Work of Lacadio Hearn Featured at UA Hoole Library Thursday

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The public is invited to the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library on Thursday, April 11, from 4:30 pm-6:30 p.m. for “Lafcadio Hearn at the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library,” part of the 16th Annual Sakura Festival at The University of Alabama.

The W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library will host a reception, talk and a reading of Lafcadio Hearn’s version of the Japanese folktale “The Eater of Dreams (Baku).” The Hoole Library is located in Mary Harmon Bryant Hall, 2nd Floor, 500 Hackberry Lane on the UA campus. The lecture and reading will begin at 5:30 pm. The reception is sponsored by the Rotunda Library Society. This event is free and open to the public.

The UA Sakura Festival is an annual spring celebration of Japanese culture and friendship, featuring events on campus and in the community during March and April.

Catherine Oshida, instructor of Japanese at UA, will read and explain Hearn’s tale of the creature that “will change the misfortune or the fear into good fortune and gladness.” Koichi Oshida will complement the English language reading with a reading in Japanese. In addition, Dr. Richard Collins from the department of English at Xavier University in New Orleans will discuss Lafcadio Hearn’s life in New Orleans in a talk entitled “Hearn’s Southern Decade.”

There are two exhibits in the Hoole Library in conjunction with this event. The first is an exhibit of works from the Lafcadio Hearn Collection at the Hoole Library, curated by Jessica Lacher-Feldman and Jenny Ellis from the Hoole Library. A second is an exhibit of Kimono and Japanese Textiles was done by Virginia Wimberley from the UA College of Human Environmental Science. These exhibits will be on display throughout the month of April.

Lafcadio Hearn is well known in Japan, but is much less known to Americans except in literary and journalistic circles. Hearn lived in New Orleans from 1877-1887, and moved to Japan in 1890, where he married a Japanese woman of samuri descent. He became a Japanese citizen and took the name Koizumi Yakumo and made Japan his permanent home.

Hearn was born in Greece and was educated in England and France. He came to Cincinnati just after the Civil War and worked as a journalist, documenting seedy street life in postbellum Cincinnati. In moving to New Orleans, he ran in circles that included George Washington Cable and Marie Laveau, the “Voodoo Queen”. Hearn worked as a journalist, writing for Harper’s as well as for the New Orleans newspapers. Hearn also translated several 19th century French works to English. He also began work on his lifelong interest in folktales and proverbs, and published his first book, Stray Leaves from Strange Literature (1884), which brought together “Stories Reconstructed From The Anvari-Soheili, Baital, Pachisi, Mahabharata, Panchatantra, Gulistan, Talmud, Kalewala, Etc.”

Hearn lived in New York and Martinique before making Japan his permanent home. Hearn died in 1904; after having spent 14 years in his newly adopted country, and produced a dozen books, which interpreted Japan and its civilization to Western readers. Generations of Japanese school children have grown up learning both English and their society’s pre-Western lifestyle through reading Hearn’s interpretations of Japanese folk stories, mythology, and daily life in turn of the century Japan.