This fascinating fictional account of the life and times of Lafcadio Hearn probes the question: "What was the nature of this man, born wanderer, informant of the fiendish details of Japanese lore... a man who chose to live his life 'in defiance of the season'?" Though now largely forgotten in the West, he is, in the 21st century, still considered by the Japanese to be the foreigner with the most insight into their mind and mores. Orphan of Europe, chronicler of the eerie and the grotesque, journalist and ethnographer of subcultures, Greek-Irish author Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Yokohama from the United States in 1890. During his 14-year stay in Japan he wrote 14 books about the country, becoming known, in the decades succeeding his death, as the foremost interpreter of things Japanese in the West. The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn is a novel not only about Hearn in Meiji Japan but about any person in any era who may feel, for a time or forever, more at home in a foreign land than in their own. The novel is preceded by a detailed introduction on Hearn from the time of his birth in Greece in 1850 until his death in Japan in 1904.

This collection of writings from Lafcaido Hern paints a rare and fascinating picture of pre-modern Japan Over a century after his death, author, translator, and educator Lafcaido Hearn remains one of the best-known Westerners ever to make Japan his home. Almost more Japanese than the Japanese--"to think with their thoughts" was his aim--his prolific writings on things Japanese were instrumental in introducing Japanese culture to the West. In this masterful anthology, Donald Richie shows that Hearn was first and foremost a reliable and enthusiastic observer, who faithfully recorded a detailed account of the people, customs, and culture of late nineteen-century Japan. Opening and closing with excerpts from Hearn's final books, Richie's astute selection from among "over 4,000 printed pages" not including correspondence and other writing, also reveals Hearn's later, more sober and reflective attitudes to the things that he observed and wrote about. Part One, "The Land," chronicles Hearn's early years when he wrote primarily about the appearance of his adopted home. Part Two, "The People," records the author's later years when he came to terms with the Japanese themselves. In this anthology, Richie, more gifted in capturing the essence of a person on the page than any other foreign writer living in Japan, has picked out the best of Hearn's evocations. Select writings include: The Chief City of the Province of the Gods Three Popular Ballads In the Cave of the Children's Ghosts Bits of Life and Death A Street Singer Kimiko On A Bridge

The dead wreak revenge on the living, paintings come alive, spectral brides possess mortal men and a priest devours human flesh in these chilling Japanese ghost stories retold by a master of the supernatural. Lafcadio Hearn drew on the phantoms and ghouls of traditional Japanese folklore - including the headless 'rokuro-kubi', the monstrous goblins 'jikininki' or the faceless 'mujina' who stalk lonely neighbourhoods - and infused them with his own memories of his haunted childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland to create these terrifying tales of striking and eerie power. Today they are regarded in Japan as classics in their own right. Edited with an introduction by Paul Murray

Insect Literature collects twenty essays and stories written by Hearn, mostly in Japan, a land where insects were as appreciated as in ancient Greece.

Harold MacGrath (1871-1932) was a bestselling American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter.

I think that my best apology for the insignificant size of this volume is the very character of the material composing it. In preparing the legends I sought especially for "weird beauty"; and I could not forget this striking observation in Sir Walter Scott's "Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad" "The supernatural, though appealing to certain powerful emotions very widely and deeply sown amongst the human race, is, nevertheless, a "spring which is peculiarly apt to lose its elasticity by being too much pressed upon."" -- Lafcadio Hearn