In 1890, Lafcadio traveled to Japan for Harper’s Weekly, and he never left. He was hoping for a glimpse of the “Old Japan” before it disappeared altogether in the Meiji Period’s rush to modernize. With its major ports forcibly opened by the U.S. since 1868, Japan was well on its way to becoming a country where the man-powered jinrikisha shared the city streets with the horse-drawn carriages, where the landscape, unchanged for centuries, was suddenly marred by telegraph poles and their sagging lines, crisscrossed by railroad tracks, and punctuated by the din of steam engine trains.

Landing first in Yokohama, a port city located south of Tokyo, Lafcadio jotted down notes and first impressions that later became “My First Day in the Orient,” the opening chapter of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, a book of essays that would commence his status as a Western expert on Japan. He underwent a literal shift of perspective in this essay. Standing at 1.6 meters, he was certainly never considered tall, towering, or a giant among men, especially in Cincinnati or New Orleans, but in Yokohama Lafcadio described his new surroundings as “elfish everything” with the words “small” and “little” repeating themselves over and over again, as if tumbling gleefully from his pen. Lafcadio had transformed into the “tall foreigner” and become the undeniable, unmistakable “stranger.” His alienation, which he perceived now as wholly positive and invigorating, was most evident when he wrote of the beauty, movement, and lifelike qualities of the Japanese characters8 emblazoned on signs, on the noren of shops—the split pieces of fabric that marked their entrances—and on the clothing of their deliverymen. The written language around him was no longer defined by its utilitarian or communicative function. This written language was instead decorative, artistic, and a medium for the mysterious and the unknown.

During his fourteen years in Japan, Lafcadio would never become truly fluent in Japanese, spoken or written, but he would continue to benefit from his ongoing encounters with a language so foreign and indecipherable to his own. A writer estranged from the language of his everyday surroundings, he would be free to concentrate and to hone his literary language.

An offer to teach English at a middle school soon brought Lafcadio to Matsue, a geographically remote city along the Sea of Japan, where he found a region of the country that was to him suitably unfamiliar and “unspoiled.” In the beginning months of 1891, he met there Koizumi Setsu, the impoverished daughter of a former samurai family. She worked for him as a live-in maid, caring for him during a bout of illness during his first and only winter in Matsue, becoming his mistress, and marrying him thereafter.