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Photograph of Lafcadio Hearn, 1889
Frederick Gutekunst, 1889 · public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Historical voicesOn the Valice list

Lafcadio Hearn

1850–1904

The writer who carried Japanese ghost stories into English.

Born
27 June 1850 · Lefkada, Ionian Islands
Died
26 September 1904 · Tokyo, Japan
Nationality
Greek and Irish by birth; a Japanese citizen from 1896 as Koizumi Yakumo
  • folklore
  • ghost stories
  • Japan
  • journalism

On the Valice list. One title published by Valice Press carries Lafcadio Hearn’s work; it is below.

Biography

The life, briefly

Writer and interpreter of Japan (1850–1904). Born on Lefkada to a Greek mother and an Irish father, raised in Dublin, and a newspaperman in Cincinnati and New Orleans for twenty years before he reached Japan in 1890. He married Koizumi Setsu, became a Japanese citizen in 1896 as Koizumi Yakumo, and taught at Tokyo Imperial University. Kwaidan, his book of ghost stories, was published six months before he died.

Works

Major works

  1. 1887Some Chinese Ghosts
  2. 1889Chita: A Memory of Last Islanda novella after the hurricane of 1856
  3. 1890Two Years in the French West Indiesfrom his two years in Martinique
  4. 1894Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japanfinished in Kumamoto
  5. 1896Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life
  6. 1904Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Thingshis best-known book of ghost stories
  7. 1904Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 1850

    Born on Lefkada to a Greek mother and an Anglo-Irish army-surgeon father; raised in Dublin by a great-aunt.

  2. 1869

    Sent to the United States at nineteen, and for a time lived by odd jobs in Cincinnati.

  3. 1872

    Began as a reporter on the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, where he stayed until 1875.

  4. 1878

    Moved to New Orleans, where he wrote for the Daily City Item and then the Times Democrat for nearly a decade.

  5. 1887

    Harper's sent him to Martinique as a correspondent; he stayed two years.

  6. 1890

    Went to Japan on a newspaper commission that ended almost at once, and found a teaching post instead; he never left.

  7. 1896

    Became a Japanese citizen under the name Koizumi Yakumo, and took up lecturing at the Imperial University in Tokyo.

  8. 1904

    Kwaidan appeared in the year he died of heart failure in Tokyo, aged 54.

Why they are here

Lafcadio Hearn and the shelf

Relevance

Kwaidan retells ghost stories and legends drawn from Japanese books and from what Hearn heard in Japan, in an English plain enough to be read aloud. It is the most direct route in English into that strand of Japanese folk tradition.

Influence

His books were translated into Japanese and remain popular there. Matsue, Yaizu and Hearn's birthplace of Lefkada each keep a museum or memorial centre for him.

On the Valice list

The title we publish

These are titles by or of Lafcadio Hearn.

Nearby on the shelf

If you read this, you might look here

These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Lafcadio Hearn, and they are not a recommendation on Lafcadio Hearn’s behalf — only the same shelf.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Lafcadio Hearn is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.