Voyage Out

In the above poem, the twentieth century poet Robert Lowell lists things he discovers in his father’s bedroom. Among them are a book of Hearn’s on Japan, a Japanese garment, and Chinese sandals. Because these items are found in his father’s bedroom, Lowell appropriates them as signifiers of his father’s private experience in

the Far East. The “warped” appearance of Hearn’s volume makes his father’s experience seem distant both in time and space. The worn condition of the book, moreover, suggests that his father, an engineer in the US Navy, had carried it with him on his journey to the Far-east and brought it back to the US Hearn may have served as a spiritual and navigational guide for his father’s voyages to both Japan and China. For the poet Lowell, Hearn also serves as a guide to navigate him through the Orient of the past, and on to his father’s memory. Hearn’s book, therefore, gives the poet access to his father’s personal history and his experience of encountering an unknown culture.

Hearn himself had carried an image of Japan as being remote and untouched by Western civilization. In his case, he found his guide in Robert Lowell’s ancestor, Percival Lowell. His well-known book on Japan, The Soul of the Far East (1888), inspired Hearn with an exotic image of a far eastern country that is totally different from the West. Hearn’s exotic expectations, however, were quickly dashed. By 1890 when he arrived in Japan, Japan’s Westernization was already underway. Nevertheless, his ethnographic and archivist spirit quickened once again. “Naturally adept in research”

in Cable’s words, Hearn continued to collect old stories and legends as before, this time taking the opportunity to observe Japanese customs.

I myself was about ten when I first read Japanese ghost stories by an author named Koizumi Yakumo. They were scary tales, reminding me of my grandfather’s old house and family gravesites. Only years later did I learn that Koizumi was the adopted name of Lafcadio Hearn, then described as a Westerner who had come to Japan and

“translated” old Japanese stories into English. What I had read was in actuality the

“re-translation” of his English “translation.” Despite his 14-year stay in Japan, his Japanese skills were at best akin to a pidgin form of the language, but somehow he was able to select stories and translate them, which impressed many Japanese for their being so Japanese. Ethnically, let us recall that he was a hybrid, being half Greek and half Irish, and people saw him as anything ranging from white to black. His indeterminate appearance enabled him to step inside the native culture wherever he went, particularly in New Orleans and Martinique. He was called a “chameleon,” as he seemed to be able to integrate into any given environment, even though, he never felt at home. In Japan, he adopted the family name of his wife, obtained Japanese citizenship, and had a family.

Most striking, he found similarities between his exposure to Japanese culture and ancient Greece. Thus for Hearn, Japan turned out not to be a far away and “unfamiliar”

culture after all, but a place where people shared the same essential origins with

Westerners. Although Hearn still maintained his “chameleon” identity, he eventually found a home in Japan—a civilization founded on both Shinto and Buddhist belief systems—where spiritual hybridity was neither foreign nor untenable.

As a writer, Hearn was cast as an “English” writer who submitted most of his manuscripts to American publishers. His stories and essays served as windows through which English-speaking readers could look at Japan. He also served as a cultural translator, who took on the role of re-telling folktales in a global context for contemporary readers. It is conceivable that a sense of modernity in Hearn’s writing might have been the reason for Robert Lowell’s father to choose Hearn’s writings over his uncle’s work to take with him on his trip to the Far East during an era of western colonialist expansion.

Hearn did not only serve as a window for the West to view the East, but also for new Japan to view old Japan and even greater East Asia to look at Japan. He translated old stories because he feared that they would soon disappear in the course of Japan’s rapid Westernization. In a 1902 letter to philosopher Yrjö Hirn (1870-1952),¹ he wrote:

“I watch, day by day, the destruction of a wonderful and very beautiful civilization, by industrial pressure. It strikes me that a time is approaching in which intellectual liberty will almost cease to exist, together with every other kind of liberty, –the time when no man will be able to live as he wishes, much less to write what he pleases” (14:208). Out of an ethnographic spirit to preserve old traditions that were fading away, he gathered old stories and songs, just as he had done in America with Creole material, but he was anxious that the waves of modernization were surging on to Japanese shores obliterating a rich heritage. In place of old tradition, he was concerned that the small island country of Japan was building up its military power instead to fight back those waves coming from the West. It became clear in Hearn’s volumes of writing on Japan that he was caught in between the two movements His Japanese students helped him to collect material over time, and after his death, translated all of his works into Japanese.

The reference to China in Lowell’s poem further illuminates a coincidental and associative connection of not only the dichotomous relationship between East and West, but also of the idiosyncratic one among peoples in the Orient. Because Hearn wrote in

1 Yrjö Hirn, an acclaimed aesthetics philosopher, taught at University of Helsinki, and his wife Kirn translated Hearn’s Exotics and Retrospectives into Swedish in 1903, and Kwaidan in 1904. See Steven Donovan,

“Conrad in Swedish: the First Translation,” The Conradian (Autumn 2006) 118; see also Laura Stedman’s bibliography in Concerning Lafcadio Hearn 251.

