Roger Pulvers

writer of sort of ethnographic stories.

I think he's one of the great ethnographers of the 19th century, but he was known as a journalist, particularly a crime journalist.

He loved the macabre.

He was more at home with corpses than he was with human beings.

And then, at age 40, he had the chance to go to Japan to do some sketches and some stories for Harper's Magazine.

And he went there for the first time.

So, in a sense, I identified with him, however, because he didn't speak Japanese.

He loved Japan from the very beginning, but he died at age 54, so he spent the last 14 years of his life in Japan.

And this is the 1890s, so this is a particularly… Yes, 1890s to 1940s, a fantastic period in the Meiji period, just, you know, when Japan was modernising and becoming, starting to become an imperial power, not talking for better or for worse, but that's what they were doing.

But he never learned Japanese, and he wrote about the old Japan.

He lived in an illusion of his Japan that he created and then lived in it.

And I wasn't at first interested at all in Lafcadio Hearn because I was trying to learn about Japan in the 1960s and the 1970s when I took a great interest in the underground theater movement and in the films and in the novelists, many of whom I met, and poets.

And yet I began to see how interesting he was because he was very anti-missionary and he was very anti-Western.

He hated the British Empire and so on.

And I found him to be a very interesting character.

And then I started to become interested in him as an object of fiction.

So I wrote this historical novel called The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn, which is 98% fiction.

So I put in an introduction of 30-odd pages of what his life was really like.

So if you want to know

the reality of his life in Japan, read the introduction.