hes! and white
shirts! and "_yofuku_"! Would that he had been born savage; the curse of
civilised cities was on him, and he supposed he couldn't get away
permanently from them. "How much I could hate all that we call
civilisation I never knew before. How ugly it is I never could have
conceived without a long sojourn in Old Japan--the only civilised
country that existed since Antiquity."

"Kokoro," the book written at this time, is now celebrated, and justly
so. Hearn himself called it a "crazy book." Crazy, it may be designated,
from its very originality, its strange interpretation of strange things,
the new note that it initiates, and the sympathetic power it displays of
divining beliefs and mythologies, the "race ghost" of one of the most
enigmatical people on earth. "The papers composing this volume," he says
in his preface, "treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of
Japan,--for which reason they have been grouped under the title 'Kokoro'
(Heart)."

Written with the above character, this word signifies also mind, in the
emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and
inner meaning--just as we say in English, "the heart of things."

It is the quality of truthful work that it never grows old or stale; one
can return to it again and again, and in interpreting the "heart" of
Japan, Hearn's work is absolutely truthful. I know that this is
contradicted by many. Professor Foxwell tells a story of a lady tourist
who told him before she came to Japan she had read Hearn's books and
thought they were delightful as literature, but added, "What a
disappointment when you come here; the people are not at all like his
descriptions!"

The lady had not perhaps grasped the fact that Hearn's principal book on
Japan, the book that every tourist reads, is called "Glimpses of
Unfamiliar Japan." The conditions and people that he describes are
certainly not to be found along the beaten tourist track that Western
civilisation has invaded with webs of steel and ways of iron. He perhaps
exaggerated some of the characteristics and beliefs of the strange
people amongst whom he lived, and saw romance in the ordinary course of
the life around him, where romance did not exist. Dr. Papellier, for
instance, said that he once showed him a report in the _Kobe Chronicle_,
describing the suicide of a demi-mondaine and her lover in a railway
tunnel. The incident formed the basis of "The Red Bridal," published in
"Out of