FREE: Kokoro - Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, by Lafcadio Hearn

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Paperback, Like New condition
5 Out of 5 Stars: A Fluent Translation of Unspoken Worldviews
Amazon Review By Crazy Fox on June 26, 2007
Not to be confused with Natsume Soseki's novel by the same title, Lafcadio Hearn's "Kokoro" is a magnificent collection of essays, vignettes, memoirs, and meditations on Japan in the 1890's. Very much a product of the mid-Meiji period, these masterfully-written little literary pieces are nonetheless timeless. Each piece is quite different from the rest, and yet almost all of them manage to start from everyday incidents or obvious observations and gradually spiral inwards to some deeply moving and startling insight into Japanese attitudes, values, and worldviews; more than once this seemingly methodless method allows Hearn to share with the reader certain common opinions and normal spiritual orientations held by average Japanese folks--the kinds of things usually taken for granted and so unarticulated, hence least amenable to documentation and scholarship (especially of the time, but even today). And Hearn does all this with an unpretentious erudition and an understated and balanced sympathy for his subject that, along with his literary flair for wonderfully clear and flowing prose, places his writings here in a category far above the rest. With him we can find none of the unintentional strains of condescension and orientalism so typical of folklore and religious anthropology, for while he's looking with the surprised gaze of the outsider with one eye, his other eye is that of the insider feeling very much at home where he is. The resulting view is visionary--but in subdued and shadowy tones.