‘Hand and Soul’: Japanese Craft and Embodied Spirituality in Lafcadio Hearn’s Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897)

Abstract

Reporting on the Jidai Matsuri festival to celebrate the eleven hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Kyōto in October 1895, Lafcadio Hearn describes finding himself confronted by a dizzying array of crafts. ‘I saw a young man writing Buddhist texts and drawing horses with his feet’, Hearn recalled, noting his admiration also for ‘Butterflies of paper’, ‘maidens “made by glamour out of flowers”’ and an ‘artificial cuttlefish’ which could ‘move all its tentacles’ when air was blown into ‘a little rush tube fixed under its head’.[i] Sent to the festival by the Japan Chronicle, Hearn documented the city’s ‘festive appearance’: ‘A committee has been appointed which has decorated almost every street in the city with lanterns and flags, and […] the town wears a most holiday-like appearance’.[ii] When he expanded his taut reportage into a later article for the Atlantic, republished in his essay collection Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897), Hearn focused especially on the handicrafts he had encountered.

[i] Lafcadio Hearn, ‘A Trip to Kyōto’, Atlantic, 77 (May 1896), pp. 613–24 (p. 617). Hearn quotes Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King (Edward Moxon, 1895), p. 40.

[ii] Hearn, ‘The Kyoto Memorial Festival’, Japan Chronicle, 26 October 1895; typescript by P. D. Perkins held in Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia (UVA), MS 6101.