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(PATRICIO) LAFCADIO (TESSIMA CARLOS) HEARN (1850-1904) was born in Levkás, Greece (one of the Ionian islands), the child of Charles Hearn, an Irish army surgeon, and Rosa Kassimati, a Greek national. After his parents' divorce when he was six, he was sent to live in Dublin in the care of a great-aunt; her eventual bankruptcy compelled him to leave school, and at the age of nineteen he immigrated to the United States, where he took up residence in Cincinnati, Ohio, eventually becoming a reporter and feature writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer (from 1872 to 1875) and later the Cincinnati Commercial. During this period he also translated works by Théopliile Gautier and Gustave Flaubert, and - in an act illegal at the time - married Alethea Foley, a black woman. In 1877 Hearn left Cincinnati for New Orleans, where he remained for almost ten years, writing articles on a remarkable variety of subjects and publishing them in a range of journals, including Scribner's Magazine and Harper's Weekly Magazine. Harper's sent him to the West Indies in 1889, and the writings he produced there included Two Tears in the French West Indies, which appeared in 1890. That same year he went to Japan, initially as a correspondent for Harper's; after a break in his relations with the magazine, he took a position as a teacher in a middle school in Matsue, then at the Government College at Kumamoto, and finally at the Imperial University in Tokyo, where he was appointed professor of English. In 1891 Hearn married Setsuko Koizumi, a member of a distinguished samurai family, and in 1895 he became a naturalized Japanese citizen, taking on the name Koizumi Yaleumo. Publishing essays early on in The Atlantic Monthly, he soon established himself as one of the West's principal interpreters of Japanese culture. His numerous books in this area include Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (1895), Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896), Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), Japanese Fairy Tales (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), A Japanese Miscellany (1901), and Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1903). Hearn's best known work is probably Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, a series of lectures intended to...