Lafcadio Hearn

This delightful eBook presents seven pieces from the rich heritage of Lafcadio Hearn-one of the first and most preeminent scholars to travel to and write about Japan. They are a natural outgrowth of Hearn's peerless philosophy: "If you have any feeling-no matter what-strongly latent in the mind (even only a haunting sadness or a mysterious joy), you may be sure that it is expressible." Hearn's language, his incomparable prose, ripened and mellowed...

This collection of essays and classic stories set in Japan by Lafcadio Hearn one of the earliest Westerners to write about Japan is an essential addition to any collection of Japanese literature. Shadowings is made up of three parts: "Stories from Strange Books," which presents sex old Japanese tales; "Japanese Studies," in which Hearn explores the lore of his adopted country; and "Fantasies," a group of essays in which he gives free rein to his wide-ranging...

Title; Contents; Difficulties; Strangeness and Charm; The Religion of the Home; The Japanese Family; The Communal Cult; Developments of Shinto; Worship and Purification; The Rule of the Dead; The Introduction of Buddhism; The Higher Buddhism; The Social Organization; The Rise of the Military Power; The Religion of Loyalty; The Jesuit Peril; Feudal Integration; The Shinto Revival; Survivals; Modern Restraints; Official Education; Industrial Danger;...

"Sometimes the swamp-forest visibly thins away from these shores into wastes of reedy morass where, even of breathless nights, the quaggy soil trembles to a sound like thunder of breakers on a coast." Images are expertly imbued into the mind by vivid description. In Chita, Lafcadio Hearn paints life on a marshy, eclectic Gulf Coast island in the middle of the nineteenth century. Chita is a young white girl who is orphaned by a shipwreck and then...

A brief but delightful insight into Japanese culture by an author who (from my experience) has consistently captured the ways of the Japanese people of the time. (Goodreads)

Kokoro, meaning "heart," "spirit," and "way of being" is a fitting title for this 1896 collection, for these fifteen essays focus on the interior life of Japan and its people. Hearn's insights into Japan's soul are unmatched by any Westerner, and his portraits of individual Japanese are as profound as his long essays on the civilization.

Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn by Lafcadio Hearn These chapters, for the most part, are reprinted from Lafcadio Hearn's "Interpretations of Literature," 1915, from his "Life and Literature," 1916, and from his "Appreciations of Poetry," 1917. Three chapters appear here for the first time. They are all taken from the student notes of Hearn's lectures at the University of Tokyo, 1896-1902, sufficiently described in the earlier...

A Story with Heart. "We owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge." A collection of 15 essays that examine the inner spiritual life of Japan through the people that make Japan the unique place it is.

“Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan” is a bewitching look into a world that few Westerners saw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a world that still endures in many ways in spite of the changes that have taken place during the modernization of Japan.

This collection of essays, individually published between 1915 and 1917, originated as lectures Hearn delivered to Japanese students at the University of Tokyo. They constitute one of the first attempts by a Western critic to interpret Western culture to the East. Chapters are dedicated to Western attitudes to women, poetry, the Bible, and an overview of Western literary influences.