8 CHINESE GHOST STORIES Foreword Where got I that truth? Out of a medium’s mouth, Out of nothing it came, Out of the forest loam, Out of dark night where lay The crowns of Nineveh. —Yeats: “Fragments,” The Tower, 1928 Lafcadio Hearn was a thief of myth. Born in 1850, into a time when the British Empire reached around the globe, he raided the world’s archives. Epic narratives, sacred recitals, ancestral prayers: all were fair game for his declared ambition: “I would give up any- thing to be a Literary Columbus.” 1 Hearn wanted to recalibrate the literary voices he knew, to create a “universal literature.” Western storytelling had ossified, he claimed. “Naturalism”—with its solid portraiture of the minutiae of daily life—was narrow and dull. His “universal literature” 2 would be a hybrid of Western realism and “Eastern Literary growths.” 3 “Left to itself,” Hearn said, “every literature will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the con- tributions of a foreign one.” 4 It is unlikely that such a grandiose plan could have been anticipated for Hearn. Unprepossessing of figure, Hearn was, if not deformed, then disfigured; blind in one eye, he walked with a pronounced limp, both injuries suffered on the unforgiving playing fields of a Victorian childhood. Nor did the circumstances of his 1 Beongcheon Yu, An Ape of Gods: the Art and Thought of Lafcadio Hearn, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1964, p. 100. 2 Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p. 177. 3 Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p. 176. 4 Beongcheon Yu, Ibid., p 174–5.