Hearn, Lafcadio (redirected from Koizumi Yakumo)

Hearn, Lafcadio (lăfkä`dēō hûrn), 1850–1904, American-Japanese author, b. Lefkás, Ionian Islands, of Irish-Greek parentage. He was educated in Ireland, England, and France before immigrating to the United States in 1869. Handicapped by partial blindness, Hearn was a colorful, imaginative, but morbidly discontented man, who was most admired for his sensitive use of language in writing about the macabre and in creating strange exotic moods. Hearn first attracted attention with the originality and highly polished style of his "Fantastics," a series of weird sketches that appeared in a New Orleans paper. His first published book was One of Cleopatra's Nights (1882), a translation of six Gautier stories. In 1890 he went to Japan to write a series of articles for an American publisher. There he spent the rest of his life, writing what is considered his best work. He married a Japanese woman, taught in Japanese universities, and became a Japanese citizen in 1895, taking the name Yakumo Koizumi. Of his 12 books written during this period, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Kokoro (1896), Japanese Fairy Tales (1902), and Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904) are most memorable.

Bibliography

See biography by E. Stevenson (1961).

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Hearn, (Patricio) Lafcadio (Tessima Carlos)

 Japanese Koizumi Yakumo

(born June 27, 1850, Levkás, Ionian Islands, Greece—died Sept. 26, 1904, Okubo, Japan) Irish-U.S.-Japanese writer, translator, and teacher. He immigrated to the U.S. at age 19 and worked as a reporter and translator, writing on a wide range of subjects. In 1890 he traveled as a magazine writer to Japan, where he soon became a teacher, took a Japanese wife and name, and became a Japanese subject. Articles and books about Japan's customs, religion, and literature followed, including Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Exotics and Retrospective (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), and A Japanese Miscellany (1901); Kwaidan (1904) is a collection of supernatural stories and haiku translations. It was Hearn who, perhaps more than any other single person, introduced the broad culture of Japan to the West.

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Hearn, (Patricio) Lafcadio (Tessima Carlos) (1850–1904) writer, translator; born on the island of Lefkas, Greece. Son of a Greek mother and an Irish doctor with the British army, after age six he was raised in Ireland, England, and France. He came to the U.S.A. in 1869 and, settling in Cincinnati, became a journalist and translator (of French). In 1877 he went to New Orleans and as a journalist and translator, also began to publish his own stories, usually involving the exotic or macabre and drawing on local lore. From 1887–89 he lived on Martinique in the West Indies. In 1890 Harpers' New Monthly Magazine sent him to Japan to write a series of articles. He would stay in Japan for the rest of his life—becoming a teacher, marrying a Japanese woman, and taking citizenship there as Koizumi Yakumo. He published a series of books that offered the West its first thoughtful, sympathetic view of Japanese culture, most memorably Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904).