In “From Hoki to Oki,” also in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Setsu was Lafcadio’s invisible travel companion. He referred to a Japanese male colleague who traveled with him to the remote Oki Islands, but he did not acknowledge the presence of the Japanese woman who was by then his wife, his interpreter, and eventually his trusted literary compiler and collaborator. According to Setsu’s memoir, Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn, translated into English and published in the U.S. in 1918, her main service to him was her storytelling—often multiple tellings at his insistence—of fairy tales and ghost stories remembered from her youth, gathered from her family members and neighbors, and selected from secondhand books and other publications. Setsu read and wrote in Japanese but not in English. The language that she and Lafcadio used to communicate with each other was a mix of simplified English and Japanese, populated with odd phrases and terms coined by husband and wife, which they and eventually their four children would refer to as “Hearn’s language.”

In “From Hoki to Oki,” Lafcadio also included a rare acknowledgement of feeling “tried” by the excessive curiosity shown toward him as a foreigner by the inhabitants of a remote village. He insisted that their attention was without malice or “roughness.” Setsu, in her memoir, wrote of yet another incident in a different village, where people threw sand at him and refused to perform their festival dance in his presence, which, to me, did not sound like acts devoid of hostility. Lafcadio wrote that he was usually “dressed like a Japanese” and therefore “excited little attention among the common people.” He claimed to pass as a “curious-looking Japanese from some remote part of the empire.” He was writing here a fiction about his day-to-day life within a country where he was clearly determined to be at home.

“From Hoki to Oki” contained some of Lafcadio’s most gorgeous descriptions of the Japanese landscape and specifically of its shorelines. For a man with only one eye, a myopic one at that, he could render with seeming precision and delicacy the colors and tones that graced each rock formation, grouping of vegetation, and body of water. He also imbued them with emotions and gave them a point of view. The hills were “silent.” The vegetation was “somber.” The cliffs were “sinister.” His poetic sensibility was combining here with Japanese animism, the belief that the trees, rocks, rivers, and other elements of the natural world possessed within them a spirit or god. Lafcadio was indeed becoming a remarkable hybrid of West and East. Though he adored and valued the distant past, his life and his writings about Japan were, in this respect, profoundly modern.