Your letter was a wonderful event for me—a great and happy surprise. The Fairy Queen also wrote me a beautiful letter (I suppose that all she does is beautiful): I had to read it many times to learn the full charm of it. I have lost all power to write a nice letter of thanks—feel stupid.
We have a nice home a little out of Tōkyō—to which I should not be ashamed to invite you, or even the Fairy Queen: only, you would have to take off your shoes, for it is a Japanese house.
I shall try to atone later on for the great length of this weary scrawl: how tired you must be after reading it! All happiness to you. Be sure that, whether I win or fail, I shall never be able to even tell you how sincerely and deeply I remain grateful for that letter.
Y. Koizumi, Lafcadio Hearn.
TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK
Tōkyō, 1902.
Dear Hendrick,—I am glad to hear that you are a strong and successful swimmer in that awful sea of struggle, and that your home is happy. Having two little ones, you can understand now what the Japanese call Mono no aware,—weirdly translated by Aston as “the Ah-ness of things.”[3]
Thanks for the Martinique clippings. The Swede’s account seems to me possibly apocryphal,—for his localizations are all wrong. The other man did, apparently, visit Saint-Pierre, and explore the vicinity.—I opened and re-read that black day a letter from Saint-Pierre, enclosing a spray of arborescent fern, labelled “From the sunny garden.”
The time is approaching in which I must go abroad, for my boy’s sake. To Queen Elizabeth I wrote, asking for a possible smoothing of the way; and if you can put a spoke in my wheel any time about next spring, or during the summer, I should be as grateful as I can—which is nothing to brag of, I need scarcely say. I should like some easy post, for about two years. “Easy posts” must be in sharp demand; and I am not sure that I am asking for the possible. New York is, of course, the place where I do not want to go—for my lad’s sake; but I shall probably make a flying trip there,—if the gods allow.