Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn

by Jonathan Cott

In 1869 a half-blind Greek-Irish teenager named Lafcadio Hearn came to Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the age of twenty-four became the city's most famous newspaper reporter on the strength of his lurid crime stories and bizarre explorations of the city's dark underside. Fired in 1877 for his brief marriage to a black woman, he wandered from New Orleans to New York to the Caribbean before finally settling in Japan where, in a unique act of self-transformation, he became a Japanese patriot and patriarch. Full of excerpts from Hearn's writing, Jonathan Cott's insightful portrayal of an extraordinary life recovers for a Western audience a unique figure of the nineteenth century.

Genres: Biography, Japan, Asia

438 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had expected Wandering Ghost to be a standard biography, but the number of long passages taken from Hearn's writings made me wonder what the author's intent was. At least half (or more) of the book is comprised of these lengthy passages from Hearn's newspaper work and other writings.

At times these quotes serve to move the book forward, but more often than not they bog it down, as in the inclusion of an entire newspaper story about a sensational murder -- some 13 pages that, while they served as a good illustration of Hearn's more florid prose style, served very little purpose biographically. The quoted passages are so numerous and at times so extraneous that it is frustrating to read this book as a biography. It's especially irksome when a five- or six-page lengthy quote is used when a one- or two-paragraph one would have easily sufficed.

Perhaps the problem is that I didn't pay sufficient attention to the publisher's description of Wandering Ghost as containing "generous selections" from Hearn's work, but even that did not prepare me for the amount of quoted material. Given the richness of the subject and wealth of material that Hearn left behind, it seems a shame that a more lucid biographical account of his life was not attempted.

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunner of a biography, from an era before xenophilia became fashion.

First, its well worth seeing the film Kwaidan, for the wider impression. Somehow the film version sets the stage really well for the lifelong passions of Mr. Hearn, bewitched and entranced by other cultures just beyond his grasp.
But by all means see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafcadio...

An exotic from the era when exotics emerged on the strength of their own willpower, not parentage or whim.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of interesting bio of the troll who is Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek citizen who trvelled madly, and became one of the early chroniclers and writers of salvage ethnography about Japan. The book suffers from over-attribution of intention vis-a-vis LH's psychic life, and takes pains to save him from being racist/racialist/exoticist. _Ghost_ does embed a nice selection of LH's actual writings into its swath, which contain lots of lush description of various kinds of oral folklife, and what one might call slumming--his love for the racialised demi-mondes where his powers as a citizen were not compromised (his occupation, ability to find housing, etc.) but his inner affinities for non-white women satisfied. His descriptions of the north as nordic and cold fit a typical paradise exoticist lover's playbook, and are 'balanced' by portraits of feminine beauty in the South and tropics that mixes descriptors of Hellenic and African. Some of his early Cincinnati reporting is quite interesting--body-snatchers and other thrills of the crime beat. A real character, who might have been better served with a critic less enamored or protective of his object of study.

[John Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the only biography on Hearn that I have read (who has read more than 1??) so I can't really compare, myself.
Interestingly the author of this one DOES compare his biography to the previous 4-5.
This one includes VERY long excerpts from his journalism and other writings. There were times where I thought this was pretty great, some sensational early articles from Cincinatti, but it also includes long long boring letters written to friends about his philosophy on life and thoughts on other authors. I don't really care about his long winded take on French literature. So for some of these I ended up skipping around.
The excerpts probably comprise more than 50% of the book. Most people know of Hearn for his works on Japan, and will be surprised that his life there is less than a third of the book.
He was an interesting guy who had strange theories, traveled a lot and wrote thousands of pages of letters, so there is a lot of information to draw from.
Definitely a fascinating character to read about even if you aren't familiar with Kwaidan or anything else he wrote.