Rest assured, Husband, the third telling of how Lafcadio Hearn became Koizumi Yakumo will withstand Kazuo’s scrutiny, Iwao’s, Kiyoshi’s, Suzuko’s, and their children’s and their children’s children. It will go into the world as the Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn by Koizumi Setsu and feed the houses of Koizumi and Inagaki, my aim since the age of twelve.

These pages that I have shown you tonight, Yakumo, they are still weak with truths. I will shore them up by removing more bones.

Elizabeth Bisland: (1861–1929)

ELIZABETH BISLAND

(1861–1929)

. . . .

NEW YORK, 1906

It was while Lafcadio was living in the house by the Ōhashi bridge that he married, in January, 1891, Setsu Koizumi, a lady of high samurai rank. The revolution in Japan which overthrew the power of the Shōguns and restored the Mikado to temporal power had broken the feudal structure of Japanese society, and with the downfall of the daimyōs . . . fell the lesser nobility, the samurai, or “two-sworded” men. Many of these sank into as great poverty as that which befel [sic] the émigrés after the French Revolution, and among those whose fortunes were entirely ruined were the Koizumis. Sentarō Nishida, who appears to have been a sort of head master of the Jinjō-chūgakkō, in special charge of the English department, was of one of the lesser samurai families, his mother having been an intimate of the Koizumi household before the decline of their fortunes. Because of his fluency in English, as well as because of what seems to have been a peculiar sweetness and dignity of character, he soon became the interpreter and special friend of the new English teacher. It was through his mediation that the marriage was arranged. Under ordinary circumstances a Japanese woman of rank would consider an alliance with a foreigner an inexpugnable disgrace; but the circumstances of the Koizumis were not ordinary, and whatever may have been the secret feelings of the girl of twenty-two, it is certain that she immediately became passionately attached to her husband, and the marriage continued to the end to be a very happy one. It was celebrated by the local rites, as to have married according to English laws, under the then existing treaties, would have deprived her of her Japanese citizenship and obliged them to remove to one of the open ports; but the question of the legality of the marriage and of her future troubled Hearn from the beginning, and finally obliged him to renounce his English allegiance and become a subject of the Mikado in order that she and her children might never suffer from any complications or doubts as to their position. This could only be achieved by his adoption into his wife’s family. He took their name, Koizumi, which signifies “Little Spring,” and for personal title chose the classical term for Izumo province, Yakumo, meaning “Eight Clouds”—or “the place of the issuing clouds”—and also being the first word of the oldest known Japanese poem.