Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life

By Lafcadio Hearn and Patricia Welch

The 15 classic essays collected in Kokoro examine the inner spiritual life of Japan.

The title itself can be translated as "heart," "spirit" or "inner meaning," and that's exactly what this collection teaches us about Japan. Sometimes touching and always compelling, the writings here tell the stories of the people and social codes that make Japan the unique place it is. "Kimiko" paints the portrait of a beautiful geisha; "By Force of Karma" tells the story of a Buddhist monk; and in "A Conservative," we come to know the thoughts and actions of a Samurai.

As an early interpreter of Japan to the West, Lafcadio Hearn was without parallel in his time. His numerous books about that country were read with a fascination that was a tribute to his keen powers of observation and the vividness of his descriptions. Today, even though Japan has changed greatly from what it was when he wrote about it, his writing is still valid, for it captures the essence of the country--an essence that has actually changed a good deal less than outward appearances might suggest. In a word, the Japanese character and the Japanese tradition are still fundamentally the same as Hearn found them to be, and for this reason, his books are still extremely revealing to readers in the West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
• Release date: Dec 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781462900251

Lafcadio Hearn

Lafcadio Hearn, also called Koizumi Yakumo, was best known for his books about Japan. He wrote several collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, including Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

Book preview

KOKORO

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), born in Greece to an Anglo-Irish father and a Greek mother, was brought up in Greece and Ireland. He moved to the US when he was nineteen, and then to Japan in 1890, where he spent the rest of his life teaching and writing. Hearn was one of the first great interpreters of things Japanese for Western readers. His long residence in Japan, combined with his perfect insight and sympathy, keen intellect, poetic imagination, and clear writing style have ensured him a devoted readership among both foreigners and Japanese for over a century.

Books to Span the East and West

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hearn, Lafcadio, 1850-1904.

Kokoro: hints and echoes of Japanese inner life / Lafcadio Hearn; with a foreword by Patricia Welch.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-4-8053-1138-7 (pbk.)

1. Japan--Social life and customs. 2. Folklore--Japan. 3. Japan--Civilization. I. Title.

DS822.3.H4 2011

952.03’1--dc22

2010051647

ISBN 978-4-8053-1720-4; ISBN 978-1-4629-0025-1 (Ebook)

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TO MY FRIEND

AMÉNOMORI NOBUSHIGÉ

POET, SCHOLAR, AND PATRIOT

Contents

FOREWORD

1. A T A R AILWAY S TATION

2. T HE G ENIUS OF J APANESE C IVILIZATION

3. A S TREET S INGER

4. F ROM A T RAVELING D IARY

5. T HE N UN OF THE T EMPLE OF A MIDA

6. A FTER THE W AR

7. H ARU

8. A G LIMPSE OF T ENDENCIES

9. B Y F ORCE OF K ARMA

10. A C ONSERVATIVE

11. I N THE T WILIGHT OF THE G ODS

12. T HE I DEA OF P REEXISTENCE

13. I N C HOLERA -T IME

14. S OME T HOUGHTS ABOUT A NCESTOR -W ORSHIP

15. K IMIKO

APPENDIX. THREE POPULAR BALLADS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Consideration of Kokoro: An Intimate Portrait of Japanese Inner Life

Lafcadio Hearn understands contemporary Japan better, and makes us understand it better, than any other writer, because he loves it better."

