Ghost stories

Jean Pasley tells the story of writer Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, the inspiration behind a touring print exhibition by Irish and Japanese artists


Ghost stories

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the death of Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, a 19th-century writer who is greatly revered in Japan. Born in 1850 to a Greek mother and an Irish father, he was abandoned by his parents at an early age and grew up in Rathmines, Dublin in the care of his elderly, widowed great-aunt, Sarah Brenane. The Hearn family were Protestant, but Sarah Brenane converted to Catholicism on marriage and brought Patrick up in that faith. As a teenager, he was sent to a boarding school in England run by Catholic priests, an experience that turned him off organised religion forever. An accident at the school resulted in the loss of his left eye and left him permanently disfigured. Later in life, his other eye became myopic and he used a monocular to examine the world. Some scholars attribute his acute powers of observation to the need for such intense focus.

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