This delightful book presents seven pieces from the rich heritage of Lafcadio Hearn—one of the first and most preeminent scholars to travel to and write about Japan. They are a natural outgrowth of Hearn’s peerless philosophy: ‘If you have any feeling—no matter what—strongly latent in the mind (even only a haunting sadness or a mysterious joy), you may be sure that it is expressible.’

Hearn’s language, his incomparable prose, ripened and mellowed consistently to the end, enabling him to write rich, melancholy, and profound passages such as the final paragraph in
The Romance of the Milky Way: ‘I see the thrill of its shining stream, and the mists that hover along its verge, and the water-grasses that bend in the winds of Autumn. White Orihime I see at her starry loom, and the ox that graces on the farther shore, and I know that the falling dew is the spray from the herdsman’s oar. And the heaven seems very near and warm and human; and the silence about me is filled with the dream of a love unchanging, immortal, fever yearning and forever young, and forever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom of the Gods.’