On the 26th of September, 1904—shortly after completing . . . [a] last letter . . . —while walking on the veranda in the twilight he sank down suddenly as if the whole fabric of life had crumbled within, and after a little space of speechlessness and pain, his long quest was over. . . .

Afterword

Afterword

Sugar and cornbread led me to Lafcadio Hearn.

Specifically, this question: was it more common to find sugar in the traditional cornbread recipes from the North or the South of the United States? I was finishing my second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, which is set in North Carolina, a state located well below the Mason-Dixon line. I wrote in Bitter that sugar was more often found in Yankee cornbread. After years as a food-centric novelist and essayist, I knew that a surprising number of my readers would have deep, historical knowledge of cornbread recipes—perhaps even wrote their PhD theses on the subject—and would agitate and foment if my assertion was made in error. I had to find a definitive answer, a citation from a trusted source, or suffer the ignoble consequences.

In my small but well-stocked kitchen in Brooklyn, I had culinary reference books of all sorts, and among them was The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Foodways. As I flipped through its pages for cornbread corroboration, an unusual, geographically difficult-to-pinpoint name caught my eye: “Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) Journalist, Author.” The entry began with his birth on the Greek island of Lefkada; a lonely childhood in Dublin, Ireland; an unexplained emigration as a young man to Cincinnati, Ohio; and a subsequent migration southward to New Orleans, Louisiana. Then the entry offered the following:

While Hearn lived in New Orleans, he . . . opened the short-lived 5-Cent Restaurant and collected recipes of local dishes from the homes he visited. Hearn published these recipes in 1885 as La Cuisine Créole, which became the earliest published collection of New Orleans and Louisiana recipes. . . . Hearn’s work in La Cuisine Créole continues to serve as an invaluable record of the history of Creole food, New Orleans, and Louisiana.

After making, and writing, history in New Orleans, Hearn moved to Japan, taught English, changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo, married a Japanese woman who was the daughter of a samurai . . . and continued his voluminous writing . . . . Hearn secured a place in history after publishing numerous volumes . . . particularly Japanese fairy tales.

The entry ended with the country and date of his passing: “Japan, September 26, 1904.”

I immediately reread this apocryphal-seeming biography.

Here was a writer who had made the reverse migration that I made in my own life. Hearn went from West to East. More significantly, he chose East over West. Ironically, he selected Japan, a country that was moving full speed in the exact opposite direction. During the Meiji Period (1868–1912), Japan was in the midst of an unprecedented and eager, albeit conflicted, adoption and integration of Western ideas and ideals.