Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn led an exotic and restless life from his birth on an island off the coast of Greece until his death in Japan fifty-four years later. He lived in loneliness in Ireland, England, and France as a child. He spent two years in obscurity in New York City, six years in turmoil and creative growth in Cincinnati, and eight years in sickness, desperation, and the beginnings of literary renown in New Orleans. Then he wandered from Martinique in the West Indies to New York and Philadelphia anxiously striving to keep his literary success from dying out. Finally he journeyed across North America, sailed for Japan, there to spend the last twelve years of his life in the only measure of stability and domestic calm he seems to have found: husband and father, professor of literature, and interpreter of Japanese culture for the Occidental audience...