42 Facts About Lafcadio Hearn

Yakumo Koizumi, born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, was a British and Japanese National of Greek-Irish descent who was a writer, translator, and teacher who introduced the culture and literature of Japan to the West.

Lafcadio Hearn's writings offered unprecedented insight into Japanese culture, especially his collections of legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

In Japan, Lafcadio Hearn married Koizumi Setsuko, with whom he had four children.

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born on the Greek Ionian Island of Lefkada on 27 June 1850.

Lafcadio Hearn's mother was a Greek named Rosa Cassimati, a native of the Greek island of Kythira, while his father, Charles Bush Hearn, a British Army medical officer, was of Irish and English descent, who was stationed in Lefkada during the British protectorate of the United States of the Ionian Islands.

Lafcadio Hearn was baptized Patrikios Lefcadios Hearn in the Greek Orthodox Church, but he seems to have been called "Patrick Lefcadio Kassimati Charles Hearn" in English; the middle name "Lafcadio" was given to him in honour of the island where he was born.

Charles's Protestant mother, Elizabeth Holmes Lafcadio Hearn, had difficulty accepting Rosa's Greek Orthodox views and lack of education; she was illiterate and spoke no English.

Charles Lafcadio Hearn was assigned to the Crimean Peninsula, again leaving his pregnant wife and child in Ireland.

Lafcadio Hearn had been left in the care of Sarah Brenane.

Lafcadio Hearn married his childhood sweetheart, Alicia Goslin, in July 1857, and left with his new wife for a posting in Secunderabad, a city in India, where they had three daughters prior to Alicia's death in 1861.

Lafcadio never saw his father again: Charles Hearn died of malaria in the Gulf of Suez in 1866.

In 1857, at age seven and despite the fact that both his parents were still alive, Lafcadio Hearn became the permanent ward of his great aunt, Sarah Brenane.

Lafcadio Hearn divided her residency between Dublin in the winter months, and her husband's estate at Tramore, County Waterford, on the southern Irish coast, and a house at Bangor, North Wales.

Lafcadio Hearn began exploring Brenane's library and read extensively in Greek literature, especially myths.

In 1861, Hearn's great aunt, aware that Lafcadio was turning away from Catholicism and at the urging of Henry Hearn Molyneux, a relative of her late husband, he was sent to a Catholic college in France, but was disgusted with the life and gave up the Roman Catholic faith.

In 1863, again at the suggestion of Molyneux, Lafcadio Hearn was enrolled at St Cuthbert's College, Ushaw, a Catholic seminary at what is the University of Durham.

At age 16, while at Ushaw, Lafcadio Hearn injured his left eye in a schoolyard mishap.

Lafcadio Hearn suffered from severe myopia, so his injury left him permanently with poor vision, requiring him to carry a magnifying glass for close work and a pocket telescope to see anything beyond a short distance.

Lafcadio Hearn avoided eyeglasses, believing they would gradually weaken his vision further.

Lafcadio Hearn eventually befriended the English printer and communalist Henry Watkin, who employed him in his printing business, helped find him various odd jobs, lent him books from his library, including utopianists Fourier, Dixon and Noyes, and gave Hearn a nickname which stuck with him for the rest of his life, The Raven, from the Poe poem.

Lafcadio Hearn frequented the Cincinnati Public Library, which at that time had an estimated 50,000 volumes.

Lafcadio Hearn went to work for the rival newspaper The Cincinnati Commercial.

The Enquirer offered to re-hire him after his stories began appearing in the Commercial and its circulation began increasing, but Lafcadio Hearn, incensed at the paper's behavior, refused.

Lafcadio Hearn lived in New Orleans for nearly a decade, writing first for the newspaper Daily City Item beginning in June 1878, and later for the Times Democrat.

Lafcadio Hearn began at the Item as a news editor, expanding to include book reviews of Bret Harte and Emile Zola, summaries of pieces in national magazines such as Harper's, and editorial pieces introducing Buddhism and Sanskrit writings.

Lafcadio Hearn gave up carving the woodcuts after six months when he found the strain was too great for his eye.

Lafcadio Hearn continued his work translating French authors into English: Gerard de Nerval, Anatole France, and most notably Pierre Loti, an author who influenced Hearn's own writing style.

Lafcadio Hearn wrote enthusiastically of New Orleans, but wrote of the city's decay, "a dead bride crowned with orange flowers".

Lafcadio Hearn published in Harper's Weekly the first known written article about Filipinos in the United States, the Manilamen or Tagalogs, one of whose villages he had visited at Saint Malo, southeast of Lake Borgne in St Bernard Parish, Louisiana.

At the time he lived there, Lafcadio Hearn was little known, and even now he is little known for his writing about New Orleans, except by local cultural devotees.

Lafcadio Hearn spent two years in Martinique and in addition to his writings for the magazine, produced two books: Two Years in the French West Indies and Youma, The Story of a West-Indian Slave, both published in 1890.

In 1890, Lafcadio Hearn went to Japan with a commission as a newspaper correspondent, which was quickly terminated.

Lafcadio Hearn became a Japanese citizen, assuming the legal name Koizumi Yakumo in 1896 after accepting a teaching position in Tokyo; Koizumi is his wife's surname and Yakumo is from yakumotatsu, a poetic modifier word for Izumo Province, which he translated as "the Place of the Issuing of Clouds".

On 26 September 1904, Lafcadio Hearn died of heart failure in Tokyo at the age of 54.

Lafcadio Hearn's grave is at the Zoshigaya Cemetery in Tokyo's Toshima district.

Consequently, Lafcadio Hearn became known to the world by his writings concerning Japan.

Admirers of Lafcadio Hearn's work have included Ben Hecht, John Erskine, Malcolm Cowley and Jorge Luis Borges.

Lafcadio Hearn was a major translator of the short stories of Guy de Maupassant.

Lafcadio Hearn won a wide following in Japan, where his books were translated and remain popular to the present day.

Lafcadio Hearn's books are treasured here as a trove of legends and folk tales that otherwise might have vanished because no Japanese had bothered to record them.

The first museum in Europe for Lafcadio Hearn was inaugurated in Lefkada, Greece, his birthplace, on 4 July 2014, as Lefcadio Hearn Historical Center.

Yukari is a powerful Yokai who helped create the border separating Gensokyo from the outside world, and Maribel Lafcadio Hearn is a college student who lives in Kyoto who is able to see Gensokyo in her dreams.