This Sunday, as it was part of my New Year good resolutions, I went to say hello to the bust of my great, great idol : I give you Mr. Lafcadio Hearn. If afterlife exists, this guy is in my top-ten list of the people I want an appointment with when I arrive. Of course I need to see a few others before, like my grandma I never had the pleasure to meet for example - family first - but I will definitely give a call to Lafcadio right after.
... Okay, you have no clue who this gentleman can be. I know. But he should be a legend for all the people who have a sailor's soul and a neverending apetite for new landscapes. Not only he was an amazing writor who wrote dozens of books including analysis of French peotry, linguistic papers and children tales, but also he was an inspiring globe-trotter and his travel notes are so deep I could have drown when I read it.
To summarize the crazy life of this crazy guy, let's say first that he was born in 1850, from an Irish dad and a Greek mum. Apparently Daddy married Mummy secretly and when she had the baby the father and brother got so hungry they fought Daddy to almost-death; finally the couple could escape and take a boat for Ireland. What a beginning. Unfortunately Daddy abandonned wife and child to make his career in India and the Greek mum got so depressed in this over-raining Ireland she left the child to the tyrannic grand-mother. So he grew up basically without parents, and with few love. In order to make his childhood even a bit more romanesque, he got injuried and became half-blind. No, this is not a Dickens novel, it is the truth.
Anyway, even unappy as a kid, he received a top-level education in France (he he) and started studying the French literature closely. But life was hell and he decided to go and see America, so he took a boat hoping that his brother-in-law (the husband of his sister his Dad had with a second wife) could help him to get in a job in Cincinatti. But when he rang the bell, the nice brother just gave him a 5-dollars note and a "good luck". No money, no family, lost in the US... But Lafcadio was amazingly smart and he got employed by Henry Watkin, a quite progressist printor. Quickly, he revealed himself to be more than a simple assistant and launched his own research project, especially about the black ghettos - an amazing guy, I told you. There, he fall in love with a black woman, and married her, but had to leave her and the city because mixed weddings were forbidden at that time. It could have been enough for one life, but no. Then he went to New-Orleans, Louisiana, and started to write about vaudoo, French Opera, Creole culture and cuisine - the first official Creole cooking book ! En français, s'il vous plait ! This man was so open-minded, so multitasking, especially for the XIX century !... - but also the politic responsability for poverty and diseases, crimes, and so on.
Then Lafcadio was sent to the West Indies, and he has been living there for three years. It's fascinating to read his travel notes and personal diaries and letters at that time, because first his new life seems to free his body : sun, spices and naked bodies opened for him a whole world of new sensation that I can imagine after his previous lives in rainy Ireland, grey Paris and gloomy New Orleans. But finally he found himsself lacking for intellectual challenges ; life was too sweet, too easy, and he needed excitement... So he decided to go to... Japan. Tadaaaaam !
I mean, Japan. In 1890.Can you just imagine how was Japan looking like at that time ?
People like us who had always landed in Narita airport, after a oh-my-god-that-was-too-long 12-hours flight, will never know. We will never know what it could represent for someone to go to Japan at that time. And here appears some of my favorite books about Japan : "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" and "Japan : an Attemp at Interpretation", by Lafcadio Hearn. And his travel notes about his "first steps in Asia" are fabulous too. The most crazy is : everything he wrote is still totally true. For example, when he describes his emotion walking on a street covered with "advertisements" painted on the walls, on the roofs, on posters, on fabric; with kanji, kanji, kanji everywhere. And first he could not understand what was written, so he was just amazed by their beauty but he also remarked that it would be something terrible to be able to read them and feel trapped - he imagines them covered with latin letters and he feels bad, ha ha... And it was exaclty what I felt the first times in Shibuya : thanks goodness, the beauty of the writing compensates the commercial pressure !... Another funny story : at one moment he says there is no way to avoid shopping here, and he already bought a full luggage of "souvenirs" so he is anxious to know if he will have to pay an additionnal fee for the weight when he leaves the country... Remind me something... And many random observations that can not leave my heart, like the comparison between the Japanese women's feet in their tabi with the pretty legs of a faun... I think of this image everytime I see tabi now.
Well, his books about Japan are pure jewels and you have to read some of them (not all, it's impossible). He even became the first non-Japanese Japanese language teacher at Tokyo University (wow), got the Japanese nationality (wow-WOW) and married a Japanese lady (oh). He is famous in Japan for his traditionnal ghost stories, and legends, but under his Japanese name of Koizumi Yakumo, so many of my Japanese friends even did not know that he was not a native. He stayed in Japan until he died in 1904.
Lafcadio was a pure genius, and a real Japan-lover. Everything he wrote about this country and this society is mind-stricking and soul-opening and I admire this guy more than I can say, especially in English.
This is why, I had to go to this tiny little garden between Shin-Okubo station and Meiji-dori they call "Koizumi Yakumo Garden" and bend the knee in front of my hero. The garden was not especially beautiful but I liked the statue. Next time I will go to his grave.
A few dark clouds, however. Even if Lafcadio Hearn found a real home and a family in Japan, as well as a constant source of inspiration, there were some moments he became sick of being there. A Japanese writor said that in Japan, his Greek temperament and his French culture became froze-bitten like a flower in winter. But my concern is more about these words he had about the Japanese :
"What is large about them? His poems, which are only tiny pictures? his deepest sentiments of heroism which he shares with the ant and the wasp ! his romances, mediaevally tiresome, yet without any of the strength of our own medievalism ! Always details, details infinite in number and variety, infinitesimal in character. And to-day, what is his tendency ? To make everything that he adopts small
philosophy, sciences, material, arts, machinery; everything is modified in many ways, but uni formly diminished for Lilliput. And Lilliput is not tall enough to see far. Cosmic emotions do not come to Lilliputians. Did any Japanese ever feel such an emotion? Will any ever feel one ?" (Letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain)
I am disturbed. Cosmic emotions. That's the point.
Oh Lafcadio, at least I am not alone in this.
(a very complete webpage about Hearn's life in French, here)
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