Koizumi Setsuko (1868-1932)

[nnozomi]

Koizumi Setsuko was born in 1868 in Matsue on the southern Japan Seacoast. From childhood she was fond of stories, teasing the adults around her to tell her fairy tales and folktales. Adopted soon after birth by relatives, she left school at age eleven to work in her birth father’s spinning factory when her adoptive family fell on hard times. In 1886 she married, in part to help out her adoptive family’s economic situation, but her husband immediately took off for Osaka and refused to return; Setsuko divorced him and returned to her birth family.

In 1890 she became the housekeeper for Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-Irish journalist and writer then teaching English at a high school in Matsue. He admired her stubborn capacity for hard work, and they were married in 1891. Hearn’s burgeoning career was to take them to Kumamoto, Kobe, and finally Tokyo; in 1896 he took Japanese citizenship and became Koizumi Yakumo, adopting Setsuko’s family name. They had four children, sons Kazuo, Iwao, and Kiyoshi and daughter Suzuko; the only existingletters from Yakumo to Setsuko are a pleasantly pastoral record of a summer vacation with the boys.

Neither was fluent in the other’s language; they developed their own “Hearn-speak” form of Japanese in which to communicate. Yakumo was fascinated with Japanese folktales and ghost stories, eventually publishing the well-known English-language collection Kwaidan. To provide him with material, Setsuko would trawl the local second-hand bookstores, coming home with assorted collections which she would read to him. He insisted that rather than simply reading aloud, she retell the stories in her own words, with her own inflections and opinions, and found her a gifted storyteller; it has been suggested that Kwaidan should list her as co-author as well.

Yakumo died in 1904, leaving a thirty-six-year-old Setsuko with four children under ten. She survived him by almost thirty years, raising their children and keeping herself amused with Noh singing and the tea ceremony until her death in 1932.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.hearn-museum-matsue.jp/exhibition-setsu.html (English/Japanese) Biography of Setsuko and photos of their possessions
https://www.hearn-museum-matsue.jp/archives/family/index.html (English/Japanese) Family photos

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

I am delighted to learn that this book of ghost stories also includes an unrelated nonfictional section on entomology.

[nnozomi]

Hearn, while partaking of the obvious problems of his era and origin, can be really fascinating to read and--having discovered via Setsuko that openlibrary has several collections of his letters--I plan to go back and read some more of him!
(No clue re the entomology lol.)

[zenigotchas]

What an interesting badass.

[nnozomi]

Excellent description!

[sakana17]

Wonderfully interesting. I liked the notebook photo in the first link showing some English words phonetically written. I couldn't decipher all of them, but it was fun to try. :)

[nnozomi]

Yes, that was great! Especially interesting to see how the phonetic transcription is often different from the way we'd do it now.