Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum and Former Residence

What is there

On the old samurai street along the north moat of Matsue castle, two doors apart, stand the house where Lafcadio Hearn lived in 1891 and the museum built in his memory. The house is a modest samurai residence with three small gardens, which he described room by room in his essay on it; the museum, renewed in 2016, shows his high writing desk, built for the one eye he could see with, his manuscripts and letters, and the books through which Japan’s ghost stories reached readers abroad. Matsue was his first home in Japan and the town he wrote about most.

Why here

Hearn retold the stories he was given, and four of them are articles on this site: the snow woman of Musashi, the faceless woman on the slope at Akasaka, the detached heads of the rokurokubi, and the shark-man on the bridge at Seta. None of them is set in Matsue, but Matsue is where he began collecting, and the museum is the place to see the hand that wrote them down.

Yokai you will meet

• Yuki-onna 雪女 — The writer whose 1904 retelling made the snow woman known abroad.
• Noppera-bō — The faceless woman of his tale of the mujina.
• Rokurokubi 轆轤首 — His tale of the heads that leave their bodies at night.
• Samebito 鮫人 — His 1900 tale of the shark-man on the Seta bridge.

Getting there

Matsue Station (JR San'in Main Line). Lake Line bus about 16 minutes to the Koizumi Yakumo Kinenkan-mae stop.

• Open in Google Maps (external link)
• Open in OpenStreetMap (external link)
• Official site (external link)