The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn: Light from the East by Antony Goedhals offers radical rereadings of a misunderstood and undervalued Victorian writer. It reveals that at the metaphysical core of Lafcadio Hearn’s writings is a Buddhist vision as yet unappreciated by his critics and biographers. Beginning with the American writings and ending with the essay- and story-meditations of the Japanese period, the book demonstrates Hearn’s deeply personal and transcendently beautiful evocations of a Buddhist universe, and shows how these deconstruct and dissolve the categories of Western discourse and thinking about reality – to create a new language, a poetry of vastness, emptiness, and oneness that had not been heard before in English, or, indeed, in the West.

This will appeal to anyone wishing to enrich their understanding of Japan, those with an interest in Hearn, Irish literary tradition and life and literature in a cross-cultural context.

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

A collection of twenty-eight brilliant and strange stories, inspired by Japanese folk tales and written by renowned Western expatriate Lafcadio Hearn Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was one of the nineteenth century’s best-known writers, his name celebrated alongside those of Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. Born in Greece and raised in Ireland, Hearn was a true prodigy and world traveler. He worked as a reporter in Cincinnati, New Orleans, and the West Indies before heading to Japan in 1890 on a commission from Harper’s. There, he married a Japanese woman from a samurai family, changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo, and became a Japanese subject. An avid collector of traditional Japanese tales, legends, and myths, Hearn taught literature and wrote his own tales for both Japanese and Western audiences. Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn brings together twenty-eight of Hearn’s strangest and most entertaining stories in one elegant volume. Hearn’s tales span a variety of genres. Many are fantastical ghost stories, such as “The Corpse-Rider,” in which a man foils the attempts of his former wife’s ghost to haunt him. Some are love stories in which the beloved is not what she appears to be: in “The Story of Aoyagi,” a young samurai narrowly escapes the wrath of his lord for marrying without permission, only to discover that his wife is the spirit of a willow tree. Throughout this collection, Hearn’s reverence for Japan shines through, and his stories provide insights into the country’s artistic and cultural heritage. With an introduction by Andrei Codrescu discussing Hearn’s life and work, as well as a foreword by Jack Zipes, Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn provides a unique window into one writer’s multicultural literary journey.

A discussion of one of the great interpreters of Japan. The Japanese have always revered Hearn and this book shows the West why he is revered. Experts look at his writings and discuss his integrity as an observer and interpreter of Japan and the Japanese.

Featuring a wide range of writings from Hearn’s time in America, this collection is a stunning showcase of the Greek-Irish author’s uniquely decadent literary flair and keen eye for observation A translator of Flaubert and Gautier, Lafcadio Hearn was the master of a gaudy and sometimes self-consciously decadent literary style, but he was also a tough-minded and keenly observant reporter, with an eye for the offbeat, the sensual, and occasionally the gruesome. The writings of his American years collected in this Library of America volume—on subjects as wide ranging as comparative folklore, the history of musical instruments, French literary avant-gardes, and New Orleans voodoo—reveal an omnivorous curiosity and an always eclectic sensibility. Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), a stylized retelling of ancient legends, foreshadows Hearn's later fascination with Asian themes. The exquisitely crafted novels Chita (1889), about the devastation wrought by a Louisiana hurricane, and Youma (1890), about a slave rebellion in Martinique, epitomize his writing at its most luxuriantly romantic, alert to the interactions of diverse cultures and suffused with imagistic splendor. His extraordinary travel book Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), presented here with the many illustrations from its first edition, provides a richly impressionistic account of his long stay on Martinique and other Caribbean islands. Also included are personal letters as well as more than a dozen examples of Hearn's journalism from the 1870s and 1880s, depicting vividly: a raucous African-American nightclub on the Cincinnati waterfront; an execution; scenes of Mardi Gras and the New Orleans French Quarter; an uncharted village of Filipino fishermen in a remote Louisiana bayou. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes explores traditional theories on hybridity, generated in consideration of multicultural infusions, and at times profusions, of colonial migrations. Arguments on defining Englishness and the insinuations of a ‘fixed centre’ for the marginalised are now considered on a global scale as postmodernity defies imperial homogeneity. Although postcolonial studies have largely been Anglocentric and Western in focus, developments elsewhere have opened up theoretical applications on cultural shifters such as that of the diaspora. The Arabian world, the Caribbean, North and Latin America, Australia, and more recently, countries such as Ireland and Scotland, have emerged as regions confronted with comparable power struggles. Mass migration, exile, refugee reshuffling and diasporic repositioning provide neo-hermeneutics on the predicament of the global, which is undergoing major geopolitical and cultural transformation. This volume addresses how writing from the peripheries is developing a new worldview through diasporic modes of thought. By moving beyond the facile search for an imperial ‘centre,’ these contributions provide an understanding of the rupture in identity since there is a feeling of ‘being held back from a place or state we wish to reach . . .’ (Brooks). This volume is a unique collaboration by academic scholars from four different continents, and a vast number of regions, critically converging on the contemporaneous debate that problematizes the diasporic identity.