Lafcadio Hearn’s Traveling Regionalism

Both during his lifetime and in literary criticism for a century afterwards, Lafcadio Hearn was known not as a writer of American literature but as a foreigner entering the “exotic” land of Japan. For the last years of his life, Hearn made Japan his home, writing stories and observations of the country. As numerous critics have discussed, Hearn’s primary goal in his Japanese sketches was to preserve what he saw as the older and more romantic Japanese culture. However, before Hearn traveled to Japan, he lived in New Orleans, writing sketches, collecting folklore, and translating stories of the rapidly disappearing Creole culture. Though critics have discussed the New Orleans sketches and Japanese sketches, there has been little discussion of the connection between the two phases of Hearn’s writing career. Hearn applies the same form of southern American regionalism to the space of Japan. Just as the Creole culture in Hearn’s New Orleans is a romantic and exoticized other in need of preservation, so, too is the Japan of Hearn’s later life. Thus, Hearn’s regionalist sketches contain both New Orleans and Japan within almost identical spaces of othered, romanticized regions, spaces populated by seemingly timeless traditions and one-dimensional characters.