ‘Fiat Lux’ (‘Let There be Light’), in 1870 and 1871.

  His big break came in November 1874 when news of a sensational crime – the ‘Tan-yard Murder’ – broke and Hearn was assigned to cover it for the Cincinnati Enquirer as the regular staff were not available.10 He transformed the lurid basics of the story – illicit sex and extreme violence – into a dramatic narrative that reads more like an eye-witness account than the second-hand reconstruction it actually was. The story was picked up by newspapers across America and Hearn was instantly established as a journalist. Assigned to the police beat of the Enquirer, he specialized in reporting on the most debased and squalid stories and revelled in his self-styled persona as ‘the Enquirer’s Dismal Man, whose rueful countenance was flushed with the hope of hearing or seeing something more than the usually horrible’.11

  In Cincinnati, Hearn dropped his first name, Patrick or Paddy, and adopted his middle name, Lafcadio, by which he would be known from this point on. His change of name signalled a reinvention of his identity. At the time, the Orient was seen as stretching from Eastern Europe to the Far East, taking in North Africa to the south. Hearn, by virtue of his Greek lineage and new name, could claim to be ‘Oriental’ according to the perceptions of the era.

  The police beat brought Hearn into contact with the thriving black culture of the city’s ‘levee’, or docklands, on the banks of the Ohio river. One of his fellow journalists in Cincinnati, Henry Krehbiel, was keenly interested in ‘exotic’ music and invited Hearn to join him in an opium den to hear Chinese music played on authentic instruments. The pair also collaborated in collecting black music, although a planned book on the subject never materialized. When he later moved to New Orleans, Hearn sought African elements in Louisiana’s Creole music, as he would also do in the West Indies.12 As an early, sympathetic explorer of the music of black America, Hearn was engaging with the roots of what would become jazz, the blues and, ultimately, rock music in the twentieth century. The black population of Cincinnati attracted Hearn’s interest, in a way that mainstream white culture – its more sensational manifestations aside – did not.

  Hearn’s disregard for the racial divisions of the time brought him notoriety when, in June 1874, he married Alethea (‘Mattie’) Foley, a biracial woman who had been born into slavery. A servant in the boarding house where he was staying, Mattie was a gifted storyteller, of supernatural tales especially. As interracial marriage was then illegal in Ohio, Hearn had broken the law as well as scandalized respectable opinion and, in any event, the marriage soon foundered. When word of the marriage leaked out, he lost his newspaper position, although he did subsequently find another, with the Cincinnati Commercial, albeit it at a lower salary.

  In 1877, Hearn shook the dust of Cincinnati off his feet and moved south to New Orleans. Cincinnati would prove to be the pivot of his life. He had arrived as Paddy Hearn, a nineteen-year-old with shattered confidence and uncertain prospects. He left as Lafcadio Hearn, a successful journalist, and he would – with just a few short intervals – be a well-paid professional writer and educator for the rest of his life.

  With his move to New Orleans in 1877, Hearn changed direction once more. He again established himself as a successful journalist but now, instead of the police beat and its associated horrors, he became a littérateur and editorial writer, much respected and even lionized as a local literary celebrity. Having written for both the New Orleans Daily City Item and New Orleans Democrat between 1878 and 1881, he settled into a comfortable niche at the New Orleans Times-Democrat from 1881 until his departure for the West Indies in 1887. He forged lifelong friendships with the Times-Democrat editor, Page Baker, an old-style Southern gentleman, and with a fellow staff member, the able and supportive Elizabeth Bisland. B
island published The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, a substantial two-volume biography, two years after his death.

  Much as the substitution of ‘Lafcadio’ for ‘Paddy’ helped obscure the Irish elements of Hearn’s childhood – whose upper-class background was in any case atypical of the majority of Irish immigrants in the USA – so now Hearn suppressed his radical Cincinnati past, his failed marriage especially. He adopted the coloration of the antebellum genteel culture of the old South and, although he explored the local Creole culture with relish, he now adopted the pose of a superior observer of scientific bent.

  Hearn had begun an immersion in French literature while still in Cincinnati; in New Orleans, where he lived in the French Quarter in the midst of a dwindling francophone minority, it flowered into extensive translations in newspapers and then books. One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882), translations of the work of Théophile Gautier, provided him with an early book; he also translated works by Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Pierre Loti, Alphonse Daudet, Charles Didier and Gérard de Nerval. Translation of risqué contemporary French writing allowed Hearn to indulge his taste for sensuality and violence, and placed him intellectually as much outside the mainstream of Victorian respectability as his gutter journalism had done in Cincinnati. He was so engrossed in this fictional French world that it might be argued that he was almost a French writer writing in English. Hearn’s attempt to remodel English on French lines proved, however, to be a false direction, as the ornate forms of his French masters simply did not lend themselves to the English language. His engagement with Creole life was reflected in Gombo Zhèbes: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs, Selected from Six Creole Dialects and La Cuisine Creole: A Collection of Culinary Receipts from Leading Chefs and Noted Creole Housewives, Who Have Made New Orleans Famous for Its Cuisine, both published in 1885.