Last year was, admittedly, a very good year for Lafcadio Hearn's small but devoted band of readers. To mark the centenary of this Irish and multinational writer, events were held around the world, writes John Moran.
In Hearn's birthplace, the Ionian island of Lefkas in Greece, even though all hearts and minds were focused on the Olympics, Hearn was remembered with a series of public events.
In New Orleans, where he lived and worked for 10 years, a symposium was held which was attended by some of the city's social and academic luminaries. In Matsue, his favourite place in Japan, where a museum is dedicated to his memory, many of the world's foremost Hearn scholars gathered.
Alas, in Ireland, where Hearn spent his formative years, and where he had extensive family connections in counties Mayo, Westmeath, Waterford, Armagh and Dublin, there was no official commemoration.
Indeed, were it not for the efforts of the Ireland-Japan association and the Chester Beatty Library, the centenary would have passed by like a ghostly ship in the night.
When the year ended, Hearn enthusiasts feared that his name would once again disappear from the radar screen.
So it is a great delight to discover that there is to be a play featuring significant periods in Hearn's life. The Dream of A Summer's Day will open at the Civic Theatre in Dublin next Thursday, March 31st, and run for 10 nights before touring the country.
Written by Liam Halligan, artistic director of Storytellers Theatre Company, the play celebrates a remarkable and colourful life. Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was an outsider from the beginning. He was born in 1850 of an unlikely union between Dublin surgeon Charles Bush Hearn and Ionian islander Rosa Cassimati. Charles's ardour for the beautiful Rosa did not long survive their arrival in the dank Victorian gloom of his mother's house in Dublin's Gardiner Street. The exotic Rosa and her two-year-old Greek Orthodox strangeling, with the long dark hair and gold earrings, did not quite fit in the mid-19th century Victorian drawing room, where Patrick was coldly referred to as "The Child".
He was quickly dispatched to a widowed grand-aunt, Sarah Brenane, who had married out to a wealthy Catholic. On the odd occasions when Sarah visited her sisters in Gardiner Street, a faithfully trained parrot would generate great hilarity by erupting into a hysterical mocking screech, "Have you seen the priest? Have you seen the priest? . ."
Within a few years, both parents had abandoned Patrick. Charles divorced Rosa, remarried and resumed his imperial army career. Rosa returned to Greece.
After a fairly cossetted upbringing in the then genteel Dublin suburb of Rathmines, replete with maids, coachmen, private tutors - and some nocturnal ghosts - Patrick was enrolled in a leading Catholic seminary in England, St Cuthbert's in Ushaw, Durham.
His best friend there was Achilles Daunt from Co Cork, who later wrote that Hearn was terrific fun, had a mischievous manner, and that his popularity increased with each beating he received for playing tricks on teachers.
Patrick's happy days, however, were coming to an abrupt end. He was to suffer a calamity when, during a school game, he received a blow that lost him the use of his left eye. Ever afterwards, he felt his appearance was repulsive.He became withdrawn and introverted.
Another great misfortune overtook him when Sarah Brenane found herself in reduced circumstances and withdrew him from Ushaw. He was sent to live with a former maid and her dockworker husband in the teeming slums of London's East End.
Within two years, at the age of 19, he was presented with a one-way ticket to the United States, to remove him, he bitterly believed, from inheritance rights in Sarah Brenane's will.
For four years in Cincinnati, Patrick lived an almost feral existence, and might very well have disappeared without trace were it not for the kindness and mentoring of a radical English printer who virtually adopted him, trained him in print-craft and encouraged his dream of becoming a writer.
Hearn eventually found his way into the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper where he quickly displayed a peculiar genius for shocking readers with his mischievously detailed accounts of grotesque crimes and eyewitness accounts from Cincinnati's demi-monde.
He also crafted stories from cultures on the margins of the city's life: German, Chinese and Jewish, but most often black.
A rash marriage, to the daughter of a former slave whose father was Irish, repeated the pattern his father had set - and was similarly doomed. Given the racial prejudices of the day, Hearn was ostracised and eventually fled Cincinnati for the balmy and bohemian New Orleans. Somewhere between Cincinnati and New Orleans, and in keeping with his fascination with all things different, Hearn swapped the name Patrick for Lafcadio.
It was in New Orleans he established a nationwide reputation with stories about the "other" America, featuring black music and culture, native Indian culture and all things Creole. He was ahead of his time in championing the cause of conservation, writing trenchant newspaper articles opposing the activities of logging-company barons.
After 10 years in New Orleans, Hearn continued his search for "the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous" and moved to Martinique in the French West Indies, where he lived for two years writing painterly prose on tropical fauna and flora, and collecting Caribbean customs and folklore.
In his 40s, he eventually settled down in Japan, where he spent the final 14 years of his life. There he reinvented himself again as Koizumi Yakumo and fathered four children, the first of which, he boasted in a letter, had "a queer little Irish accent". In Japan, he was to become a respected figure on the world stage, with 14 volumes of delicately crafted impressions of the physical, spiritual and folkloric life of contemporary and old Japan.
In The Dream of a Summer's Day we learn about Hearn through significant voices from his life speaking to each other across places and times. Period music, dance and fantastical visual imagery should further excite the senses. Despite Ireland's official indifference to this minor national treasure, thanks to Liam Halligan and to the doughty troupe of Storytellers, Lafcadio Hearn continues on his travels.