–Basil Hall Chamberlain

THE WANDERER Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was perhaps Meiji Japan’s favorite adopted son. In fourteen years of residence in Japan between 1890 and the time of his death, he authored some twelve books, which included reminiscences, retellings of folktales, studies of the Japanese, and sketches of Japanese life. He also taught English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, married a Japanese woman with whom he had children, and became a naturalized Japanese citizen, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo. During his lifetime he was far more famous in the West than in Japan. Readers found his observations of a vanishing Japan poignant and beautifully moving. After his death, his popularity declined. This may have resulted from Japan’s increasingly aggressive imperialism, some determined slandering in an early biography, which denounced both his character and his literary output, as well as by changing literary sensibilities.¹ In Japan, by contrast, his popularity has only increased with the passage of time. Today, he is admired for his sympathetic renderings of traditional Japanese life, and his renderings of ghost stories and folk tales, many of which have been used as source texts for adaptations. For example, the chillingly beautiful 1964 film Kwaidan by Kobayashi Masaki is based on Hearn’s renderings of Japanese ghost stories. But this is not to say that Hearn’s body of work on Japan is of no value for contemporary Western readers, who may find his observations astute and prescient. Kokoro: An Intimate Portrait of Japanese Inner Life, a collection of 15 essays first published in 1896 and now re-issued by Tuttle provides the reader with an eclectic vision of Japanese traits and the sources from which they spring.² Because these essays are so precisely situated at the mid-point of the Meiji Period, the contemporary reader can learn much about changing concepts of nation, modernization, and tradition through the eyes of one who was present to witness the transitions.

Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn was born on Leucadia Island in 1850, the second son of Charles Bush Hearn, an Anglo-Irish surgeon stationed there with the British Army, and Rosa Antonio Cassimati. Their secret marriage, conducted five months after the birth of their first child (and after Rosa realized she was pregnant for a second time), was a failure almost from the outset. Three months after they married, Hearn left his wife for a posting in the British West Indies, having never registered his marriage with the British War Office. Further, aware of his mother’s antipathy toward the union, he chose not to relocate Rosa to Dublin. The young mother lost her first son before Lafcadio was even two months old, and she doted on her remaining child. Lafcadio’s earliest memories are of wandering through the streets of Leukadia with his mother.

In 1852, Charles Hearn, still stationed in the West Indies, finally relocated his wife and child to Dublin. This too was a failure: Hearn’s upper-crust Anglo-Irish family was astounded to discover that Rosa was illiterate, and the culture clash between their staunch Protestantism and her belief in ghosts and saints would have been laughable were it not for the tragic consequences. Rosa and her child first took refuge at the residence of Sarah Brenane, Major Hearn’s widowed aunt, who had converted to Roman Catholicism when she married. Rosa had a brief reunion with her husband when he returned to Dublin on sick leave, though it only confirmed that the marriage to all intents and purposes was over. When he recovered, Major Hearn left Rosa for the last time, though she didn’t yet know this. Rosa—again pregnant—returned to Greece, leaving Lafcadio (then called Patrick or Paddy) behind with Sarah Brenane. There she learned that her husband had annulled their marriage. Lafcadio never saw his mother again. Lafcadio remained with his great-aunt Sarah, and his infant brother was returned to Ireland to be raised by the father upon his return to Dublin. Throughout his life, Hearn felt betrayed by the father who had abandoned his mother, though he continued to honor her memory.

His great-aunt Sarah Brenane was sixty-four, childless, and wealthy when she became Lafcadio’s guardian. By all accounts, she cared for him to the best of her abilities—schooling was first a live-in tutor and then a succession of boarding schools; summers were spent by the sea. Moreover, the two were fond of each other, in an awkward way. As he grew, Hearn, who always felt like an outsider, struggled against her straight-laced Victorian mores and the strict Roman Catholic ways of the convert. He took refuge in the folk tales and ghost stories told him by nursemaids, fisherfolk, and others, and in the illustrated books of classical mythology he discovered in his aunt’s rarely used library. These disparate sources provided him with emotional and aesthetic sustenance.

Although Sarah Brenane had intended to make her charge her principal heir, she fell under the influence of Henry Hearn Molyneax, a businessman who claimed to be a distant relative of her late husband. She first settled an annuity onto his fiancée and then transferred the bulk of her estate to him and his wife after they married. As they ingratiated themselves into Brenane’s life, the rebellious boy was pushed further and further aside. First, he was sent to a distant boarding school, where the injury that blinded his left eye occurred. Then Molyneax’s importing business failed, almost bankrupting Lafcadio’s aunt. Young Hearn was home from school recovering from his eye injury. He was soon shipped off to a former employee in London, and somewhat later to the United States. After his great-aunt died, Hearn was not entirely shocked to learn that he was not even to receive the annuity promised him after she changed her will in favor of Molyneaux.

