View from the Green Room: Lafcadio Hearn Kwaidan exhibition draws large crowds
The current exhibition entitled “Kwaidan” runs at the Tramore Coastguard Station, organised by Irish artists Stephen Lawlor, Kate MacDonagh and Ed Miliano.
On a bitterly cold January night earlier this year, Agnes Aylward, founder of the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens, delivered a fascinating insight to a full house in the Museum of Treasures Garden Room into the life and times of Lafcadio Hearn.
Agnes, in forensic detail, also explored his importance as the very first and, also, the most influential interpreter of Japanese culture.
Agnes was particularly anxious to connect Lafcadio’s childhood in Tramore with subsequent events in his lifetime.
Writer Lafcadio spent many summers in Tramore in his childhood. Lafcadio’s parents separated and his military-surgeon-father remarried but died of malaria shortly afterwards. His mother abandoned him to his paternal unwelcoming grandmother in Dublin and he was effectively orphaned at the age of four to well-to-do grandaunt Sarah Brenane, who brought him to her summer house in Sweetbriar in Tramore each year and saw to his formal education as a boarder in England.
Agnes connected his love of sea-swimming that began in Tramore with his writings on the sea and remarked that “Lafcadio was accredited in the American Anthology of Sea Writers”.
She also connected the Gothic influence in his horror stories with the building of the Holy Cross Church in Tramore, which he was fascinated with as a child. Subsequent holidays at Yaizu in Japan bore a startling similarity to Tramore with its long beach and a view of the seaside that resembled the Doneraile walk.
Growing up in Ireland Lafcadio Hearn absorbed the tradition of storytelling, honed his skills as a young writer in the United States, and wrote his most renowned works in Japan.
In her lecture, Agnes connected the Gothic influence in his horror stories with the building of the Holy Cross Church in Tramore, which was built in Gothic Revival style between 1857 and 1871 – a stone’s throw from Sweetbriar where he lodged every summer and where he watched the construction as a child and teenager.
Of his writings “Kwaidan” is widely considered to be Hearn’s masterpiece and the culmination of his literary output. Some of these tales are ancient, some just local folklore, but Hearn has woven them into a language that can joyously be translated into visual form.
His fascination with Japan originated with a commission for Harpur’s Magazine for a series of articles from Japan on Japanese culture in 1890.
“He became,” Agnes enthused in her lecture, “the greatest interpreter of Japan for the West, and," she added, “there are memorials to Hearn all over Japan.”
Hearn never returned. In Japan, he found a home and his greatest inspiration. Hearn became a naturalized Japanese, assuming the name Koizumi Yakumo and married Koizumi Setsu, the daughter of a local samurai family, with whom he had four children. He began teaching English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, a job he had until 1903 before becoming a professor at Waseda University in 1904.
Hearn’s most brilliant and prolific period was from 1896 to 1903, as professor of English literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo. Four books written during this time - Exotics and Retrospective (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), and A Japanese Miscellany (1901) are all very informative about the customs, religion, and literature of Japan.
His very detailed explanation of the role and person of the Emperor of Japan as a living God was very instrumental in preventing the trial and possible execution of the Emperor at the end of WW2.
The current exhibition entitled “Kwaidan” runs at the Tramore Coastguard Station. This exhibition features the works of 40 artists based in Ireland and Japan who have been inspired by these strange and ghostly tales. Their interpretations are presented through a diverse collection of contemporary fine art printmaking and photography.
The exhibition is organised by Irish artists Stephen Lawlor, Kate MacDonagh and Ed Miliano, who formed the working group Blue Moon Projects in 2019 and began to develop an exhibition inspired by the writings of Hearn. Each individual artwork in this exhibition expresses the beauty, fear and inevitability of death and interprets these eerie and macabre stories through a variety of highly skilled print media.
As I wandered around the exhibition, breathing in the beauty of the work and the surrounding panorama of ocean outside and noticing a Japanese family discussing the works, my mind returned to that marvellous writer who spent idyllic childhood summers in Tramore and sought and found a holiday space in Japan that, incredibly, looked a mirror image of Tramore. A childhood that had a profound influence on Lafcadio as a writer.
Well done to everyone involved in this fascinating exhibition.
