In all English-language literature it’s hard to find a writer more mysterious and strange than Lafcadio Hearn. Or rather: he is just as mysterious and strange as the bizarre stories he invented. There are writers who stay at home. They sit at a desk, scratch with a pen or click the keys. Lafcadio Hearn is different. He constantly changed something—his homeland, citizenship, name, language—a writer who drifted like a tumbleweed. He was Greek, Irish, American; he lived on the island of Mauritius—and all of this to finally settle in Japan and transform from Patrick Lafcadio Hearn into Yakumo Koizumi. Such were the metamorphoses. The stories he wrote are full of ghosts and strange events. The Japan he described is an unreal, fantastic country where demon-kings and the most ordinary people coexist. Because, as he once said: “Art does not exist without imagination. Truly artistic is always fantastic.”