Once in America, Hearn, who had faced rejection numerous times already in his life began to assert his independence. Soon to go was his name Patrick; henceforth, he insisted on being called Lafcadio, the wanderer. He struggled considerably his first years in the States, but eventually found himself in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he began to learn a trade (printing) and to follow a vocation (writing). His journalistic career began in 1872 with detailed sketches about life in Cincinnati’s margins, ghettoes, and ethnic enclaves. These evocative pieces captivated contemporary readers. Although some of his articles—for example a lengthy story on the so-called Tanyard Murder in which murderers attempted to incinerate a corpse—were decidedly lurid, he was admired for his ability to evoke time, place, and motivation through colorful characters and thick description. Moreover, unlike most writers then current who tackled dangerous topics, he not only broke with genteel norms, he was able to do so in a way that did not wholly reflect then conventional views of marginalized peoples as inferior.

He threw himself into his work, like an ethnographer who participated in the lives he described. Shockingly, to his more conventional friends, Hearn developed a taste for the lives and cultures of Cincinnati’s under-classes. In 1874, to the displeasure of most of his friends both black and white, he married Alethea Mattie Foley, the mixed-race cook at the boarding house where he lived. Given Ohio’s miscegenation laws at the time, this marriage was not allowed; and it was only by passing Mattie as white, that he convinced a black minister to marry them. However, the marriage did not last very long. The scandal, when it got out, resulted in Hearn’s dismissal from the Enquirer, though he was soon picked up by the Commercial, a rival newspaper. When word of this marriage surfaced again following his death, it was once again scandalous news.

Eager for new adventures, and tired of Ohio’s bone-chilling winters, Hearn left for New Orleans after the 1876 Presidential election to be the Commercial’s political correspondent, though he was soon fired from the paper for failing to make reports as contracted. Rather, he found himself entranced by New Orleans’ folk and hybrid cultures of the city, which he began to see as a kind of model for America’s future. He joined forces with George Washington Cable, an early folklorist, and together they collected Creole stories and African-American folksongs. In advance of the 1885 New Orleans exposition, Hearn compiled many of his materials on Creole culture. Interestingly, it is also around this time that he first wrote on Japan: a few essays to Harper’s about the Japan Pavilion at the New Orleans exposition. He decided that he would write a book on Japan, though it was some years before he managed to travel to Japan. After leaving New Orleans, he spent time on Mississippi’s gulf coast, two years in Martinique, and in New York, a city he detested because of what he saw as the overwhelmingly negative results of America’s emphasis on enterprise and materialism.

In the years after he left Cincinnati, he found his métier as a writer. Though he continued to write for newspapers on occasion, his output included numerous magazine articles (mainly for Harper’s), skillful translations of French literature, and six full-length books, including two short novels. While the novels are read today mainly as evocative period pieces, his ethnographically journalistic work on Creole cultures is now considered ground-breaking, almost revolutionary in its concern with hybridity, and its partial rejection of evolutionary models of culture then dominant. In the words of Simon Bronner, who has written extensively about Hearn’s Creole writings, Hearn:

saw in folklore a window to what he called the inner life, or the meaning of the expressiveness of ordinary people. As an outsider to elite institutions, Hearn presaged the concerns of the urban or modern folklore field, and as outsider to America, he presented hybridization as process and metaphor, thereby confronting the nation’s racial legacy in its cultural development" (Bronner 146).

Though unremarkable today, this position put him at odds with many early folklorists. Further, in contrast to many other American ethnographic writers of the time, but in line with French folklorists, Hearn treated his material as authentic and natural, the true property of locals, and not mere imitations of elite culture. Finally, by considering the importance of social context in affecting how and why people and cultures might behave in certain ways in response to certain stimuli, Hearn foreshadowed the emergence of writers like Oscar Lewis.

