In his fifty-four years among the living, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn wrote twenty-nine books in just about every conceivable genre—folktales, travelogues, novels, cookbooks, translations, dictionaries of proverbs—none of which can compete, in terms of sheer Dickensian horror and pluck, with the story of his own life. He was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkáda (one of the Ionian Islands, at the time still under British control), to an Ionian mother named Rosa and an Irish father, Charles, who was stationed there as a staff surgeon in the British Army. Their youthful romance reputedly grew into love when she nursed him back to health after he was set upon and stabbed multiple times by her brother, who viewed their liaison as a stain on the family’s honor. They married and, with their two-year-old son, relocated to Dublin to move in with Charles’s family, some of whom considered their honor pretty well stained, too. On a leave between overseas postings, Charles took up with an old girlfriend, around which time Rosa—pregnant again, speaking little English, exhibiting symptoms of mental illness—bolted back to the islands, leaving behind her son, who was then four years old. Mother and child never saw each other again; she spent her last years confined to an asylum in Corfu. Charles had the marriage annulled, then quickly remarried and moved to India. The boy, now seven, never saw his father again, either.

An ignominious and unexpected burden to his family, Paddy, as he was then known, was reared in the prosperous Dublin home of his great-aunt Sarah. “His mind,” in the words of one of his biographers, was “dominated by horror from an early age.” He had a crippling fear of the dark, which was treated by putting him to bed every night in a pitch-dark room that was locked from the outside. At age thirteen, he was sent to a Roman Catholic boarding school in England, where a playground incident caused a grievous injury to his left eye. As lasting as the resulting blindness in that eye was Hearn’s terrible self-consciousness about his disfigured appearance. He was freed from the misery of that boarding school only when Sarah, having been bilked by a fortune hunter, went broke and had to withdraw him. For the next two years, he lived in an East London slum with one of Sarah’s former maids.

It gets wilder. Hearn—who was considered, by the European standards of the day, to be of mixed race—was nineteen when a relative of his father’s, acting out of some combination of concern and embarrassment, gave him a one-way boat ticket to New York and the address of a distant relation in Cincinnati. Somehow, Hearn reached this stranger’s door, where he was handed a few dollars and was told to fend for himself. And here the story of Paddy Hearn, the baroquely unwanted homeless youth, starts to flower into the biography of Lafcadio Hearn, the writer whose reputation would eventually reach across the world. After starting out as a printer’s assistant, he lucked into an emergency assignment covering a lurid local murder, and he did such a bang-up job that his story was republished in papers across the country. He parlayed this into a regular gig as a sort of Weegee of words, covering the city’s most violent and squalid stories for the Cincinnati Enquirer, under the byline “Dismal Man.”

He lost that job when his employers learned that he had secretly married a biracial woman, Alethea Foley, who had been born into slavery—a marriage illegal in Ohio at the time. In 1877, he moved, without his wife, to the more hospitable environment of New Orleans. He continued writing, in more respectable veins (editorials, short fiction, translations from the French), and he took a particular interest in Creole cuisine, writing a book about it and opening a restaurant in which everything on the menu cost five cents. As his authority and reputation grew, his writing took on a certain quality of cultural ownership: never having had a real home, he compulsively, and rather lovingly, documented the domestic customs of wherever he was living at the time. In New Orleans, in addition to his culinary research, he wrote sketches about such topics as “The Creole Character.” A two-year stay in Martinique resulted, a year later, in “Two Years in the French West Indies,” a travelogue-cum-cultural-history that, tragically, became definitive when, twelve years later, Saint-Pierre, the city where he had lived and written, was destroyed by a volcanic eruption. He was building a home for himself, a permanence, out of words; without a culture of his own, he was desperate to attach himself to others’.

At age thirty-nine, Hearn travelled on a magazine assignment to Japan, and never came back. At a moment when that country, under Emperor Meiji, was weathering the shock and upheaval of forced economic modernization, Hearn fell deeply in love with the nation’s past. He wrote fourteen books on all manner of Japanese subjects but was especially infatuated with the customs and culture preserved in Japanese folktales—particularly the ghost-story genre known as kaidan. He married into a samurai family and eventually, in order to become a Japanese citizen, was adopted by the family and took its name, becoming known thereafter as Koizumi Yakumo. (One of the consequences of his new citizenship was that the University of Tokyo, where he lectured, reduced his salary, in line with its policy of paying nationals less than it paid foreigners.) He died in 1904, and, by the time his “Japanese tales” were translated into Japanese, in the nineteen-twenties, the country’s transformation was so complete that Hearn was hailed as a kind of guardian of tradition; his kaidan collections are still part of the curriculum in many Japanese schools.

One hesitates to say that Hearn is now being “rediscovered” by an English-language readership, because his output was so voluminous and so varied that some corner of it seems to resurface every decade or so. His haiku and tanka translations influenced Pound, Rexroth, and others. His “La Cuisine Creole”—the first cookbook of its kind—is historically invaluable. There are Hearn museums virtually everywhere he lived in Japan, and in 2015 the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens were dedicated, in the seaside town of Tramore, Ireland, near the spot where young Hearn said goodbye to his father for the last time.

But this season there is a rare confluence of books by or about him: Penguin Classics has put together a Hearn collection called “Japanese Ghost Stories”; Princeton University Press has just issued a similar compendium called “Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn,” with a passionate introduction by Andrei Codrescu; and the latest work from the esteemed Vietnamese-American novelist Monique Truong, “The Sweetest Fruits” (Viking), is a fictional reconstruction of Hearn’s picaresque life told in the voices of the three women—his two wives and his mother—whose time with him proved most formative.

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Shopping Cartoon by Trevor Spaulding

What we make of Hearn now depends on how we frame him in the volatility of our own historical moment. Close one eye and he is a unique tragic hero, a victim and an outcast, who consistently championed nondominant cultures and tried to bind his own deep psychological wounds by celebrating in prose the world beyond the white, European society that had tortured and rejected him. Close the other eye and he is just another nineteenth-century white man who appointed himself an expert on places and cultures in which he was a tourist, making a career out of depicting or interpreting these cultures as if they were his to represent or to profit from. The very premise of Truong’s novel makes a salient contemporary point: Hearn’s global search for love and acceptance may have been touching, but even the search was a privilege. The women in his wake—none of them white—suffered gravely as well, and they didn’t have the option of lighting out for the territories.