The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn

Roger Pulvers' novel The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn brings to life the encounter of the Greek-Irish expatriate journalist-writer with Japan and the Japanese. Arriving in Japan in 1890 after twenty years in the United States, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) (小泉八雲)'s fourteen-year immersion in Japanese life provided the basis for a series of books that established him as the most influential interpreter of Japan in the West. But what Japan? The novel brings out the clash between Hearn's idealized vision of a society rooted in ancient lore of the grotesque, the macabre and the quaint, and the thrust of industrialization and war that was transforming a rising imperial power. Drawing on his experience of immersion in Japanese literary, theatrical and filmic life for much of the last forty years, Pulvers limns the extraordinary life and times of Lafcadio Hearn. The following introduces readers to Hearn's biography and an excerpt of the novel. Mark Selden