My quiet bite to eat had become a boozy lock-in.

The sake was flowing, women were smoking, and the men were pulling their own pints. In this manner, our Shikoku restaurant’s seven diners gradually took the reins from the hostess who, by the end of the night, was herself eating dinner and listening to my song.

I have mastered ‘yes’ in Japanese, which encourages chat despite the disadvantage of understanding almost nothing. 

The arm-wrestler beside me, having shared his roasted ginkgo beans by way of introduction, asked the inevitable question.

Where was I from?

***

Ireland is the Laos of Europe.

Familiar, but only vaguely so. Having exhausted the usual routes, I landed on explaining where I came from through people.

Sinéad? U2? McGregor? A shaking head greeted all three. Then I pulled out my trump card.

Lafcadio Hearn?

The restaurant exploded. Ah! they cried, with a burst of energy. You come from the land of the ghost-story man!

***

I had first heard Hearn’s name in the far west, drinking coffee on tatami mats in Kyushu.

The nice waiter was all chat as he rid himself of his shoes and mounted the mats, balancing my tray in executing the ritual.

He was proud that his town, Kumamoto, had a lively Ireland-Japan society. And it was because Lafcadio had once lived here.

Who is this Irishman, I wondered, and began slowly to uncover his life in Japan.

Indeed, tracing Hearn’s path across these islands has become a leitmotif of my current trip. First Kumamoto, then Matsue, and now here by his grave, in Tokyo.

I have come deeply to respect his sense of adventure, his curiosity, his sadness, his joy and his graft. Hearn is a monument to all a person can contribute with zero parents, one eye, and an interest in ordinary people.

But I get ahead of myself.

Lafcadio would not have liked that. He believed a story should be carefully told.

***

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born in Greece on the island of Lefkada in 1850. His mother was a loving Greek peasant, unable to keep up with her philandering Irish army-officer husband.

Her move to Dublin was to appease him, but she fell apart – unequal to the grey weather, the inscrutable language and the frosty in-laws.

She quit Ireland, parting with her four year old boy. Dad absconded with a new love. The child was left to his great-aunt living in Dublin, and to his own devices.

By age 16 he had lost sight in one eye but acquired a rather good education.

By age 19 he was destitute in Cincinnati.

And over the coming 20 years, Patrick contributed to the fortunes of two American newspapers through his wizardly journalism, dropping Patrick to write under the byline of Lafcadio Hearn. It was a way to keep his mother close, while retaining his Irish identity intact.

Hearn had a nose for a story, and an ear for a tight phrase. His coverage included the travails of the working-class people, the occult, the unique culture of the Creole, and the keen arts of murder and murderers.

His interest was essentially ethnographic, seeking to tell the story of the person behind the act.

He married a former-slave named Mattie, and so began a tempestuous relationship. They broke up, reunited, broke up. His enemies got wind of the illicit marriage and he lost his job.

So Hearn moved on; first to New Orleans, then Martinique, and finally, Japan.

***

Perhaps every country has a foreigner who describes its soul afresh.

Famously, Alexis de Tocqueville journeyed through the United States in 1831 and described what he saw in his twin-volume Democracy in America. The books have never been out of print, acting as a touchstone for Americans to understand themselves.

Lafcadio, between 1890-1904, gifted the same to Japan.

He arrived as a teacher, and became both citizen and chronicler. With the help of his Japanese wife, Koizumi Setsu, he retold Japanese ghost stories in the English language, which were then widely translated.

This genre differs from ghost fables in Europe. Frequently, the protagonist falls in love with the ghost, or the ghost is a medium of mercy. Sometimes the stories have neat endings; sometimes they unravel just as you expect a neat denouement.

Hearn produced fourteen books across those fourteen years.

His most famous book, Kwaidan, details seventeen supernatural stories. My favourite is that of a mother who is mistakenly buried with her child who is still alive; her ghost haunts the food stores of the town, purchasing milk so that she might feed the entombed child.

Writing that began in explaining Japan to the outside world has ended up explaining Japan to the Japanese.

***

I visited his serene and modest home in the shadows of Matsue Castle. Unlike most museums which draw tourists as their primary clientele, it was crowded with Japanese people.

Hearn’s writing is lively and witty. Importantly, he is comprehensive in explaining his fable characters, listing families, places, regions and occupations. The result is an historical document, written during that bridge period around 1900, when old Japan was still in living memory – and a new nation had just begun.

***

Hearn remained loyal to his mother and refuted the lazy characterisation that he had been abandoned. He also stayed loyal to his Japanese wife, whose family name he adopted as his own.

Indeed Hearn identified as Irish, integrating the fairy stories of his Irish nurserymaid into his Japanese tales. But he was a man who always moved forward. He never returned to my rock in northwestern Europe. After all, the family he made for himself was in Japan.

***

I walked Zōshigaya Cemetery in Tokyo until I found his simple grave, marked as ‘Koizumi Yakumo, a writer’. So many of his stories involved tombs, and evoked a porous exchange between life and death.

I recalled the conclusion of that ghost-mother and hungry infant. Its lesson to the reader was delivered in three elegant words: ‘love conquers death’.

In the bright November sunlight, with Lafcadio lying by my side, I had the feeling that words can conquer death too.