Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the following people: Dr Frederick J. Augustyn, Jr., of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and Professor Tanya Zanish-Belcher, Head of Special Collections, Iowa State University Library, for their support while I was at their institutions in 2012; Adrienne Warricker at the University of Pretoria’s Merensky Library for her help in obtaining obscure works, and for her kindness and willingness to listen. I am deeply thankful to my friend and supervisor, Professor David Medalie, for his guidance in writing the PhD thesis upon which this book is based, and also to Dr Idette Noomé and Philippa Goedhals, for proofreading. My grateful thanks go also to Professors Molly Brown and Andries Wessels for ensuring, as HODs of the busy department in which we work, that I had time to conduct this research. I wish also to thank Professor Russell West-Pavlov of the University of Tübingen, Professor Nobuyoshi Saito of Doshisha University in Kyoto, and Dr Elisabetta Porcu of the University of Cape Town for the valuable suggestions they made as examiners of the thesis.
My deepest thanks and appreciation go also to Lafcadio Hearn’s great-grandson, Professor Bon Koizumi – of the University of Shimane Junior College, and Director of the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum – for permission to quote extensively from Hearn’s oeuvre, as well as use unpublished writings and artworks from the George M. Gould Collection of Hearniana, and from the Dorothea McClelland (1897–1995) Papers. I am indebted, also, to the following editors and publishers: Dr Greg Graham-Smith and Professor Deirdre Byrne, the Editors of Scrutiny2, for permission to reuse some material from two articles I published in the journal in 2015 and 2017; Cambridge Scholars Publishing for permission to reuse material (describing some axioms of Hearn’s Buddhism on pp. 7–8, and his leaving America on p. 143) from my chapter ‘Lafcadio Hearn and George Gould’s “Philosophy of Spectacles”: the story of a Buddhist–Christian encounter’, in Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes, edited by Anastasia Nicéphore and David Brooks (2013). Thanks, too, to the following publishers and authors whose work I have quoted extensively: Professor J. Jeffrey Franklin, for permission to quote from two of his articles (2005, 2011), and from his book The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire (2008); Paul Murray for allowing me to use material from his Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (1993); Wayne State University Press for permission to quote from Beongcheon Yu’s An Ape of Gods: The Art and Thought of Lafcadio Hearn (1964); and Kyoto University, and Professor Motohiro Kojima, the Editor of Review of English Literature, for permission to quote from an article (1991) by Professor Akiko Murakata. I am indebted also to the University of Pretoria for ceding to Brill Publishers copyright of the thesis on which this book is based. And I am grateful to Elizabeth You and Christina Sargent at Brill in Boston for shepherding the book through the publication process.
I wish, additionally, to thank all those authors and publishers whose work is quoted to a lesser degree than those enumerated above: though they are not individually named, their efforts to get at the realities of an extraordinary author are appreciated and hereby acknowledged, even if (or perhaps especially if) I do not agree with them. That said, one of the greatest pleasures of writing this book has been getting to know the like-minded individuals – no longer in this world, but nonetheless present in their writings – who were the first to adumbrate what The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn demonstrates, and who shared Hearn’s reverence for the great luminousness at the heart of the Buddhist vision: Paul Elmer More, Félicien Challaye, and Jean Temple. Professor Akiko Murakata of Kyoto University deserves my especial thanks for her pioneering work on Hearn and the Fenollosas.
And, last but not least, my deepest thanks and gratitude go to friends and companions, for their kind forbearance and encouragement: Ian Butler (University of Pretoria), Gina Buijs, Anthony Chennells (Arrupe Jesuit University), Jampal Chosang (Office of Tibet, South Africa), Andrew Cohen (University of Kent), Marcos da Costa, Eunice da Conceicao, Jean Freed-Isserow (University of the Witwatersrand), Duncan Hodge (University of South Africa), Ann Ireland (Vista University), Anton Krueger (Rhodes University), Louise Krueger, Miles Larmer (St Antony’s College, Oxford University), Patrick Lenahan (University of Pretoria), Geshe Lobsang Dhondup (Office of Tibet, South Africa), Skúli Magnússon (University of Iceland), Daniel McKay (Doshisha University), Brett McIlwrath, Glynn Metha, Nawang Apho Rinpoche, Ngodup Dorjee (Office of Tibet, South Africa), Idette Noomé (University of Pretoria), Ken Saycell, Brian Slon, Jane Starfield (University of Johannesburg), Marie-Louise Ström, Leanne Sykes, Richard Thompson, Anine van Zyl, Caroline Victor, Tim White, and Keiko Sawada – for her support, and for being my guide and translator while we were in Japan. I am ever-thankful, finally, to my parents, Philippa and Barrie Goedhals, for creating the intellectual conditions where others might be heard, and where the odd and outlandish could conspire to become the commonplace.
Pretoria, November 2019