Lafcadio Hearn's Japan (2 page)

There is, however unfortunately, no such place and after a time the foreigner discovers this. Initially, though, enchanted, he seeks to “understand” this attractive land, to insist upon the inscrutable, to find enigma where there is none, and to view change as destruction.

Chamberlain offers an example of these attitudes in a letter written to Hearn in 1892 “about the variability of one's feeling toward Japan being like the oscillation of a pendulum: one day swinging toward pessimism and next to optimism.” He had these feelings often, “but the pessimistic feeling is generally consistent with some experience of new Japan and the optimistic with something of old Japan.” This was in accord with Hearn's own initial findings. If Matsue was heaven, then Tokyo had to be hell.

In this he provides us with an early example of the classical Western attitudes toward Japan. Three stages have been observed. The first of these is an unreasoning infatuation, the second is an equally heedless dislike, and the third is when one accepts the country as it is—a state more like a marriage than a love affair. If one hears much less nowadays about the three classical stages it is because there is now so much less to infatuate and, consequently, to later abominate.

For well over a century, however, it was common for folks to fall in love with the place and, in the early stages of the affair, to compare all other countries unfavorably. During Hearn's first years in the country such ideas were so visible in his writings that a later author, John Paris (Frank Ashton-Gwatkin), could write that Hearn's books were mere visions of a land where everything was “kind, gentle, small, neat, artistic and spotlessly clean,” the reverse of “our own poor vexed continent where the monstrous and the hideous multiply daily.”

That the new Japan could not live up to the utopia that Hearn was constructing is quite true. Yet this fact does not affect the fidelity of his partial vision, and if an understanding of the impossibility of paradise undercut his early infatuation, it at the same time gave a kind of energy to his thoughts about the country.

This energy is reflected in the evolution of Hearn's style. When he arrived in Japan he wrote in the heightened, sensitive style typical of his
fin-de-siècle
times. For him the formative influences had been the florid Shelley, his favorite poet; the romantic Poe (in his student days Hearn called himself “The Raven”); the Gothic novelist and connoisseur of bizarre cultures, William Beckford; and George Borrow, the man who traveled with the exotic gypsies and coined a style to fit his Romany encounters.

In Japan Hearn had initially admired the writings of Pierre Loti and attempted to emulate what he took to be the French writer's technique: “On visiting a new country he always used to take notes of every fresh and powerful impression,—a landscape,—a sunset-blaze,—an architectural eccentricity,—a bit of picturesqueness in custom. . . .”

In elucidating this admired style, Hearn imitates it with his rhapsodic periods, his incantations, and his punctuation. The use of dashes with commas is a typical effusion—even more so is a lavish use of another mark of punctuation which lent the author the name of “Old Semi-Colon.”

This emotive use of punctuation was matched by a word choice that sought to create an aura of general emotion rather than to give a precise meaning. The result included a number of Japanese words as well—used entirely for atmosphere rather than for precise information.

This practice was criticized by both Hearn's publisher, Harper's, and his friend Chamberlain. In his defense he wrote, typically, that “for me words have color, form, character; they have faces . . . moods, humours, eccentricities. . . . That they are unintelligible makes no difference at all.”

They were truly unintelligible to him. He never learned properly to read or write, much less speak. Japanese remained a delightfully alien tongue to him, though in time he and his wife evolved a kind of baby-talk combined from both languages, and eventually he mastered the
kana
syllabary and could send her notes.

His wife read to him the stories which he, like a child, transcribed; and it was she who provided him with much of the information that became the basis of his work. It is thus quite true, as Marius Jansen writes, that Hearn “never made great progress in spoken or written Japanese . . . and he committed errors that would have been impossible had he possessed command of the language.”

This incapacity in language can be defended. Words, as Roland Barthes later emphasized, are arbitrary. They are symbols that seek to capture the real, they are not that reality itself. Indeed, that they are notoriously ill-fitting to the object intended is common knowledge. Hence, to describe something is often to destroy it. Writers are aware of this, or should be, and consequently attempt to try out new combinations which they hope will more precisely describe the intended. To
not
know a language, then, is to be free of its imprecision, and to retain the ability to approach afresh.

In addition, this lack of knowledge seems appropriate to someone who saw himself as so set apart. Ignorance was like a vaccination against a general contagion—one did not come down with that general inattention to reality that language inevitably breeds. Hearn was thus not only blind in Japan, he was deaf as well. Both of these qualities contributed to his happiness.

By 1893, however, the author was changing. Romancing about things he had seen (or been told of) was not enough; something more precise was called for. The flaccid Loti was no longer an inspiration. Instead, Hearn found in Rudyard Kipling—a writer who had also been to Japan—a much more muscular model. There was also the example of Hans Christian Andersen. Later he would have his publisher send him the collected stories of the Danish author. “How great the art of the man!—the immense volume of fancy,—the magical simplicity. . . .”

