The Romance of the Milky Way

Romance of the Milky Way, by
Lafcadio Hearn

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Title: The Romance of the Milky Way And Other Studies & Stories
Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Release Date: March 10, 2005 [EBook #15320]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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SHORT STORY

THE ROMANCE OF THE MILKY WAY
AND OTHER STUDIES & STORIES
BY LAFCADIO HEARN
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW
YORK 1905

COPYRIGHT 1905 BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN & COMPANY ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1905

CONTENTS
THE ROMANCE OF THE MILKY WAY 1
GOBLIN POETRY 51
"ULTIMATE QUESTIONS" 103
THE MIRROR MAIDEN 125
THE STORY OF IT[=O] NORISUKÉ 139
STRANGER THAN FICTION 167
A LETTER FROM JAPAN 179

INTRODUCTION

Lafcadio Hearn, known to Nippon as Yakumo Koizumi, was born in
Leucadia in the Ionian Islands, June 27, 1850. His father was an Irish
surgeon in the British Army; his mother was a Greek. Both parents died
while Hearn was still a child, and he was adopted by a great-aunt, and
educated for the priesthood. To this training he owed his Latin
scholarship and, doubtless, something of the subtlety of his intelligence.
He soon found, however, that the prospect of an ecclesiastical career
was alien from his inquiring mind and vivid temperament, and at the
age of nineteen he came to America to seek his fortune. After working
for a time as a proof-reader, he obtained employment as a newspaper
reporter in Cincinnati. Soon he rose to be an editorial writer, and went
in the course of a few years to New Orleans to join the editorial staff of
the "Times-Democrat." Here he lived until 1887, writing odd fantasies
and arabesques for his paper, contributing articles and sketches to the
magazines, and publishing several curious little books, among them his
"Stray Leaves from Strange Literature," and his translations from
Gautier. In the winter of 1887 he began his pilgrimages to exotic
countries, being, as he wrote to a friend, "a small literary bee in search
of inspiring honey." After a couple of years, spent chiefly in the French
West Indies, with periods of literary work in New York, he went in
1890 to Japan to prepare a series of articles for a magazine. Here
through some deep affinity of mood with the marvelous people of that
country he seems suddenly to have felt himself at last at home. He
married a Japanese woman; he acquired Japanese citizenship in order to
preserve the succession of his property to his family there; he became a
lecturer in the Imperial University at T[=o]ky[=o]; and in a series of
remarkable books he made himself the interpreter to the Western World
of the very spirit of Japanese life and art. He died there of paralysis of
the heart on the 26th of September, 1904.
* * * * *
With the exception of a body of familiar letters now in process of
collection, the present volume contains all of Hearn's writing that he
left uncollected in the magazines or in manuscript of a sufficient
ripeness for publication. It is worth noting, however, that perfect as is
the writing of "Ultimate Questions," and complete as the essay is in

itself, the author regarded it as unfinished, and, had he lived, would
have revised and amplified some portions of it.
But if this volume lacks the incomparably exquisite touch of its author
in its arrangement and revision, it does, nevertheless, present him in all
of his most characteristic veins, and it is in respect both to style and to
substance perhaps the most mature and significant of his works.
In his first days as a writer Hearn had conceived an ideal of his art as
specific as it was ambitious. Early in the eighties he wrote from New
Orleans in an unpublished letter to the Rev. Wayland D. Ball of
Washington: "The lovers of antique loveliness are proving to me the
future possibilities of a long cherished dream,--the English realization
of a Latin style, modeled upon foreign masters, and rendered even more
forcible by that element of strength which is the characteristic of
Northern tongues. This no man can hope to accomplish, but even a
translator may carry his stones to the master-masons of a new