Kokoro. Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life. Boston New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1896. First Edition. Pp, 388, top edge gilt. Olive-green buckram boards, title in gilt to upper cover and spine. Steel engraved vignette of child to title page, with the Kanji character in red at top of page. A nice bright copy.

The appendix, pp. [327]-388, collects prose translations of three Japanese popular ballads.

Lafcadio Hearn grew up in Dublin. After a brief education in England and France, he immigrated to the United States at nineteen. In 1890 Hearn traveled to Japan for Harper’s Magazine. He married & became a Japanese subject.

Hearn’s articles on Japan soon began appearing in The Atlantic Monthly and were syndicated in several newspapers in the United States. These essays and others, reflecting Hearn’s initial captivation with the Japanese, were subsequently collected and published in two volumes as Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894).