“Of his works, ‘Japan: an Interpretation’ seemed a great labour to him. So hard a task it was that he said at one occasion: ‘It is not difficult that this book will kill me.’ At another time he said: ‘You can imagine how hard it is to write such a big book in so short a time with no helper.’ To write was his life; and all care and difficulties he forgot while writing. As he had no work of teaching in the university, he poured forth all his forces in the work of ‘Japan.’
“When the manuscripts of ‘Japan’ were completed, he was very glad and had them packed in strong shape and wrote addresses upon the cover for mail. He was eagerly looking forward to see the new volume. A little before his death he still said that he could imagine that he could hear the sound of type-work of ‘Japan’ in America. But he was unable to see the book in his lifetime.”
To me he wrote, in that lassitude always following on the completion of creative work: “The ‘rejected addresses’ will shortly appear in book form. I don’t like the work of writing a serious treatise on sociology.... I ought to keep to the study of birds and cats and insects and flowers, and queer small things—and leave the subject of the destiny of empires to men with brains.” Despite which verdict he probably recognized it as the crowning achievement of his long effort to interpret his adopted country to the world.
Shortly after its completion he accepted the offer of the chair of English in the Waseda University, founded by Count Okuma, for he was expecting again to be a father and his pen was unable to meet all the demands upon his income. Meantime the University of London had entered into negotiation with him for a series of lectures, and it was suggested that Oxford also wished to hear him. It had always been the warmest of his desires to win recognition from his own country, and these offers were perhaps the greatest satisfaction he had ever known. But his forces were completely exhausted. The desperate hardships of his youth, the immense labours of his manhood, had burned away the sources of vitality.
On the 26th of September, 1904—shortly after completing the last letter included in these volumes, to Captain Fujisaki, who was then serving on Marshal Ōyama’s staff—while walking on the veranda in the twilight he sank down suddenly as if the whole fabric of life had crumbled within, and after a little space of speechlessness and pain, his long quest was over.
In “Kwaidan” he had written: “I should like, when my time comes, to be laid away in some Buddhist graveyard of the ancient kind, so that my ghostly company should be ancient, caring nothing for the fashions and the changes and the disintegrations of Meiji. That old cemetery behind my garden would be a suitable place. Everything there is beautiful with a beauty of exceeding and startling queerness; each tree and stone has been shaped by some old, old ideal which no longer exists in any living brain; even the shadows are not of this time and sun, but of a world forgotten, that never knew steam or electricity or magnetism.... Also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings so strangely far away from all the nineteenth-century part of me that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid,—deliciously afraid. Never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost,—a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell.”
In so far as was possible this was complied with. Though not a Buddhist he was buried according to Buddhist rites. One who was present at his funeral thus describes it:—
“The procession left his residence, 266 Nishi Ōkubo, at half past one and proceeded to the Jit?-in Kobu-dera Temple in Ichigaya.... First came the bearers of white lanterns and wreaths and great pyramidal bouquets of asters and chrysanthemums; next, men carrying long poles from which hung streamers of paper gohei; after them two boys in ’rickshas carrying little cages containing birds to be released, symbols of the soul released from its earthly prison....
“The emblems were all Buddhist. The portable hearse, carried by six men in blue, was a beautiful object of unpainted, perfectly fresh, white wood trimmed with blue silk tassels and with gold and silver lotus flowers at the corners.... Priests carrying food for the dead, university professors, and a multitude of students formed the end of the procession.... In the comparative darkness of the temple, against the background of black lacquer and gold, eight priests chanted a dirge. Their heads were clean-shaven and they were clothed in white, with several brilliantly tinted gauze robes imposed. After a period of chanting punctuated by the tinkling of a bell, the chief Japanese mourner arose from the other side and led forward the son. Together they knelt before the hearse, touching their foreheads to the floor, and placing some grains of incense upon the little brazier burning between the candles. A delicate perfume filled the air.... The wife next stepped forward with expressionless face—her hair done in stiff loops like carved ebony, her only ornament the magnificent white obi, reserved for weddings and funerals. She and the younger sons also burned incense. The chief mourner and the eldest son again bowed to the ground, and the ceremony was ended.”
The students presented a laurel wreath with the inscription “In memory of Lafcadio Hearn, whose pen was mightier than the sword of the victorious nation which he loved and lived among, and whose highest honour it is to have given him citizenship and, alas, a grave!” The body was then removed to a crematory, the ashes being interred at the cemetery of Zōshigaya, his tombstone bearing the inscription “Shōgaku In-den Jō-ge Hachi-un Koji,” which literally translated means: “Believing Man Similar to Undefiled Flower Blooming like Eight Rising Clouds, who dwells in Mansion of Right Enlightenment.”