He began to look back with regret to the days passed at Matsue. "You must travel out of Izumo," he said, "after a long residence, and find out how unutterably different it is from other places,—for instance, this country ... the charming simplicity of the Izumo folk does not here exist."
All his Izumo servants had accompanied him to his new quarters, and apparently all his wife's family, for he mentions the fact that he has nine lives dependent upon him: wife, wife's mother, wife's father, wife's adopted mother, wife's father's father, then servants, and a Buddhist student.
This wouldn't do in America, he says to Ellwood Hendrik, but it is nothing in Japan. The moral burden, however, was heavy enough; he indulged in the luxury of filial piety, and it was impossible to let a little world grow up round him, to depend on him, and then break it all up—the good and evil results of "filial piety" are only known to orientals, and an oriental he had now become. His people felt like fish out of water, everything surrounding them was so different from their primitive home in Izumo. A goat in the next yard, "mezurashii kedamono," filled his little wife with an amused wonder. Some geese and a pig also filled her with surprise, such animals did not exist in the highlands of Japan.
The Kumamoto Government College was one of the largest in Japan,—came next, indeed, to the Imperial University in Tokyo in importance. It was run on the most approved occidental lines. A few of the boys still adhered to their Japanese dress, but most of them adopted the military uniform now, as a rule, worn in Japanese colleges. There were three classes, corresponding with three higher classes of the Jinjo Chugakko—and two higher classes. He did not now teach on Saturdays. There were no stoves—only hibachi. The library was small, and the English books were not good. There was a building in which Jiu-jitsu was taught; and separate buildings for sleeping, eating, and bathing. The bath-room was a surprise. Thirty or forty students could bathe at the same time; and four hundred could sit down to meals in the great dining-hall. There was a separate building, also, for the teaching of chemistry, natural history, etc.; and a small museum.
Hearn apparently foregathered with none of the masters of the college, except the old teacher of Chinese. The others he simply saluted morning and evening, and in the intervals between classes sat in a corner to himself smoking his pipe.
"You talk of being without intellectual companionship!" he writes to Hendrik. "OH YE EIGHT HUNDRED MYRIADS OF GODS! What would you do if you were me? Lo! The illusion is gone! Japan in Kyushu is like Europe—except I have no friend. The differences in ways of thinking, and the difficulties of language, render it impossible for an educated Japanese to find pleasure in the society of a European. My scholars in this great Government school are not boys, but men. They speak to me only in class. The teachers never speak to me at all. I go to the college and return after class,—always alone, no mental company but books. But at home everything is sweet."
In consequence of this isolation, or because of the softening influence of matrimony, here at Kumamoto he seemed for the first time to awake to the fact of having relations in that distant western land he had left so many years before. "Our soul, or souls, ever wanders back to its own kindred," he says to his sister.
His father, Charles Bush Hearn, had left three children by his second wife (daughters), all born in India. Invalided home, Charles Hearn had died, in the Red Sea, of Indian fever; the three orphan children and his widow continued their journey to Ireland.
At their mother's death, which occurred a few years later, the girls were placed under the guardianship of various members of the family; two of them ultimately married; one of them a Mr. Brown, the other a Mr. Buckley Atkinson. The unmarried one, Miss Lillah Hearn, went out to Michigan in America, to stop with Lafcadio's brother, and her own half-brother, Daniel James Hearn, or Jim, as he was usually called.
Public interest was gradually awakening with regard to Japanese affairs. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's and Satow's books were looked upon as standard works to refer to for information concerning the political and social affairs of the extraordinary little people who were working their way to the van in the Far East. But, above all, Lafcadio Hearn's articles contributed to the Atlantic Monthly, afterwards published under the title of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," had claimed public attention.