japanese ghost stories by lafcadio hearn

Hearn went to a Catholic college in France, but was disgusted with the life and gave up the Roman Catholic faith.Īt 19, Hearn was sent to live in the United States of America, where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. His aunt died while he was still a youth. During his teens, he was injured in a playground accident and lost the vision in his left eye. In his early years, he received an informal education, but records show that by 1865 he was attending Ushaw Roman Catholic College, Durham. His father's brother, Richard, was at one time a well-known member of the Barbizon set of artists, and Lafcadio seemed to have inherited his family's artistic and rather bohemian tastes. Lafcadio’s brother was sent to a boarding school, and he was placed in the care of an aunt in Wales, who was a Roman Catholic. His mother returned to Greece, and his father took service in India. Hearn’s father moved the family to Dublin, Ireland, when he was two years old, and his parents soon divorced. (This may have been because they did not recognize the legitimacy of the Greek Orthodox Church to conduct a marriage ceremony for a Protestant.) It is not clear that Hearn's parents were ever legally married, and the Irish Protestant relatives on his father's side considered him to have been born out of wedlock.

Lafcadio was initially baptized Patricio Lefcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn in the Greek Orthodox Church. He was the son of Surgeon-major Charles Hearn (of King's County, Ireland), who had been stationed in Lefkada during the British occupation of the islands, and Rosa Antonia Kassimati, a native of Kythera, another of the Ionian Islands. Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born June 27, 1850, in Lefkada (the origin of his middle name), one of the Greek Ionian Islands. Hearn is especially well-known for his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Hearn's books about Japan, Exotics and Retrospective (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), A Japanese Miscellany (1901), and Japan, an Attempt at an Interpretation (1904), helped to introduce Japan to the Western world. In 1891, Hearn married a samurai, Setsu Koizumi, and in 1895, he became a naturalized Japanese, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo. He soon took up a teaching position in Matsue, a town in western Japan on the coast of the Sea of Japan. In 1890, Harper’s sent Hearn to Japan as a newspaper correspondent, and there he found his home and his greatest inspiration.

Japanese ghost stories by lafcadio hearn