Celebrating the Irish writer whose ghost stories still grip Japan

Irish Times

04-07-2025

Expo 2025, the sprawling world exposition in the
Japanese
city of Osaka, is bounded by Sou Fijimoto's Grand Ring, the largest wooden structure in the world and designed as a symbol of unity in diversity. Just inside the entrance to the Expo is another ring,
Joseph Walsh
's six-metre tall Magnus Rinn, a monumental sculpture made of bronze and oak.
Walsh's sculpture stands outside the Irish pavilion, itself composed of three intersecting circular structures based on the Celtic triskele and clad in fir timber. The French pavilion features displays of haute couture and luxury goods and the American is themed on space, but the Irish one is notable for its restraint.
The three spaces inside on the ground floor are dark and the first features an installation based on the sights, sounds and smells of Ireland, with some living bog at the centre. The second shows objects that connect Ireland and Japan, and the third is a performance space that looks at creative collaboration between the two countries.
When Taoiseach
Micheál Martin
visited the pavilion on Thursday, he lingered over an exhibition upstairs of prints based on the Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost stories. Once as famous as Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe, Hearn is still widely read in Japan, where he was also known as Yakumo Koizumi.
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'Japan and Ireland share a deep respect for the past and the love of culture, literature and music, along with a deep connection to nature. We are both storytellers, and in this pavilion, we tell the story of Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn came to Japan as a journalist in 1890 and wrote about life in Japan for a western audience, keen to know more about this wonderful country,' the Taoiseach told a reception in the pavilion later.
At 8am every morning, millions of Japanese television viewers start their day watching the latest 15-minute episode of the current asadora, or morning drama. Each drama runs for six months with about 150 episodes on the national broadcaster NHK, where it has been among the most popular shows since 1961.
Every series features a woman who overcomes adversity to find fulfilment, often inspired by the lives of real historical figures. The next series is The Ghost Writer's Wife, loosely based on the life of Setso Koizumu, who was married to Hearn.
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 on the island of Lefkada near Ithaca to an Irish father and a Greek mother. When he was two, his mother brought him to Ireland, where she discovered that Hearn's father had left her for another woman.
Hearn's mother soon returned to Greece with a new partner and she left her son behind in Dublin to be raised by his great-aunt Sarah Brenane, a wealthy widow with no experience of bringing up children. She sent him to school in England but when she fell on hard times, he found himself in low company on the backstreets of London before gaining a passage to America.
He moved to Cincinnati where he made an impression as a journalist who wrote vivid accounts of grisly crimes. But marrying a black woman led to his dismissal and he moved to New Orleans, where his accounts of the high life and the low life of the city attracted the attention of Harper's Monthly, which hired him and later sent him to Japan as a correspondent.
Six years after he arrived in the country, Hearn became a Japanese citizen, adopted a Japanese name and took his wife's family name. His most famous book is Kwaidan, a collection of supernatural stories based on Japanese folk tales but he was also as a journalist a perceptive observer of Japan's modernisation.
'Unlike contemporaneous Western Japanologists, he understood that Japan was becoming westernised, not western: it would take what it required from the West but remain quintessentially Japanese,' wrote Hearn's biographer Paul Murray.
'His vision was double-edged, illuminating both Japan and the West, the latter seen as morally inferior to a Japan which embodied to him many of the virtues of ancient Greece. His scepticism about the civilising mission of the West, evident in his Cincinnati journalism, turned into downright hostility in his Japanese work.'
A former Irish ambassador to South Korea, Murray discovered Hearn in a Tokyo bookshop when he was a junior diplomat in Japan. The Embassy's new home at Ireland House Tokyo, which the Taoiseach opened this week, has a library named after Hearn.
Ten years ago, the Little Museum of Dublin staged
an exhibition and a programme of events about Hearn's life and work
. Now that he is about to become a star of Japanese morning television drama, perhaps it's time for this remarkable figure to become better known in the country where he spent his childhood.