Concerning Lafcadio Hearn; With a Bibliography by Laura Stedman

Lafcadio Hearn remains one of the most fascinating figures in Anglo-Japanese literary history: an Irish-Greek wanderer who became Japan's most evocative interpreter of the supernatural. George M. Gould, a physician and close friend, knew Hearn during his final years in Tokyo, and this biographical study draws on that intimate acquaintance. The book traces Hearn's fractured childhood, his restless migrations across America and the Caribbean, and his eventual transformation into the man who would take a Japanese name and make the ghosts of old Japan live for Western readers. Gould offers both personal recollection and bibliographic rigor, attempting to pin down a man who seemed deliberately elusive, a writer who invented himself as deliberately as he invented his ghostly tales. The text grapples with the paradox at the heart of Hearn's legacy: how a man of such apparent rootlessness created works so deeply rooted in place. Essential reading for anyone interested in literary biography, the history of Anglo-Japanese cultural exchange, or the strange romantic figures who have always populated the edges of literature.