The Play of Authorial Voice in Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories

Abstract

The nineteenth century was critical for the development of the ghost story form as we recognize it today. As Nick Freeman has observed, it was during this century that the ghost story emerged as a ‘distinct genre of short fiction’, instead of its prior existence as interspersed episodes within longer works, and developed its own conventions, formulae, and investments.[i] Near the end of the nineteenth century, despite the proliferation of periodicals and publications publishing short-form supernatural fiction over the decades, the appetite for the genre was still ‘ravenous’.[ii] Significant innovations in literary forms of the fantastic also occurred at the turn of the century, with the genre of the ghost story providing a significant framework for Lafcadio Hearn’s cross-cultural encounters with strange places, customs, and folk traditions during his travels and then later during his Japanese years. As Nicholas Ruddick writes, ‘one of the greatest literary achievements of the fin de siècle was a successful break with fictional realism’, a development which proved crucial for the rising popularity of fantastic literature, experiments with existing forms such as the Gothic and the ghost story, as well as an interest in ‘the development of an old (oral) story-telling tradition’.[iii] The development of the ghost story as a narrative form at the turn of the century was therefore linked to writers’ interest in revisiting folktales as well as oral narratives to create supernatural tales, leading to innovations in narrative structure that are relevant to Hearn’s own literary experiments.

[i] Nick Freeman, ‘The Victorian Ghost Story’, in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 93–107 (p. 93).

[ii] Ibid., p. 101.

[iii] Nicholas Ruddick, ‘The Fantastic Fiction of the Fin de Siècle’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Gail Marshall (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 189–206 (p. 189); Michal Peprník, ‘R. L. Stevenson and the Fin de Siècle Pre-Modernist Narrative Mosaic’, in The Fantastic of the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Irena Grubica and Zdeněk Beran (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), pp. 73–90 (p. 74).