Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Manchester Quarterly, Vol. 38: Adjournal Literature and Art
Ame Nature works in mysterious ways and selects sometimes the most unlikely and unpromising instruments to carry out her aims. Who would suppose that she would ever have chosen a poor half-blind creature like Hearn to teach the world the wonder and witchery of colour? It is as if she had said: Now here is a man with no eyes to see what he should describe: with no education to Speak of to direct his writing if he had something to say: lonely and shy, without family ties, a sojourner for all his days in foreign lands: a man with no invention: an agnostic and yet increasing the faith of men in the mystical and immaterial yet he shall have style and colour that shall be a wonder to the literary world. And those of the literary world, and others too, who have no pretensions to literature, can only wonder, speculate and admire.
What a field for conjecture the parentage of Hearn opens out; his father having been an Irish surgeon-major, his mother a Greek from the Ionian Islands, with a suspicion of Turk or Arab origin. To what ancestors was he indebted for his delightful style Was there more in the Shinto religion than even Hearn suspected, with regard to his own family? Was it on the father's side to some long forgotten Irish minstrel that he owed the sweet setting of the many tales told in his Japanese home? Through how many previous existences, Turkish, Greek or Arab, had descended to him from the maternal side that glorious riot of colour and phantasy?
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