Simplicity . . . after the heightened, the complicated, the curious, Hearn had learned from Japan itself the virtues of the spare. As he wrote to Chamberlain: “After years of studying poetical prose, I am forced now to study simplicity. After attempting my utmost at ornamentation, I am converted by my own mistakes. The great point is to touch with simple words. And I feel my style is not yet fixed—too artificial. By another year of study or two, I think I shall be able to do better.”

One of the reasons for this evolving style was his own changing impressions of the country—stage two of the classical trinity was being reached. Again writing to Chamberlain, he stated, “As for changing my conclusions—well, I have had to change a good many. The tone [of my first book] is true in being the feeling of a place and time. Since then I've seen how thoroughly detestable [the] Japanese can be, and the revelation assisted in illuminating things.”

As for the writing itself, Lafcadio told Chamberlain that for every page he wrote, ten were suppressed. He would begin by arranging notes and writing down ideas, then correcting the manuscript. The following day he would rewrite everything. Then he would begin the final copy, which would be done twice. He knew the work was finished, he said, when a kind of focusing occurred. This happened when the process was completed, the original length cut in about half, and the first impression returned ever the more strongly.

To an old friend, Elwood Hendrick, he wrote that “the best work is done the way ants do things—by tiny tireless and regular additions.” He added that he never worked “without painfully forcing myself to do it.” His method was to “let the thought develop itself,” which led to “four or five rewritings and at least two final copies.”

This meant, in effect, a kind of description new to Hearn—one no longer concerned with preference and judgment but with precision; one much less concerned with places and much more concerned with people. It meant also being more clear about the person doing the writing—himself.

Indeed, as Albert Mordell has written, it is true that in this sense “it is a mistake to think of Hearn as a ‘writer on Japan.' Japan gave him nothing. He himself, not Japan, is the interesting subject.”

* * *

The solitary Hearn, seeking to lose himself in Japan, became gradually aware of individuality—theirs and his. While he had never wholly succumbed to those comforting generalizations about the Japanese that even now continue to clutter the literature, he had nonetheless done his bit toward the creating of a peaceful, beauty-loving public, invariably given to quoting haiku.

Now, however, he saw more and more clearly that “the Japanese” were in reality individuals as varied as any in Cincinnati or New Orleans. By 1894 he was writing Chamberlain: “Lowell says the Japanese have no individuality. I wish he had to teach here for a year, and he would discover some of the most extraordinary individualities he ever saw.”

He was now far distanced from Edwin Arnold, who had so praised quaint Japan and not once mentioned the miles of new railroad tracks. Hearn may not have liked the tracks but he wrote about them. This was because he was more and more writing about what he saw rather than about what he had wanted and expected to see.

Hearn's evocative and occasionally indulgent landscaping of Japan was succeeded by a penetrating and sometimes sentimental description of its people. These contributed to and led toward an attempt at interpretation, as he called it, in which his fictive country merged, finally, with the real.

Note:
As noted in the Introduction, Japanese was always “a delightfully alien tongue” for Hearn. His original manuscripts include Japanese terms that are dialect variations and other renderings that are simply mistakes.

Japanese words within this volume follow Hearn's original Romanized spelling, which can differ from modern Romanization. In addition, Hearn's spelling sometimes differed from essay to essay. This text retains Hearn's original spelling of all Japanese and English words and Hearn's original punctuation.

“There is some charm unutterable in the morning air, cool with the coolness of Japanese spring and wind-waves from the snowy cone of Fuji; a charm perhaps due rather to softest lucidity than to any positive tone,—an atmospheric limpidity extraordinary, with only a suggestion of blue in it, through which the most distant objects appear focused with amazing sharpness . . .” Thus did Hearn write in “My First Day in the Orient,” the essay that he chose to open his first book on Japan.

It reads like an announcement of intention—paradise regained. And Hearn would continue in this vein for many hundreds of pages. His delight is manifest and his enthusiasm is infectious. These writings still retain the emotions that created them.

What such emotions meant, however, was to be learned only after some years in the country. For this reason, the section “Strangeness and Charm” from one of Hearn's last books on the country seems most fitting to open this anthology. It gives a thoughtful account of the emotional impact of Japan upon an emotional person—including a more tempered memory of that first day in the country.

Hearn's finest description of the strangeness and charm of turn-ofthe-century Japan is contained in his essay on Matsue, his own personal paradise, “The Chief City of the Province of the Gods.” In this detailed, decorated, and embellished essay, he clearly tells us that he adopted the place forever: It came to represent for him all the promise of Japan—in 1904, the year of his death, he was still wanting to return.

He first went to Matsue in August 1890, having arrived in Japan less than six months before, and a month later was contentedly teaching at the local middle and high schools, having obtained the position through the kindness of Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, then at the Tokyo Imperial University.