This article is the first of our series written by DAA members. Many thanks to Carol, from Foley street dojo who is leading the way. Don't hesitate to submit your own articles for everybody to enjoy. All info on how to do this is available here.

Hearn arrived in Japan in 1890 as a jobbing journalist on a short-term commission for Harper's magazine. It was the tail-end of the Meiji era, when the country - which had been forcibly opened to international trade only in 1853 - was still in the throes of an accelerated modernisation. For modernisation, also read westernisation, because the Japan which Hearn encountered was well on its way to discarding many of the traditions and practices which had attracted the Western orientalists of the preceding century. Hearn himself, fresh from a stint in New Orleans, was in search of a little more exoticism. Many a visitor has made the same mistake. What was extraordinary about the rather romantic and eerie vision of ‘Old Japan' which he produced over the next fourteen years was the hold it would acquire on the modern Japanese imagination.

Hearn spilled an awful lot of ink on the subject of Japan. His collected works run to dozens of volumes, of which twelve are on Japanese culture alone. But outstanding among them is his 1904 collection of ghost stories, Kwaidan. Like many contemporary writers back in his native Ireland, once he arrived in Japan he set himself to collecting and recording the remnants of cultural traditions which were fast disappearing. But Kwaidan also stands as a record of the vagaries of cultural translation. Unable to read Japanese, Hearn devised English versions of traditional stories which were gathered by his Japanese wife. In later years, these stories would be translated back into their original language for generations of Japanese schoolchildren. But the tales of ‘Old Japan' collected in Kwaidan were of course first published for Western readers - for a market hungry for images of an exotic Japan, and with a taste for the eerie and the uncanny primed by fashionable writers like Edgar Allen Poe. So Hearn's most famous book effectively made its way from Japanese to English, and back to Japanese again, with perhaps a dash of Ireland's Celtic Twilight along the way. Confusing? So it should be.

Despite his death that same year, his popularity in Japan grew hugely in the 1920s and 1930s. He had been a strong critic of the country's modernising drive, a champion of its unique character and traditions, and was credited with an uncanny insight into the Japanese soul. Or so the story goes. Having become a Japanese citizen in 1896 (for largely practical reasons), his undoubted affinity for Japanese culture spawned an ever more romantic literary legend. And in the increasingly nationalist climate of early twentieth-century Japan, his rejection of its westernising aspects and his romantic appreciation of a Japanese cultural essence found a timely audience. In Ghostly Japan, one of his last books, closes with a description of a small fishing town, Yaidzu. It might be the very embodiment of Hearn's vision of Japan - apparently remote in place and time, its daily life essentially unchanging. The living characters he describes are innocent and childlike, existing in sacred continuity with old traditions and old gods, carrying with them the joys and pains of all past lives. Ironically, back in the real world, his personal letters were typically studded with abuse of the wealthy students and modernising bureaucrats he encountered in Tokyo. Japanese realities and Japanese visions inconveniently clashed. They usually do. Hearn would elsewhere attempt muddled reconciliations of Eastern philosophy and Western ‘science', pairing Buddhist reincarnation with notions of organic memory and evolutionary psychology. Unsurprisingly, not many read his thoughts on the matter any more. But Kwaidan is still haunting modern Japanese culture.

In 1964, Masaki Kobayashi transferred four of Kwaidan's stories to the screen in a founding masterpiece of Japanese horror cinema. The result is as unsettlingly strange as the best Japanese horror can be.

Excerpt from the movie Kwaidan 

Only at this glacial pace and in this most eerie Technicolor can a samurai be haunted by his dead wife's hair and not raise a glimmer of a smile. Or at least, one that is also a grimace of uneasiness. The striking cover image of the recent Eureka! DVD release is a still of ‘Earless Hoichi', his head entirely painted with sacred texts to protect him from the vengeful spirits who come to him at night. Entirely covered, that is, except for his ears. You might see what's coming. Lafcadio Hearn may have long fallen into literary obscurity, but Kobayashi's Kwaidan is still well worth checking out. It is a corner of modern Japanese culture that will forever have a touch of the Irish to it. Sort of...

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To go further:

Lafcadio Hearn virtual diary

Hearn's influence on litterature

Selection from Hearn's  Japanese Fairy Tales