English, a language of a world power at the turn of the twentieth century, his works on Japan were also read in China. In Koizumi Yakumo to Kindai Chugoku [Koizumi Yakumo and Modern China] (2004), Riyu Guni documents how Hearn’s writings were translated into Chinese during the Communist regime of the 1930’s as valuable sources of information on Japan.²

The reassessment of Hearn as a cultural translator and archivist is a meaningful task. He sought a common ground in his narrative space in which cultural encounters would enable a new narrative to emerge—a shared myth for the modern nomads. His writings, therefore, do not simply contrast the differences between the East and the West (in which the West is usually considered superior); rather, they adumbrate various subaltern differences and similarities, as they are always mutually influential.³ Nomad that he was in the modern world, Hearn could only find his place in what Homi Bhabha calls the “in-between space,” or Mary Louise Pratt the “contact zone.” To use Christopher Benfey’s words, he was typical of a “Gilded Age Misfit” from the Western world,⁴ but was also someone who became too Japanese to deserve the description of a

“Japanese Eccentric.”⁵ In other words, Hearn was “eccentric” regardless of the

2 See Ryu Gani, Koizumi Yakumo to Kindai Chugoku [Koizumi Yakumo and Modern China]. I would like to add that the Hearn-China connection has also become part of my personal experience. The discussion on the translation history of “A Living God” was originally presented for the panel “A Translation Turn in East-West” at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference held at Penn State University in March 2005, which was co-chaired by Professors Ning W. Wang of Tsinghua University and Leo Chan of Lingnan Univeristy and was co-attended by Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and Chinese-Americans, not to mention Japanese participants.

3 In this sense, Hearn overwrites Percival Lowell’s The Soul of the Far East in which Lowell’s scientific point of view is fixed and lists the contrasts between the West and East (Japan). Japan is differentiated from the West as being both alien and primitive. On the other hand, Hearn’s comparative method seeks for a common ground between the two places, since he believes that all civilizations share sources rooted in the ancient past. For example, he finds similarities between ancient Greek and ancient Japan, or between Western legends and Japanese ones.

4 Homi Bhabha’s concept of “in-between space,” or “Third Space,” applies to Hearn’s case perfectly.

In The Location of Culture, Bhabha states, “we should remember that it is the ‘inter’─the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-between space─that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people.’ And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves” (38-9). In her introduction to Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Mary Louise Pratt refers to a

“contact zone”: “A ‘contact’ perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (15).

5 In The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan: a Study of Early Modern Japan, Christopher Benfey aptly expresses that for those who tried “to open Japan culturally meant to open themselves in turn, and to risk transformation in the process” (xvi). The translations done by such “misfits” (those who went to Japan from America) and “eccentrics” (those who went to America from Japan), I would like to contend, reflect their own personal and emotional experiences as well

particular cultural domain he occupied. From the viewpoint of outsider and stranger, he wrote about Japan in English. At the same time, as husband and father of a Japanese family, he saw Japan from the inside and empathized with Japanese people. Taking advantage of being in the “in-between space,” he wrote stories that offer a double perspective, eastern and western.

The fact that Hearn chose to write in English is crucial. At the turn of the twentieth century, English was gaining ground as an international language. Hearn himself must have been aware of the influential power of the English language as his books had already been translated from their original English into Finnish, Swedish, German, and French during his lifetime. At the same time, because of Japan’s aggressive imperial expansion, it attracted increasing attention in the West. Had Hearn chosen to write in Japanese instead, his stories and essays could not have been read so widely at that time.

Interestingly enough, in this era of rising Japanese nationalism, his writings were all the more appreciated and studied by Japanese. While learning English through Hearn’s writings, they simultaneously rediscovered their own vanishing tradition. Although it is true that Hearn’s stories derive from Japanese tales, contradictorily his appropriation of them helped to revive lost Japanese culture as it was remembered and dreamed of as a shared narrative by both Japanese and Westerners.

During his pursuit of Creole themes, Hearn could not ignore moral questions concerning the issue of race in America. Since he assumed these matters would not be resolved in his lifetime, he moved on and left for Japan. He did maintain his truth-seeking journalist spirit in Japan, for example, when he was in Kobe (1894 – 1896) where he wrote opinion pieces critical of the US. He pointed out that America’s great question would be “not of race-supremacy, but of race-existence” (Editorials from the Kobe Chronicle 39). Though oceans apart from America, the issue of race there crept back into his moral outlook. Two decades later in 1916, progressive American writer Randolph Bourne (1886-1918) wrote an essay, “Trans-national America,” in which he refuted the idea of a melting pot society. He said that new immigrants would not be assimilated into standardized white American culture and saw America as “a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures.” He proposed a possible model for a trans-national community: “the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun.” In his ideal “environment of the Beloved Community,” “nationality” refers to one’s

as their observations and analysis of the target cultures.

“spiritual country.” That is for Bourne, “trans-national” means that people do not have to identify their nationality with the actual place where they live.⁶ In the 1890’s Hearn already embraced such a dream place where people could co-exist, where each seeks for his or her own “home” in spiritual experience—a place of no “race-supremacy” but of “race-existence.”

6 This article is said to be the classic first argument on the idea of the “Trans-national.” Focusing on “the failure of the ‘melting-pot,’” he states, “Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them [immigrants from Europe] more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish”; see “Trans-national America” (1 July 1916), The Atlantic. The phrase “transnational,” however, only came to be popularly used after the rise of multiculturalism in the 1980s. See Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror:

a History of Multicultural America (1993), and in American literature, Anita Patterson, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (2008) and Paul Giles, Virtual America: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imagery (2002).