At last Lafcadio departed for Japan, traveling overland before boarding a ship bound for Yokohama. He arrived on April 12, 1890, intending to stay only for the time it took to write a book on Japanese customs, religion, and philosophy. Even so, the letter to his publishers in which he pitched his project reveals that he proposed to approach his subject from a perspective different from that of many other Western sojourners. He writes:

In attempting a book upon a country so well trodden as Japan, I could not hope—nor would I consider it prudent attempting—to discover totally new things, but only to consider things in a totally new way…. The studied aim would be to create, in the minds of the readers, a vivid impression of living in Japan—not simply as an observer but as one taking part in the daily existence of the common people, and thinking with their thoughts.³

Perhaps then, it is not surprising that his sojourn in Japan lasted until the end of his life—in 1904, and was the longest he had lived anywhere other than his mostly unhappy years in Ireland as a child.

While resident in Japan, Hearn first taught English in Matsue a sleepy former castle town near the Sea of Japan. There he met Setsu, the daughter of an impoverished samurai who became his wife. He then moved to Kumamoto to teach at the Fifth Higher Middle School. Kumamoto, also a former castle town, had a very different feel than Matsue. It had become a seat for the new Japanese armed forces, and then been torched in the Satsuma rebellion of 1877. In 1895, after a sojourn in Kobe, an open port city with a vibrant foreign concession where he wrote for the Kobe Chronicle, Hearn was invited to a professorship of English at Tokyo Imperial University. Although he didn’t much care for Tokyo, he was aware of its importance in the modernization of Japan. Hearn continued teaching at Tokyo Imperial University until 1903 when his employer proposed to transmute his contract to a local contract. This would have involved a considerable pay cut. From then until his death, he lectured at Waseda University and he prepared a series of lectures that were to have been delivered at Cornell University. Unfortunately, the lectureship never materialized. He died of heart failure in September 1904.

During the fourteen years he was resident in Japan, Hearn was remarkably prolific. He wrote twelve books, including Kokoro, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Kwaidan, and Kotto, in addition to other articles, essays, and extensive correspondence with friends both inside and outside of Japan. Through the locales in which he lived, and his life with his wife’s extended family, Hearn had a rather different view of Japan during a time of immense social change than most other foreign visitors.

In the 1890s, Japan was, to paraphrase the words of Natsume Soseki’s unnamed older narrator in his novel Kokoro, referring to the time of his youth, a mystery even to itself. In the space of a generation, following the Meiji Restoration, Japan had experienced a period of rapid social change almost unparalleled in the world, as it attempted to transform itself into a modern industrialized nation, able to stand shoulder to shoulder with Western powers. The new nation demanded much of its citizens, and the new citizens responded vigorously, but the pace and force of the changes caused serious inner personal tensions, and social stress. Ideologically, in part, the changes were promoted through the devising of a state system that reconfigured Confucian social relations for the rising modern era, as expressed in the Meiji Constitution, the Civil Code, and the Imperial Rescript on Education, all of which had been codified by the time Hearn arrived in Japan. Each person had a responsibility to work assiduously for the new nation, at whatever cost. In objective terms, Japan was meeting the challenges of modernization with great panache, although the personal costs for many were great. The Meiji 20s, in other words, the time when Hearn arrived in Japan, saw growing retrenchment and nationalism, burgeoning imperialist aggression, while the pace of social change continued unabated. Hearn, with his great powers of observation and empathy was able to richly capture the contradictory moods of the time.

The fifteen pieces of Kokoro: An Intimate Portrait of Japanese Inner Life, include sketches, essays, meditations, and legends. To Hearn, each of these works reveals something of Japan’s race-mind or inner life, something which he believed existed. The collection seems idiosyncratic, yet a number of significant patterns can be seen. These patterns reveal almost as much about Hearn’s intellectual position as they do about Japan.

