Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Tuttle Classics of Japanese Literature) - Softcover

Hearn, Lafcadio

4.05

236 ratings by Goodreads

9784805310250: Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Tuttle Classics of Japanese Literature)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 4805310251 ISBN 13: 9784805310250

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing, 2009

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

As an interpreter of Japan to the West, Lafcadio Hearn was without parallel in his time. His numerous books about that country were read with a fascination that was a tribute to his keen powers of observation and the vividness of his descriptions. Today, even though Japan has changed greatly from what it was when her wrote about it, his writing is still valid, for it captures the essence of the country-an essence that has actually changed a good deal less than outward appearances might suggest. In a word, the Japanese character and the Japanese tradition are still fundamentally the same as Hearn found them to be, and for this reason his books are still extremely revealing to readers in the West. "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" combines the two volumes of a work that first appeared in 1894. Its title is apt, for the book takes the reader into a world that few Westerners saw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here are the customs, the superstitions, the charming scenery, the revelations of Japanese character, and all the other elements that Hearn found so bewitching. Here, for example, are essays on such subjects as the Japanese garden, the household shrine, the festivals, and the bewildering Japanese smile-all aspects of Japanese life that have endured in spite of the changes that have taken place during the modernization of Japan. In his preface to the book, Hearn writes: 'This is the life of which a foreign observer can never weary, if fortunate and sympathetic enough to enter into it...Each day, while the years pass, there will be revealed to him, some strange and unexpected beauty in it'. It is fortunate indeed that he was able to bring to his readers so much of this 'strange and unsuspected beauty'.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was born on the Greek island of Lefkas, the son of an Anglo-Irish surgeon in the British army and a Greek mother. After his parent's divorce when he was six, he was brought up in Dublin by a great aunt. At the age of nineteen, he went to America, eventually ending up in New Orleans as a newspaper reporter. His flight from Western materialism brought him to Japan in 1890, where he worked for an English newspaper, the Kobe Chronicle, and taught in various schools. In 1896, he began teaching English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, a position he held until 1903, and at Waseda University. Hearn married a samurai's daughter, Koizumi Setsu, became a Japanese citizen and a Buddhist, and changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo. At the young age of 54, he died of a heart attack. Hearn's search for beauty and tranquility, for pleasing customs and lasting values made him a confirmed Japanophile. His keen intellect, poetic imagination, and wonderful clear style permitted him to penetrate to the very essence of things Japanese. He became the great interpreter of things Japanese to the West. Hearn's most famous work is a collection of lectures entitled Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (published posthumously in 1905). His other books on Japan include Out of the East (1895), Kokoro (1896), Gleanings in Buddha Fields (1897), Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), A Japanese Miscellany (1901), and Kwaidan (1904).

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.