Yakumo Koizumi (小泉 八雲, 27 June 1850 – 26 September 1904), born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Greek: Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χέρν, romanized: Patríkios Lefkádios Chérn), was a Greek-British[1] writer, translator, and teacher who introduced the culture and literature of Japan to the West.
His home in Orleans Parish is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum is in Japan.
Charles's Protestant mother, Elizabeth Holmes Hearn, had difficulty accepting Rosa's Greek Orthodox views and lack of education; she was illiterate and spoke no English.
Not surprisingly, Rosa found it difficult to adapt to a foreign culture and the Protestantism of her husband's family, and was eventually taken under the wing of Elizabeth's sister, Sarah Holmes Brenane, a widow who had converted to Catholicism.
When he came back in 1856, severely wounded and traumatized, Rosa had returned to her home island of Cerigo in Greece, where she gave birth to their third son, Daniel James Hearn.
After being informed of the annulment, Rosa almost immediately married Giovanni Cavallini, a Greek citizen of Italian ancestry, who was later appointed by the British as governor of Cerigotto.
She divided her residency between Dublin in the winter months, and her husband's estate at Tramore, County Waterford, on the southern Irish coast, and a house at Bangor, North Wales.
Hearn also suffered from severe myopia, so his injury left him permanently with poor vision, requiring him to carry a magnifying glass for close work and a pocket telescope to see anything beyond a short distance.
Resolving to end his financial obligations to the 19-year-old Hearn, he purchased a one-way ticket to New York and instructed the young man to find his way to Cincinnati, where he could locate Molyneux's sister and her husband, Thomas Cullinan, and obtain their assistance in making a living.
[18] He eventually befriended the English printer and communalist Henry Watkin, who employed him in his printing business, helped find him various odd jobs, lent him books from his library, including utopianists Fourier, Dixon and Noyes, and gave Hearn a nickname which stuck with him for the rest of his life, The Raven, from the Poe poem.
The Library of America selected one of these murder accounts, Gibbeted, for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime, published in 2008.
[21] In 1874, Hearn and the young Henry Farny, later a renowned painter of the American West, wrote, illustrated, and published an 8-page weekly journal of art, literature and satire entitled Ye Giglampz.
"[23] On 14 June 1874, Hearn, aged 23, married Alethea ("Mattie") Foley, a 20-year-old African American woman, and former slave, an action in violation of Ohio's anti-miscegenation law at that time.
[26] While working for the Commercial Hearn agreed to be carried to the top of Cincinnati's tallest building on the back of a famous steeplejack, Joseph Roderiguez Weston, and wrote a half-terrified, half-comic account of the experience.
It was also during this time that Hearn wrote a series of accounts of the Bucktown and Levee neighborhoods of Cincinnati, "...one of the few depictions we have of black life in a border city during the post-Civil War period.
"[28] In addition, Hearn had printed in the Commercial a stanza he had overheard when listening to the songs of the roustabouts, working on the city's levee waterfront.
Hearn lived in New Orleans for nearly a decade, writing first for the newspaper Daily City Item beginning in June 1878, and later for the Times Democrat.
As editor, Hearn created and published nearly two hundred woodcuts of daily life and people in New Orleans, making the Item the first Southern newspaper to introduce cartoons and giving the paper an immediate boost in circulation.
[33] The vast number of his writings about New Orleans and its environs, many of which have not been collected, include the city's Creole population and distinctive cuisine, the French Opera, and Louisiana Voodoo.
[34] Hearn's writings for national publications, such as Harper's Weekly and Scribner's Magazine, helped create the popular reputation of New Orleans as a place with a distinctive culture more akin to that of Europe and the Caribbean than to the rest of North America.
[35] Hearn's writings for the New Orleans newspapers included impressionistic descriptions of places and characters and many editorials denouncing political corruption, street crime, violence, intolerance, and the failures of public health and hygiene officials.
Despite the fact that he is credited with "inventing" New Orleans as an exotic and mysterious place, his obituaries of the vodou leaders Marie Laveau and Doctor John Montenet are matter-of-fact and debunking.
During his fifteen-month stay in Matsue, Hearn married Koizumi Setsuko, the daughter of a local samurai family, with whom he had four children: Kazuo, Iwao, Kiyoshi, and Suzuko.
[47][48][49] Admirers of Hearn's work have included Ben Hecht,[50] John Erskine, Malcolm Cowley[51] and Jorge Luis Borges.
Hearn's appeal to Japanese readers "lies in the glimpses he offered of an older, more mystical Japan lost during the country’s hectic plunge into Western-style industrialization and nation building.
The visitors, through photos, texts and exhibits, can wander in the significant events of Lafcadio Hearn's life, but also in the civilizations of Europe, America and Japan of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through his lectures, writings and tales.
The municipalities of Kumamoto, Matsue, Shinjuku, Yaizu, Toyama University, the Koizumi family and other people from Japan and Greece contributed to the establishment of Lefcadio Hearn Historical Center.
[56] On a trip to Matsue in 2012, Professor Bon Koizumi (Hearn's great-grandson) and his wife Shoko were introduced by keen supporters of Lafcadio to Dublin-based Motoko Fujita, a published photographer of The Shadow of James Joyce (Lilliput Press Ltd., Ireland, 2011) and the founder of the Experience Japan Festival in Dublin.
Acting on the Koizumi's desire to reconnect with their Irish roots, Fujita then coordinated a trip for Bon and Shoko in autumn 2013, during which key relationships to more Lafcadio supporters in Ireland were forged.
Yukari Yakumo appears on a major role in many Touhou games, books and manga, and considered as "a mastermind who only takes action once its really required", and Maribel appears in the stories included in "ZUN's Music Collection", a series of music CD albums, from the 2nd installment onwards, alongside another character, Renko Usami.