One pattern concerns the power of familial love: the love of parent for child, or child for parent. This can be seen in the first piece, At a Railway Station, which relates an encounter between a murderer and the young child of his victim at a railway station. The meeting, presented as though it were an occasion witnessed by Hearn, attains lasting significance for all present when the wild-eyed felon breaks down and shows remorse for his violent act. To the surprise of the (fictional) Western narrator, this confession satisfies the restive crowd. In the first part of In Cholera Time, Hearn writes poignantly of the ravages of a cholera epidemic on family and community; in the second part, the ghost of a young mother provides milk for her child beyond the grave. Her eternal love for her child, and her husband’s respect for her dying wish make this miracle possible. And in a third, The Nun of the Temple of Amida, a young woman loses both husband and child in quick succession. Her spirit broken with grief, she eventually makes contact with her young son through an esoteric ritual at a Buddhist temple. He tells her that he died that she might live; and though his message sustains her, she becomes like a child herself. Accepting that, her aging parents make her a Buddhist nun, though in a very small temple, with a very small altar. Everyone cares for the innocent nun, and generations of children around the temple understand how the loss of her child has fundamentally changed her; they accept her as one of them, and play with her as though they were playing with one of their friends. After her death they then propose to provide for her a very, very small tombstone where her ashes might repose.

Other essays in the collection are far less whimsical. They attempt to communicate Hearn’s understanding of Japanese religious and philosophical ideas, which he saw as informing every facet of life. In these essays, Hearn begins to work out his first conceptualizations of the connection between spirituality, self, and subject. The topic fascinated him for the remainder of his life. Hearn, a believer of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary psychology, was convinced that Spencer’s theory was not incompatible with Buddhism. Spencer, who coined the phrase survival of the fittest often attributed to Charles Darwin, was a fervent believer in evolution. Central to his thought was the now controversial notion of race-memory. For Hearn, emotions and intuition are prime examples of inherited or race-memory. Emotions link individuals with the unknown past, which they understand at some base level. Hearn writes in A Street Singer, of how he wept when he heard the plaintive song of a blind singer:

Inherited memory makes familiar to even the newly born the meaning of this tone of caress. Inherited, no doubt, likewise, our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far East may revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than individual being,—vague, dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows,—dim loving impulses of generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains,—to be startled at the rarest moments only by the echo of some voice that recalls their past (26).

Though he does not understand the words of her song, its emotive content is communicated to him unbidden at a somatic level. The idea of inherited memory is developed further in such essays as From a Traveling Diary, In the Twilight of the Gods, The Idea of Pre-existence, By Force of Karma, and Some Thoughts on Ancestor Worship and he begins to link it with Buddhist notions of karma. What is identified as race-memory in Spencer, Hearn believes represents karma to the Japanese Buddhist. For Hearn, karma (innen) is not simply psychologically reasonable, but scientifically probable because of the ways it is shared and inherited. In his explanation, he shows how the Buddhist discards the Occidental conceptions of soul(130) as singular and unitary, for one that envisions it as an aggregate or composite of inconceivable complexity,—the concentrated sum of the creative thinking of previous lives beyond all reckoning (130). That is to say, for Hearn the Buddhist soul is both super-individual—beyond the individual—and inheritable. Moreover, as posited, it was not incompatible with then modern scientific ideas, related to evolution, inherited memory, and intuition. He writes:

Instinct, in the language of modern psychology, means organized memory, and memory itself is incipient instinct,—the sum of impressions to be inherited by the next succeeding individual in the chain of life. Thus science recognizes inherited memory: not in the ghostly signification of a remembering of the details of former lives, but as a minute addition to the psychological life accompanied by minute changes in the structure of the inherited nervous system. (132–133)

Each individual’s brain is a composite of personal experiences and the inherited experiences of that individual’s ancestors. The necessity, within Buddhism, to break down the fallacy of the individual ego is shown paradoxically to be both of moral benefit. It is also shown