Since that day of sugar and cornbread, I have felt an insatiable pull and a keen affection toward this literary wanderer. I have followed Lafcadio—we are on a first name basis now—to his birthplace on Lefkada1, an Ionian island perfumed in late May by golden ginestra blossoms, exuding the mingled scent of freshly baked butter cakes, honey, and fresh thyme. I have found the two-story house on a narrow lane, which begged for sunlight even at midday, where his mother Rosa Cassimati gave birth to him.

I have found Lafcadio’s grave in Zōshigaya Cemetery, a sprawling bucolic city of the dead, in the Toshima ward of Tokyo. Meiji-Period Tokyo was not his beloved city. It was too big, loud, and, worst of all, too modern. Yet, Tokyo was the city where he lived for the majority of his fourteen years in Japan and the city of his final reinvention. Upon his death, Lafcadio was a university professor, respected scholar and writer, loving husband, and a father who ate his meals every night with his four children around the table.

Smaller and situated a little behind Lafcadio’s headstone was Setsu’s. The tidy burial plot they share had small offerings of flowers and candles already there on the day I visited. I left for them my own East-West tribute: for Lafcadio a matcha-flavored Kit Kat2 bar because he preferred the traditional flavors of Japan, and for Setsu a wasabi-flavored Kit Kat because she was a renegade and bold for joining her life with his.

The Japanese city most closely associated with Lafcadio is Matsue, a once-remote samurai stronghold, located in Shimane Prefecture3 on the western coast of Honshu, the country’s main island.

Matsue was where Lafcadio first lived in Japan, its environs the setting for many of his most evocative essays, and where he met Setsu, his second wife.

Walk into the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum, a compact museum located in Matsue, as I did on a snowy, blustery March day in 2015 when the city was hosting its annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in honor of its adopted literary son, and you will find vitrines devoted to Lafcadio’s Japanese life: his collection of Japanese pipes, their long thin stems and diminutive bowls, each a branch and bud reaching for the sun, and the English-language lessons that he wrote on old newspapers for his sons with phrases that read like a found poem, “How yellow? How red? How sweet?”