"Lafcadio Hearn understands contemporary Japan better, and makes us understand it better than any other writer, because he loves it better." --Basil Hall Chamberlain Born in Greece and abandoned as a child, Lafcadio Hearn lived the life of an exile. He travelled the world and became a famous writer but always felt like an outsider--in Dublin, London, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and French-speaking Martinique. To him, none of these places felt like home. Hearn's life in America was punctuated by a string of successes and failures. In Cincinnati he became the city's best-known crime reporter but was fired after marrying a black woman. Devastated, he moved to New Orleans, where he championed French Creole and Caribbean culture in pieces for Harper's and Scribners--and created a new image for the city as a place of voodoo and debauchery (the image which many
