In 1890, an Irish-born writer of limited success found his spiritual home after arriving upon the shores of what was then considered by the West to be the world's most exotic country.
Over the next 14 years, Lafcadio Hearn's dispatches, published initially in Harper's Weekly, were the first glimpses most American readers had of Japan.
Accenting the unique, the bizarre and the quaint aspects of his adopted country, Hearn's prose was designed to titillate as much as inform, and romanticize as much as report.
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