Lafcadio Hearn's old house

Day One of Kumamoto:

I don't know why I bothered getting up early and making the first train out of town, both in Tokyo or Kyoto. There was no need. In Kyoto I had to wait around for two hours because I arrived at ten o'clock in the morning and check-in time was at noon. I repeated the mistake in Kumamoto. Even though I slept in and took a late-morning train that took four hours to arrive, I walked into the lobby of the APA Hotel at one o'clock. Check-in wasn't until three.

I paid a few hundred yen to use the Internet workspace and "checked in" with everybody back home. I considered stowing my stuff behind the counter and sauntering outside to see some stuff, but there really wasn't time. I needed to do laundry, too, so I got that started before I'd even checked into my room. The concierge was thoughtful enough to bring me my key at 2:55.

My room at the APA was smaller than the one in the Karasuma Kyoto, a lot smaller. The bed was harder. There was barely enough room for me to turn around in the shower. But I did have a pretty good view out the window and a place to lay my head for two nights (all for the low price of 8,800 yen). I wasn't complaining.

Laundry finished at about four o'clock. Worried about managing to see everything on my to-do list (Lafcadio Hearn's house, the Suizen-ji Gardens, and Kumamoto Castle), I grabbed my camera and my trusty satchel and hit the bricks.

Now, I told you that Kyoto had subway trains and Japan Rail commuter trains as well as charming little trams, right?

Well, Kumamoto is so far south and is such a sleepy little city that all it has are trams. I walked outside Kumamoto Station and saw a tram station outside of the train station. (Trippy.) Cabs and buses, too, but you know me: I go for trams every time. There's a single Y-shaped tram line which runs through greater Kumamoto. For 150 yen ($1.50 per ride) you can go anywhere you want. There are stops every few hundred yards. Best yet, the tram stopped near all three items on my to-do list. So I hopped on after I dumped my stuff off at the hotel. The train rattled and shook. The people aboard blinked sleepily. The brass handles make an even louder cranking noise when the operator turned them. It was like the Keifuku Randen tram turned up to eleven. I loved it.

First stop was Lafcadio Hearn's old house, near the tram stop at Suidocho.

Whoa, wait. You don't know who Lafcadio Hearn was?

It's hard to describe him in one sentence, but I'll do my best: Lafcadio Hearn was a Greek-Irish journalist and writer who moved to Japan in 1890 to be a correspondent for a newspaper and wound up becoming a teacher and a naturalized Japanese citizen.

Boom. There you go.

Aw, rats. I suppose just one sentence isn't going to be enough. Okay, here:

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 on the Ionian island of Lefkada (hence his middle name) to an Irish-born British Army sergeant major and a Greek noblewoman. With his father he moved to Dublin at age 2, and received "a rather casual education." At age 19 he was sent to the United States, settling in Cincinnati, Ohio, living rough for a while. After befriending some powerful people, however, he started a career in journalism. He lived in New Orleans for ten years and wrote much about that city. However, his short-lived assignment to Japan was the one that changed his life. He liked the place so much (and was in such good graces with local ambassadors) that he managed to snag a teaching position at a middle school. He learned Japanese, took a Japanese name (Koizumi Yakumo), accepted a professorship at a university in Tokyo, married a Japanese woman, and just settled down and lived out the remaining years of his life. He died in 1904 of heart failure. He's best remembered for his writings about Japan, which back in the late nineteenth century was still a black hole as far as most Westerners were concerned: unknown and mysterious. Hearn's 1894 book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan gained him notoriety and started the Western obsession with Japan and Japanese culture.

My favorite book of Hearn's, however, was the one I read when I was—golly, eight years old or something. It's called Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. It's a book full of Japanese ghost stories. I was just fascinated by it. Here was a group of people, monsters, ghosts and legends that I'd never heard of before. I was (and still am) a huge fan of Greek mythology and was just starting to branch out into others, like Norse and Hindu. Hearn's book was like a bolt from the blue. I loved the simple, straightforward, unpretentious and yet lyrical style of the work, and I adored the vividness of the settings and characters which Hearn coaxed out of the old tales. Kwaidan not only kicked off my long-lived curiosity about Japan and Asia, but also made me idolize Hearn. He became sort of a role model for me: a journalist who didn't do that well in the journalism world, but is best remembered for his travels and the stuff he wrote about the places he saw. I'm also rather awed at how well and naturally he was able to fit into Japanese society, learning the language and marrying a local. It's something to aspire to, you know? That level of linguistic assiduousness and cultural sensitivity.  

Okay, enough of me geeking out. As an homage to Hearn and the impact he had on me at a young age, I decided to seek out his old house and have a look. I didn't feel like stumping up a few bucks to take a peek inside, but I satisfied myself from without. It was a beautiful little house. I was really rather envious.

For my international readers.

There was a lovely little park next to his house, too.

On the whole, I walked away feeling like a better person. I'd completed a successful pilgrimage. Some people go to see Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon; others go to see Faulkner's or Twain's. Me, I like to challenge myself a bit. I went to see Hearn's (in Kumamoto on Kyushu Island). Someday I'll see one or two of Hemingway's and some of my other favorite expat writers', too.

Next up: SUIZEN-JI JŌJU-EN. If you want to see me pet a carp, you'd better tune in.