Before Lafcadio Hearn, there was Pierre Loti.  The Frenchman is (in)famous in Japan for his 1887 novel, Madame Chrysantheme, which influenced the short story Madame Butterfly (1898) by John Luther Long. In collaboration with David Belasco, Long turned the story into a play, which in turn inspired Puccini to write his opera of the same name in 1904. (Later still it would be adapted for the musical Miss Saigon.)

In ‘Travel Sketches of Lafcadio Hearn’, Hiromi Kawashima writes of Loti’s influence on his successor. Hearn was a big admirer of Loti and arrived in Japan just three years after the semi-autobiographical Madame Chrysantheme came out. As well as fiction, the French author also wrote travelogues which include his impressions of Kyoto (extracted below).

Kawashima’s study of Hearn raises the intriguing question of the extent to which a writer should embellish his subject-matter for the entertainment of the reader. Though Hearn himself was unashamedly romantic in his writings about Japan, he became critical of Loti’s excesses and in his final work Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation he sought greater realism and detachment.

*****************

Kawashima writes:

‘Kioto: La Ville Sainte’ [Kyoto: The Sacred Town] is an interesting account of the old city. Loti entered Kyoto by train, and narrates his experience at the hotel, his visit to Yasaka, Kiyomizu, the palace of Taiko-sama, Daibutsuden, Kitano-tenjin, and Sanjusangendo. For his English readers Hearn selected three of the topics. Under the title of ‘In the Palace of Taiko-sama’ he translated Loti’s experience of walking through mysterious chambers. In ‘The Big Bell’ a good natured Japanese family from the country who laughed with Loti are sketched, and Loti says:

What a country this Japan, –  where everything is oddity, and contrast!

The third piece, ‘A Nightmare in Daylight’ relates a legion of gods in the gloom of Sanjusangendo. Here Loti exhibits his peculiar ability in description:

In the midst, in the place of honour, – upon the open flower of a golden lotos, vast as the base of a tower, – sits throned a colossal Buddha of gold, – before a golden nimbus deployed behind him like the outspread tail of a monstrous peacock.  He is surrounded, guarded, by a score of nightmare-shapes, – something in likeness of human form, exaggeratedly huge, – and seeming to resemble at once both demons and corpses. When one enters through the central door, which is low and sly-looking, one recoils at the sight of these shapes of an evil dream, almost close to one.

We notice that Loti has his favourite vocabulary in dealing with Japan; such as ‘little’, ‘odd’, ‘mysterious’, and ‘strange’. The parts which Hearn chose are very typical of Loti, because Hearn was charmed with his exotic and romantic style. Loti was good at taking in foreign scenes intuitively, and showing them in his inimitable mysterious mood. Hearn tried to convey the deep impression he got from his works, by faithfully translating them. In this sense Hearn’s translations from Loti’s ‘Kioto’ represent the first step towards the travel sketches of Japan by Hearn himself.

**************

Later in his paper, Kawashima adds the following: While Loti remained a traveller to the last, Hearn decided to stay much longer in the country. In 1892 he visited Kyoto and wrote to [his friend] Mason:

… I can’t say that I liked Kyoto as much as I expected.  First of all, I was tremendously disappointed by my inability to discover what Loti described. He described only his own sensations: exquisite, weird, or wonderful. Loti’s ‘Kioto: La Ville Sainte’ has no existence. I saw the Sanjusangendo, for example: I saw nothing of Loti’s – only recognised what had evoked the wonderful goblinry of his imagination.

Hearn realised then that Loti’s Kyoto has been the reflection of his sentiments and taste, rather than what Kyoto really was. Visiting Kyoto himself, Hearn found that what had attracted hims was just the image of foreign lands reflected on Loti’s mind. Accordingly I regard this letter as the diverging point of the two writers. Once he failed to see the objects the way Loti had showed him to see them, his admiration began to cool down. New works by Loti seemed to him less fascinating.