It’s a convoluted title for a book, but then Lafcadio Hearn – a widely travelled author and journalist who earned his greatest fame as an interpreter of Japanese horror stories – led a convoluted life. Born in 1850 from a difficult marriage between an Irish officer-surgeon and a wildly unpredictable noble-blooded Greek woman (his middle name, Lafcadio, was adopted from Lefkada, the name of the island where he was born), he was quickly abandoned by both. His mother ended her life in an asylum; his father remarried and died young of malaria. Hearn went on to be yet again abandoned by the great-aunt who raised him, and spurned by the impatient Catholic priests to whom he was entrusted for an education. (He developed a life-long hatred for Catholicism, while cultivating a loose, long-lasting affection for Buddhism.)
Whenever he established a home in one place, he set out for another
He lost his left eye to a youthful accident, and spent the rest of his life shyly turning his disfigured profile away from attention.
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