Translating the Beauty of Japan: Lafcadio Hearn’s Art Writing

Abstract

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) is well known for his essays about Japan but his analyses of Japanese art have been overlooked, no doubt because he had no formal training in art history. This article examines the features of Hearn’s art writing. It discusses how Hearn framed aesthetic questions within formally complex essays that often blended criticism and fiction, and how he interacted with the increasingly specialized field of Japanese art history that was then starting to take shape in the West. It argues that Hearn’s art writing contributed to making Japanese art comprehensible to readers at the turn of the century by translating and explicating its own distinctive beauty.