Books by Lafcadio Hearn

"Kwaidan" means "weird tales." Lafcadio Hearn has taken kwaidan and written some amazing, hair-raising tales of long ago--delicate, transparent, ghostly sketches of a world unreal, but with a haunting sense of spiritual reality. It is a unique collection of haunting Japanese supernatural stories written by a Westerner who adopted Japan as his homeland.

The belief that the dead need affection, that to neglect them is a cruelty, that their happiness depends upon duty, is a belief that has almost cast out the primitive fear of their displeasure. They are not thought of as dead; they are believed to remain among those who loved them.... From their shrine they observe and hear what happens in the house; they share the family joys and sorrows; they delight in the voices and the warmth of the life about them.-from "The Religion of the Home"In 1889, Westerner Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan on a journalistic assignment, and he fell so in love with the nation and its people that he never left. His love letters to his adopted country, including 1894''s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan and 1896''s Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (both available from Cosimo Classics) helped fire global interest in Japanese culture as it was opening to the West in the 1890s, and in 1904, he published this engaging and highly entertaining series of essays. An early Western attempt to decipher the "outward strangeness" of all things in Japan, and to place the nation and its people in a larger historical context, this is a lyrical work, singing with respect and love.Bohemian and writer PATRICK LAFCADIO HEARN (1850-1904) was born in Greece, raised in Ireland, and worked as newspaper reporter in the United States before decamping to Japan. He also wrote In Ghostly Japan (1899).

Lafcadio Hearn's books have charmed and captivated readers, just as the exotic subjects about which he has written have captivated him. "Gleanings in the Buddha-Fields" presents more Hearn magic as he enters into the spirit of Buddhism as though he were born into it. This collection of stories, subtitled "Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East," takes the reader on a journey into the soul of Hearn's adopted land as no other writer--especially a non-Japanese native--could. Lafacdio Hearn was born in Greece to an Irish father and a Greek mother. After working as a journalist in New Orleans, he later moved to Japan, where he took on the name Koizumi Yagumo.

A reprint of the 1915 edition containing essays on Shakespeare, Poe, Longfellow, Shelley, Keats, English poetry, Baudelaire, the supernatural in fiction, poems about insects and other literary topics. These were lectures to his students while he held the chair of English literature in the University of Tokyo from 1896 to 1902. Selected and edited, with an introduction, by John Erskine, Associate Professor of English in Columbia University, New York.Lafcadio Hearn was one of the original American expatriates to move to Japan; after living in New Orleans for some years, writing stories, he moved on to Tokyo, where he married a Japanese woman and changed his name. Hearn is best known for his supernatural tales.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a complete, two-volume set of one of the greatest books of 19th century Japanese history and culture. Though Lafcadio Hearn went on to write a dozen more books on Japan, this collection of first impressions remains his most popular. Among the reasons is that here, more than anywhere else, the author most vividly captured a place that so affected him that he stayed for the rest of his life. The modern reader can still, through these pages, experience that "e;first charm of Japan, intangible and volatile as a perfume."e; Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan combines two volumes of a work that first appeared in 1894. In the pages of this book are the customs, the superstitions, the charming scenery, the revelations of Japanese character, and all the other elements that Lafcadio Hearn found so bewitching. Here, for example, are essays on such subjects as the Japanese garden, the household shrine, the festivals, and the bewildering Japanese smileall aspects of Japanese life that have endured in spite of the changes that have taken place during the modernization of Japan. The Japanese character and the Japanese tradition are still fundamentally the same as Hearn found them to be, and for this reason, his writing is still extremely revealing to modern readers. This edition also contains a new foreword by noted writer and examiner of Japanese culture Donnie Richie that puts Lafcadio Hearn and his classic works into perspective for readers just discovering Hearn's writing for the first time.