Kokoro

by Lafcadio Hern

Published six years after his arrival in the country in 1890, Kokoro was the third volume of essays on Japan by the prolific Anglo-Irish author Lafcadio Hearn. This collection is rich in a varied panorama of observations, offering snapshots of the country at a time of growing national pride following victory in the First Sino-Japanese War. Strongly influenced by the evolutionary psychology of Herbert Spencer and excited by Japan’s unique heritage and future prospects, Hearn’s sustained, race-based analysis of the jars of culture is vaguely contemporary. But his deft portraits of the everyday world around him—from the account of a blind singer of extraordinary talent performing in his home to a portrait of his patient Japanese wife—are a constant delight.

Hearn had a fearlessly inquisitive mind that often stops you dead in your tracks with the originality of his thoughts; he notes that Japanese crowds are the sweetest smells in the world and wonders whether the arch of Japanese roofs was not a distant echo of the tents of a prehistoric nomadic past. He is curiously prescient, both about the future war with Russia and about the fact that Japan's economy, using sophisticated craft traditions, will ultimately be based not on undercutting European rivals but on high-tech production. Not writing his observations, travels and historical-cultural analyses, Hearn moves on to fragments of the novel's inventions, as if he were creating an inspiring Gothic fantasy from Japan that will take him to the heart ("kokoro") of the mystery of human existence."

(...) "Ko-Ko-Ro" means everything that in Western concepts is associated with the concepts of "spirit", "courage", "feeling", "resoluteness", "inner meaning", "essence of things", "heart". This expression is practically impossible to translate in one word, and as a title it only announces that the creator was not satisfied with presenting the outer shell of life, but reached for the core. (…)”

184 pages, Paperback