Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan by Carl Dawson (review)

254Rocky Mountain Review CARL DAWSON. Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. 187 p. 1 he voluminous writings of the expatriate writer Lafcadio Hearn (18501904 )—essays on traditional Japanese life, history, religion, and retellings of Japanese folk tales and ghost stories—established him as the pre-eminent , and surely most widely read, of the interpreters of early-modern Japan to the West; his writings continue to engage readers to this day, including readers in Japan (where he is better known by his Japanese name, Koizumi Yakumo). Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision ofJapan, Carl Dawson's fascinating and eminently readable account of Hearn and his writings, is less concerned with reviewing or summarizing the minutiae of the world of traditional Japan as depicted by Hearn than with the following: situating Hearn in both a personal and historical context, revealing the effects of the "emotional and intellectual baggage" Hearn brought with him in his encounter with Japan, "plac[ing] him in the context of other Westerners" who wrote about Japan, and considering Hearn's vision of Japanese civilization and his "role as mediator between East and West" (xix-xx). It is an ambitious undertaking, and within the limits of this short book, one that has succeeded. The continuing influence of the evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer on Hearn is part of the latter's intellectual "baggage," and forms a strong undercurrent of the book; as Dawson notes, Hearn's own vision of Japan and its future was both backward- and forward-looking, as he proposed a "sort of marriage, an intellectual-spiritual union, that is, between Spencerian philosophy and Eastern religions, notably Japanese Buddhism" in order that the Japanese maintain both their "traditional culture and their independence from the West" (140, 141). While Hearn's role as interpreter of Japan to the West is well known and documented elsewhere, Dawson's study provides valuable insights into Hearn's other role, through his position as lecturer in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, namely that of interpreter of Western culture to the Japanese. Dawson reveals a divided soul, a man known through his public writings as a Japanophile who in the classroom became something of a Eurocentric, "makfing] clear to his students that Western literature set standards unmatched by the Japanese" (128) and advocating an overhaul ofJapanese literature based on "Western principles" (124). Hearn's divided nature reveals itself, too, in Dawson's compelling and original reading of Hearn's obsession with ghosts and the world of spirits. Hearn was convinced he worked within the framework of a collective unconscious, a feeling that (in Dawson's words), "Our fears as well as our desires are governed by the composite selves of history . . . the ghosts of those we follow are within" (70). While this was a potentially ego-enhancing stance, Hearn moved at the same time in a divergent direction: "The person who experiences horror, as Hearn so often did, actually experiences a breakdown of self. . . . Indeed, horror or fear seems to generate the awareness ofthe ghosts, whose main effect is the destruction of personality" (70). Encounters with the uncanny or horrific— Book Reviews255 the awareness of ghosts—thus held, in Hearn's mind, the potential for exposing the illusion of ego, something most appealing to this often disillusioned , even bitter man whose awareness of his own failings Dawson neatly traces. But why Japanese ghosts? For one thing, the richness of pre-modern Japan's ghostly world appealed to Hearn. "[Hearn's] emphasis on ghost stories indicates his conviction that Old Japan redeemed itself in the fullness of its imagination, in the creation of stories about those individuals banned from the society or punished by its inflexibility" (96). As we see here, "ghosts" in Dawson's argument stand not just for the uncanny, the spirit world, but for something social, for that which is excluded from mainstream society. Hearn, a recluse in later years whose lack of mastery over Japanese only added to his isolation, identified with these Japanese ghosts, finding "his home with those sections of the community, those ghosts of the past, excluded like himself from the new order" of Meiji Japan (98). On the...