Why Lafcadio Hearn’s Ghost Stories Still Haunt Us newyorker.com

As lasting as the resulting blindness in that eye was Hearn’s terrible self-consciousness about his disfigured appearance.
Somehow, Hearn reached this stranger’s door, where he was handed a few dollars and was told to fend for himself.
There are Hearn museums virtually everywhere he lived in Japan, and in 2015 the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens were dedicated, in the seaside town of Tramore, Ireland, near the spot where young Hearn said goodbye to his father for the last time.
What makes these stories, preserved from ancient times, especially readable today is the preternaturally postmodern form they are given in Hearn’s deeply idiosyncratic telling.
And here we touch on the interesting question of how he was exposed to many of these ghost stories in the first place.