Lafcadio Hearn

by Nina H. Kennard

" ... No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of circumstance than I; I drift with various forces in the line of least resistance, resolve to love nothing, and love always too much for my own peace of mind,—places, things, and persons,—and lo! presto! everything is swept away, and becomes a dream, like life itself. Perhaps there will be a great awakening; and each will cease to be an Ego: become an All, and will know the divinity of man by seeing, as the veil falls, himself in each and all."

One of the greatest sacrifices that Hearn ever made,—and he made many for the sake of his wife and family—was the giving up of his life in the patriarchal Japan of mystery and tradition, with its Yashikis and ancient shrines—to inhabit the modernised metropolis of Tokyo. The comparative permanency of the appointment and the, for Japan, high salary of twenty pounds a year, combined with the fact that lecturing was less arduous for his eyesight than journalistic work on the Kobe Chronicle, were the principal inducements. Still, it was one of the ironies of Fate that this shy, irritable creature, who had an inveterate horror of large cities and a longing to get back to an ancient dwelling surrounded by shady gardens, and high, moss-grown walls, should have been obliged to spend the last eight years of his life in a place pulsating with life, amidst commercial push and bustle.

His wife, on the other hand, longed to live in the capital, as Frenchwomen long to live in Paris. Tokyo, the really beautiful Tokyo—of the old stories and picture-books—still existed in her provincial mind; she knew all the famous names, the bridges, streets, and temples.

Hearn appears to have made an expedition from Kobe to Tokyo at the beginning of the year 1896, to spy out the land and decide what he would do. To his friend, Ellwood Hendrik, he writes, giving him a description of the university, such a contrast in every way to his preconceived ideas, with its red-brick colleges and imposing façade, a structure that would not appear out of place in the city of Boston or Philadelphia, or London.

After his final acceptance of the appointment, and his move to the capital, he experienced considerable difficulty in finding a house. 21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, situated in Ushigome, a suburb of Tokyo, was the one he at last selected. He describes it as a bald utilitarian house with no garden, no surprises, no delicacies, no chromatic contrasts, a "rat-trap," compared to most Japanese houses, that were many of them so beautiful that ordinary mortals hardly dared to walk about in them.

In telling the story of Lafcadio Hearn's life at Tokyo, it is well to remember that he only occupied the house where his widow now lives at Nishi Okubo for two years before his death. The bulk of his literary work was done at 21, Tomihasa-chio.

When I was at Tokyo I endeavoured to find the house, but my ignorance of the language, the "fantastic riddle of streets," that constitute a Tokyo suburb, to say nothing of the difficulties besetting a stranger in dealing with Japanese jinrikisha men, obliged me at last to abandon the quest as hopeless. I did not even succeed in tracing the proprietor, a sake-brewer, who had owned eight hundred Japanese houses in the neighbourhood, or in locating the old Buddhist temple of Kobduera, where Hearn spent so much of his time, wandering in the twilight of the great trees, dreaming out of space, out of time.

The suburb of Ushigome is situated at some distance from the university. One hour daily to go, and one to return by jinrikisha. But Hearn had one joy; he was able to congratulate himself on the absence of visitors. Any one who endeavoured to invade the solitude of his suburban abode must have "webbed feet and been able to croak and spawn!"

Hearn's description of Tokyo might be placed as a pendant to his celebrated description of New York City. To any one who has visited the Japanese metropolis during the last five years, it is most vividly realistic—the size of the place, stretching over miles of country; here the quarter of the foreign embassies, looking like a well-painted American suburb—near by an estate with quaint Chinese gates several centuries old; a little farther, square miles of indescribable squalor; then miles of military parade-ground trampled into a waste of dust, and bounded by hideous barracks; then a great park full of weird beauty, the shadows all black as ink; then square miles of streets of shops, which burn down once a year; then more squalor; then rice-fields and bamboo-groves; then more streets. Gigantic reservoirs with no water in them, great sewer pipes without any sanitation.... To think of art, or time, or eternity, he said, in the dead waste and muddle of this mess, was difficult. But Setsu was happy—like a bird making its nest, she was fixing up her new home, and had not yet had time to notice what ugly weather it was.