In the late nineteenth century, Westerners developed a fascination with Japanese art, literature, history, and culture. Artists and designers in Europe and America fell in love with the understated and yet vibrant styles of their Japanese counterparts. Cultural exchange ran both ways, however, and in Japan, Western art exerted a strong influence on age-old traditions, resulting in a hybrid style that has a special appeal of its own.
At the center of that cultural mingling was Lafcadio Hearn. Of mixed heritage himself, he was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkada to an Irish father and a Greek mother. At the age of nineteen, he purchased a one-way ticket to the United States and eventually found work as a newspaper reporter in Cincinnati, where he wrote grisly stories about true crime and the seedy underside of American industrial life. By 1877, Hearn had divorced his African-American wife and moved to New Orleans, a cultural melting pot like no other, to work as a journalist and translator of French fiction.
Hearn’s wanderlust took him to the Caribbean in 1887 and then to Japan in 1890. He acquired a position as a school teacher and married the daughter of a local samurai family. The remainder of his life was spent teaching and writing about the colorful folkways of his adopted country. A prolific author, Hearn published at least one book per year, and new editions of his work continued to appear even after his death in 1904. It was largely through Hearn’s writings that Western readers familiarized themselves with what Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, had referred to as "that double-bolted land," long shrouded in mystery.
Our "Rare Book of the Month" selection for January is actually a group of five books by Hearn. They are part of the Japanese Fairy Tale Series issued by Tokyo publisher Hasegawa TakejirÅ, who began publishing books on Japanese subjects for Western audiences in 1885. Translated by foreign residents in Japan into all the major European languages, the series was still in print in the 1930s. Travelers would have purchased the stories as souvenirs or shipped them overseas as gifts; once their popularity had caught on, they were also exported for sale in the West.
Much of the books' charm comes from their brightly colored woodblock illustrations, done in a traditional ukiyo-e style by Japanese artists. Their most striking feature, however, is the crepe paper—known as chirimen in Japanese—on which they are printed. This novel technique was used at least as early as 1800 and revived by Hasegawa. After the books’ pages were printed, a special press was used to give them a crinkled appearance. The paper was not only visually interesting and fun to touch, but also durable, making it appropriate for children’s books.
UNM’s Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections contains a wide range of historical literature for children, from works on Native Americans and other peoples of the Southwest to Victorian dime novels and first or early editions of classic children’s books like Alice in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, and Winnie-the-Pooh. To learn more, explore our catalog or contact Michael Taylor, Special Collections Public Services Librarian, at mtaylor6@unn.edu. We are especially interested in integrating such materials into classroom instruction and interpretive projects.
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