An immigrant train bound inland made its way from New York City to Cincinnati some hundred years ago. On it rode 19-year-old Lafcadio Hearn, a writer and orphan who was well read and built of curiosity; currently, the debate over his exact arrival date in Cincinnati is being passionately investigated.
Leading the search are the Lafcadio Hearn Society/USA and the Japan Research Center of Greater Cincinnati, who conducted a contest for the date’s reveal but were left with a six-month discontinuity. The answer lies somewhere between Hearn’s September 1869 arrival in NYC and his definite presence in Cincinnati in March of 1870, according to Gary Eith, JRCGC president.
But why should this matter to modern-day Cincinnatians?
A March 5 event at The Mercantile Library will pinpoint these reasons while celebrating the 150-year anniversary of Hearn’s arrival in the U.S. The JRCGC and Lafcadio Hearn Society/USA are co-hosting the celebration and lecture, along with a slew of events throughout the year. While Hearn was most well-known for his books about Japan, Cincinnati is where his career began.
The Mercantile event is devoted to equalizing his fame here in Cincinnati. Keynote speaker Junko Umemoto, Ph.D., a Hearn expert and professor at Nihon University in Japan, will highlight Hearn’s literary pilgrimage and work.
“Hearn’s life in Cincinnati decided his way to be a writer,” Umemoto says in an email. “Without his training in Cincinnati (reading and writing), he would not be a writer.”
Hearn was born in 1850 in Lefkada, Greece but grew up in Dublin, Ireland. He was educated there and briefly in England and France before immigrating to the U.S., where he made his own way in Cincinnati, working menial jobs and contributing to newspapers without pay until he landed official staff writing positions. He spent a considerable amount of time translating French works and even went on to publish a weekly independent journal, Ye Giglampz, which was devoted to art, literature and satire.
He told mundane stories and nurtured the details so finely that they became unforgettable. And at the start of it all was The Cincinnati Enquirer and The Cincinnati Commercial.
“He wrote about many aspects of Cincinnati that other journalists at that time ignored,” says Steve Kemme, president of the Lafcadio Hearn Society/USA. “He was one of the first ones to write seriously and with respect about African-Americans in Cincinnati,” which Kemme notes that, in his opinion, was some of his best work while in the Queen City.
“He was one of the best writers at (The Enquirer),” he continues. “He had a literary style that was unusual for a daily reporter, very descriptive. He used dialogue and inserted himself sometimes, which prefigured what became the new journalism of the 1960s and ’70s.”
In one Cincinnati Commercial article, written in 1876 — titled “Some Pictures of Poverty” — about apartments on West Seventh Street, Hearn animates the slums carefully:
“It came in the form of a grisly and spectral vision — deformed stairways; with interminable suites of crooked rooms, having sloping floors and curving walls; with crazy stoves and heavy smells; with long rags and ragged gowns haunting the pale walls like phantom visitors or elfish mockeries of the dead; and all the chambers haunted by sharp shadows and sharp faces that made them piteous with the bitterness of withered hopes, or weird by fearful waiting for the coming of the dreamless slumber, as a great Shadow, which silently falling over lesser darknessess, absorbs them into Itself.”
He was especially interested in profiling everyday people but was also keen on the crime beat and spared no details in the wake of gruesome murders and even public hangings. “Violent Cremation,” a story about a murder that ran in The Enquirer November 1874 recites what Hearn saw at the coroner’s office: “Masses of crumbling human bones, strung together by half-burnt sinews, or glued one upon another by a hideous adhesion of half-molten flesh, boiled brains and jellied blood mingled with coal.”
On the lighter, yet still eccentric, side of Hearn’s varied interests was Japanese folklore, which he interpreted from a language he barely understood (Japanese) and rendered the stories his own. His most popular book of such tales is Kwaidan, which means ghost story.
Kwaidan, like Hearn, is famous abroad but somehow is rarely noted among us — despite launching his career here.
“I think it’s important for Americans to learn from other cultures,” Kemme says. “There’s such a strong tie between Japan and the United States commercially, especially, but there’s a lot for both sides to learn from each other from a cultural standpoint. Hearn was generations ahead of his time, he was one of the earlier writers to write about the Japanese culture and one of the first Western writers to go and live in Japan and write about what he saw there.”
He was a curious figure abroad, Kemme says, as he traveled to places where the Japanese had likely never seen a Westerner. One of his most curious and daring decisions, though, was in Cincinnati when Hearn took on the assignment of joining a steeple climber.
Atop St. Peter in Chains Cathedral Hearn describes the gradual passing of fear after climbing nearly 250 feet above the city.
“In every direction, the city lays out in regular squares like an elaborate map,” he wrote. “For three or four blocks … the centers of the thoroughfares were distinctly visible, with wagon-teams, buggies and carriages straggling along, apparently no larger than flies.”
Hearn was said to be a stubborn man who fought for his words and was known to argue for fair pay and the inclusion of Japanese terms in his stories. Umemoto will talk specifically about the latter at the March 5 event — honing in specifically on the word “tsunami” and the debate about crediting Hearn for introducing it to the English language.
When the infamous earthquake of 1896 devastated Japan, Hearn wrote of the event and the tsunamis it caused. “A Living God,” published in the Atlantic Monthly, was about a man who sacrificed his harvests to save lives; Japanese writer Tsunezo Nakai later adapted it into a popular children’s book titled Inamura no Hi.
“It is not too much to say that thanks to Hearn, we Japanese had a chance to know ourselves,” Umemoto says.
The 150-year anniversary celebration continues after the March 5 event with a tour of places Hearn wrote about or visited, to be conducted by Kemme on June 29. Kemme and Eith are also awaiting funds to erect a memorial to honor Hearn and will release more information about upcoming events as they arise.
The Mercantile Library will host a reception and lecture by Professor Junko Umemoto of Nihon University, “Tsunami: The Tidal Wave as Introduced by Lafcadio Hearn and Others,” on March 5. More info: jrcgc.com.
This article appears in Feb 20-27, 2019.
