Long before his Japanese years, Lafcadio’s journalism and travel essays, at their best, had captured the lives of people and communities in plain sight but were rarely seen or duly noted. In particular, he had an eye—pun intended—for the bracing and the macabre. He saw the “ghostly” walking among us long before he became famous for depicting the ghosts of Japan. His travel essays about Martinique, as the later ones devoted to Japan, were admittedly overly sentimental, marred by racial biases, and occluded by exoticism, like he was, but his unusual choices of subjects often breathed intriguing life into these pieces nonetheless. Unconventional, idiosyncratic, and often holding within them Lafcadio’s personal secrets, the essays required explanation and context, like the writer himself, in order to unfold and divulge fully what distinguished them within the literary landscape of their time and now ours.

Lefkada to Dublin

Lafcadio’s traveling life began at the age of two, when he accompanied his mother Rosa Cassimati, on a sea journey from Lefkada to Dublin to live with the family of his father, Charles Bush Hearn, an Irishman and surgeon in the British Army. Two years later, Rosa would make the reverse journey but without her son by her side. Left under the guardianship of a wealthy, widowed great-aunt, who had promised Rosa that Lafcadio would inherit the estate, he would have equally few memories of his father, who soon remarried and began a new life and family in India. Lafcadio grew up in a series of boarding schools in England and France, where he acquired an excellent education and a lifelong physical impairment. At the age of sixteen, he lost vision in his left eye in a schoolyard mishap. The milky film that permanently covered the left eye and the subsequent bulging that occurred in the right one, as it strained to do the work for both, contributed and compounded his sense of self-doubt and distrust that would be his constant companions throughout his adult life.

Lafcadio, at the age of nineteen, learned once again that he could not trust those who were charged with his care. His promised inheritance was not honored by the executor of his great-aunt’s estate, and he was instead given a one-way ticket to the United States.

Cincinnati