At the age of six, I had come to the U.S. with my family as refugees from the Vietnam War. As a child, the life-and-death decision to leave all that we knew behind was not mine to make.

As an adult and as a writer, I am fascinated by those who would elect such a fate, choosing to live in exile from country, family, language, and the physical and emotional assemblage of home.

I wanted to know what propelled Lafcadio Hearn, and whether he, after circumnavigating the globe, was finally at home and at peace.

Because I understand the world best through the language of food, I began by reading Hearn’s cookbook, which became the first volume of my still-expanding Hearnian library. From La Cuisine Créole, I learned that he was thorough, verging on the obsessive. For soups alone, he included forty-five recipes. I also learned that Hearn was a man of his time, limited by nineteenth century biases. “[T]he ingredients of certain dishes should be carefully weighed and tested as though emanating from a laboratory. Few female cooks think of this, but men with their superior instinctive reasoning power are more governed by law and abide more closely to rule; therefore are better cooks and command higher prices for services,” he opined in the first chapter.

Hearn’s cookbook is now shelved side by side with Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Ghostly Japan, Kwaidan, and a musty first edition of Two Years in the French West Indies, among many others. During his fifty-four years of life, he translated (from French to English) and wrote (in English) nearly thirty books, fiction and nonfiction, most notably about Japanese folklore, ghost stories, and fairy tales. Posthumously, his prodigious bibliography grew to include edited collections of his voluminous correspondence and early journalism, as well as memoirs written by his Japanese wife, Koizumi Setsu, and his eldest son, Koizumi Kazuo, Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn and Father and I, respectively, and the many biographies that, for me, have raised more questions than they have answered about this peripatetic writer.

After eight years of researching and writing about Hearn, if I could add to the New Encyclopedia entry where I first met him, it would read as follows:

An immigrant thrice over, Lafcadio Hearn was known by different names wherever he landed. Whether he was Patricio (on Lefkada), Patrick (in Ireland), Lafcadio (in the United States) or Yakumo (in Japan), he remained a consummate outsider and awkward introvert, blind in one eye. Hearn’s prolific body of work was animated by his travels, self-inventions and reinventions, obdurate search for belonging, attraction to the “exotic” and “the Other,” and a belief in the transformative power of a good meal. His life and his writings stand as testament to the unexpected and the life-changing that necessarily occur, when disparate peoples, cultures, and languages meet.