Instinctively and compulsively, I have written my own version of Lafcadio’s life in The Sweetest Fruits, a novel that reimagined the possibilities, impulses, and desires that led him to Japan. My gut told me that he must have been hungry: for love, family, a sense of inclusion, and, of course, a daily meal that fed the soul as well as the body. Shoring up intuition were my own life experiences that mirrored his: a food-centric novelist, same as a cookbook author (twice over), was always hungry and one who was displaced, I knew, was famished.

As an adult, I have asked myself many times if I would have made the same choice that my parents made at the end of the Vietnam War. Would I have been so clear-headed, mentally tough, optimistic, and brave?

To me, these are the necessary traits that all refugees, immigrants, and migrants must possess in order to leave home and then to survive in a new one.

To me, there is a direct, taut line between this line of inquiry and the primal questions that are at the heart of all my novels: What brings you here, and what makes you stay?

Lafcadio’s answers, awash in wanderlust and transformations, were not exactly my own, but I recognized in his life and Elizabeth’s, Rosa’s, Alethea’s, and Setsu’s, a theme of my own life journey: being lost and finding a way home again.

This is a revised version of an essay in German language that appeared in Lafcadio Hearn, Vom Lasterleben am Kai. Grosse Reportagen, herausgegeben und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Monique Truong (C.H. Beck, 2017).

1  In The Sweetest Fruits, Lefkada is referred to as Santa Maura, its name from 1815–1864, when it was part of a British protectorate known as the United States of the Ionian Islands. Likewise, the island of Rosa Cassimati’s birth is referred to as Cerigo. It is now known as Kythera.

2  Originally from England, the Kit Kat chocolate bar has been re-imagined in Japan in a myriad of flavors, including, for example, sweetened red bean, ginger, and cherry blossom, as well as the above-mentioned flavors.

3  In The Sweetest Fruits, the region is referred to as Izumo Province, its name under the administrative system in place from the 600s to 1868, and the name that Hearn used in his writings.

4  Alethea Foley was a biracial person born into slavery in the state of Kentucky. Her mother was an enslaved Black person and her father a white man of Irish descent.

5  The Cincinnati Commercial articles referenced in this essay were originally printed without a byline, but historians have attributed them to Lafcadio Hearn.

6  All of Hearn’s satirical articles for The Daily City Item were published without a byline.

7  The official name of this 1885 exposition was the “World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition” and was also known as the “New Orleans World’s Fair.”