978-0-6450763-2-5 (paperback)

978-1-7438220-2-9 (ebook)

Designed by Amanda Dewey

Cover design by Ten Deer Sigh with artwork by Yuko Shimizu (yukoart.com)

Typeset in Perpetua by Lasertype

This is a work of fiction based on actual events.

for Damijan

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—

~EMILY DICKINSON

Contents

About the Author

Elizabeth Bisland: (1861–1929)

Rosa Antonia Cassimati: (1823–1882)

Elizabeth Bisland: (1861–1929)

Alethea Foley: (1853–1913)

Elizabeth Bisland: (1861–1929)

Koizumi Setsu: (1868–1932)

Elizabeth Bisland: (1861–1929)

Afterword

Acknowledgments

ELIZABETH BISLAND

(1861–1929)

. . . .

NEW YORK, 1906

Lafcadio Hearn was born on the twenty-seventh of June, in the year 1850. He was a native of the Ionian Isles, the place of his birth being the Island of Santa Maura, which is commonly called in modern Greek Levkas, or Lefcada, a corruption of the name of the old Leucadia, which was famous as the place of Sappho’s self-destruction. . . . To this day it remains deeply wooded, and scantily populated, with sparse vineyards and olive groves clinging to the steep sides of the mountains overlooking the blue Ionian Sea. . . . This wild, bold background, swimming in the half-tropical blue of Greek sea and sky, against which the boy first discerned the vague outlines of his conscious life, seems to have silhouetted itself behind all his later memories and prepossessions, and through whatever dark or squalid scenes his wanderings led, his heart was always filled by dreams and longings for soaring outlines, and the blue. . . .

~ Elizabeth Bisland’s The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn,
Volumes 1 and 2 (1906)

ROSA ANTONIA CASSIMATI

(1823–1882)

. . . .

IRISH SEA, 1854

Patricio Lafcadio Hearn was born hungry. I could tell by the way that he suckled. From the first time that his mouth found the nipple, he was not wont to let it go, his eyes opened and unblinking, watching and daring me to tug myself from him.

All babies were born with an empty stomach, but not all of them were born with such need in their eyes.

His elder brother, Giorgio, my first blessed one, had to be coaxed and tricked. The tip of my little finger dipped in honey was what he took first into his rosebud mouth. Then, patiently, I would guide him to my breast, where honey and milk would mix. This soothed him, but it was not enough to keep him. Giorgio shared my milk with Patricio for less than two months.

I beg of you do not call them “George” and “Patrick.” Those are not their names. Their father’s language is not mine.

Even before I was certain that there would be a blessed second, I suffered his appetite, which was growing in me swift and strong. Patricio demanded of me the small things from the sea. Whelks, which no one sold because the people on Santa Maura, same as on Cerigo, the island where I was born, would not buy something that they could gather like pebbles at the shore. In the mornings, I would leave my first with Old Iota, the only woman on our lane with no children of her own, in order to bend over the wet sand until I felt light-headed or until my basket was full. Patricio wanted the whelks boiled, their spiral of flesh removed one by one. He allowed me olive oil and lemon juice with them but never vinegar.