Lafcadio Hearn

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was a writer born on the Greek island of Lefkada to an Irish army surgeon and a Greek mother, raised in Dublin, and sent to America at nineteen. He worked as a journalist in Cincinnati and New Orleans, where he wrote on Creole life, spent two years in Martinique, and in 1890 went to Japan, where he married, taught English, took the name Koizumi Yakumo and became a Japanese subject. His books Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Kokoro, In Ghostly Japan and Kwaidan interpreted the country to the West through its legends, customs and ghost stories, written in a delicate, exact prose. He died in Tokyo.