Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum and Former Residence in Matsue

Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Matsue in 1890, an Irish Greek journalist with one working eye and an insatiable curiosity, and left as Koizumi Yakumo, the naturalised Japanese author whose ghost stories and essays introduced the West to old Japan. Matsue is where his Japanese life began, and the town remembers him with a memorial museum standing beside the samurai house where he actually lived.

The museum and the residence

The museum tells Hearn’s improbable life story through manuscripts, personal effects and thoughtful bilingual displays, and it does an unusually good job for English speaking visitors. Next door, his former residence is preserved as he knew it, a modest samurai house wrapped around a small garden he described so lovingly in his essays that reading a page and then looking up at the real thing is a small thrill. Together they take around an hour, and they sit on one of the loveliest streets in the city.

Getting there

Matsue is reached by the Yakumo limited express from Okayama, a scenic run of about two and a half hours through the mountains to the San’in coast. From Matsue Station, buses and the Lakeline loop bus reach the castle area; the Hearn sites sit on Shiomi Nawate, the old samurai street along the moat north of Matsue Castle. The street itself, all pines and earthen walls, is half the pleasure.

While you are there

Matsue Castle, one of Japan’s few original keeps, is minutes away, and the Horikawa sightseeing boats pottering around the moats give the town a gentle, watery rhythm. Time your evening for the shore of Lake Shinji, whose sunsets are a local religion.

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