Koizumi Setsu — The Storyteller Who Never Gave Her Name

Don't Look at the Book

"Looking at a book, no good. It must be only your story, your words, your thoughts."

Her husband always said this to her. Many years later, she wrote it down herself.

On lonely nights, she turned the lamp wick low and told him an old tale. He lowered his voice and held his breath and listened, as if he were afraid. He looked so scared that she put more and more of herself into the telling.

If she told a tale with a book in her hand, he stopped her. So she learned each one until it was completely her own. In the end, she even dreamed them.

Her husband's name was Lafcadio Hearn. Later he would be known as Koizumi Yakumo. In her memories, he is always called "Herun," the way she said Hearn.

Her name was Setsu.

The woman who was told not to look at the book had never studied at a higher school.

She had not finished a good girls' school. She could not speak English freely. Setsu was sorry about both, a later biography says.

In 1868, Setsu was born into a samurai family in Matsue. Her father, Koizumi Minato, was a warrior of the Matsue han, a domain ruled by a lord.

But Setsu was sent away to be adopted by another family, the Inagaki.

When the Meiji era began, the life of the samurai fell apart. Her birth father started a textile factory, and it failed. A biography says that was how many former samurai ended up in business.

Both the Koizumi house and the Inagaki house grew poor. Young Setsu wove cloth on a loom to help them get by.

She was a girl who loved stories.

Stories were told about someone in her own family, too. Her mother's father was a well-known chief retainer in Izumo. Three times he warned a lord who behaved badly. Then he took his own life by seppuku, the samurai's way, at the lord's residence in Edo (now Tokyo). So it is said. His story became a play and a storytelling piece.

Years later, Setsu wrote down her grandfather's story with her own hand, for her eldest son.

Before she met Hearn, Setsu had been married once. The biography says only this about her at that time: she had learned her studies and her accomplishments, and then met with an unexpected misfortune.

At the end of August 1890, a foreigner came to Matsue. He was the new teacher of English at the middle school and the teacher training school.

On that day, Setsu had not yet met Hearn. Still, years later she described in detail the view from the Great Bridge, where his boat landed. To the east, Mount Daisen rose like Mount Fuji. To the west, the lake and the sky melted together, and white sails came and went. Then she added:

"I believe Hearn would have liked this view first of all."

She told of a scene she had not seen, as if she had seen it. Perhaps the storyteller in her was already there.

On the advice of Nishida Sentaro, the head teacher of that school, Setsu came to live in this teacher's house. It was the end of 1890 or the start of the next year.

In town, the teacher's good character was already well known. So Setsu was anxious, but she also felt safe when she went to him as his wife, the biography says.

It was 1891.

One evening, Setsu stood at the edge of the eaves, looking at the lake at dusk. On the shore just below, four or five mischievous children were dunking a small kitten in the water, lifting it out, and dunking it again.

Setsu apologized to the children and took the kitten home.

When she told Hearn, she remembered, he said:

"Oh, poor little cat. Cruel children, aren't they?"

And as he said it, he took the kitten, soaking wet and shivering, and put it inside his clothes against his chest to warm it.

"I was very moved then."

In June of that year, the two of them, a maid, and the kitten moved to a house in Kitahori, near the castle moat. Hearn liked the garden, which backed onto a hill, very much.

A mountain dove called "Tete poppo, kaka poppo." That is how people in Matsue hear it. Hearn was delighted and called for Setsu.

"Do you hear that voice? How interesting."

Then he copied the call himself, tete poppo, kaka poppo, and apparently asked Setsu whether he had it right.

But this man's kindness sometimes overflowed in strange ways.

It Troubled Me Every Time

At the Suetsugu house, a man who had just moved in next door once came to say hello and to borrow a corkscrew. It was soon after Setsu had arrived.

He was a man who had stayed at the same inn where Hearn had stayed before. Hearn asked, then you are a friend of the innkeeper? The neighbor answered without thinking: yes, a friend.

Then, Setsu wrote, Hearn said this and went back inside:

"A friend of that strange, heartless man. I do not like. Good-bye, good-bye."

The innkeeper had been slow to take his small daughter, who had a sick eye, to a doctor. There seem to have been other reasons too, but this angered Hearn most, and he had left the inn.

The neighbor had no idea what this was about. It was Setsu who stepped in and made excuses. "I was very troubled then."

Later Setsu described her husband this way. He had a kindness and warmth greater than a woman's. But since childhood he had been bullied by bad people and had cried over it, so he was an ikkoku-mono, and his feelings were sharp to a startling degree. An ikkoku-mono is a stubborn man.

It was the same when they traveled.

In the summer of 1891, the two went on a trip to Hoki (now Tottori Prefecture). At a hot spring called Togo Pond, they went into an inn planning to stay about a week. A crowd was drinking and making a racket.

Hearn pulled at Setsu's sleeve right away.

"No good. This is hell. Not even one second."

The people of the inn welcomed them. He said he did not like it, and walked straight out. The inn's people and the rickshaw men were startled. Setsu, too, did not like noisy inns, but Hearn called it hell.

"I was still young and not used to the world, so this stubbornness troubled me every time. But I believe it was Hearn's pure, honest good side."

It was the same when they went by boat into Kukedo, a sea cave in Kaga. The boatman told a frightening story about the cave. Then Hearn began taking off the clothes he had just put on. He wanted to swim.

The boatman tried to stop him. Setsu also warned him that a place with such a fearful legend must have something lurking in it.

Hearn finally gave up swimming. And until the next day, Setsu wrote, he said nothing, grieving over it.

There were times she was truly worried.

When he was absorbed in writing, Hearn saw and heard things that were not there. Was he going mad? Setsu admits that she once asked Nishida about it. Little by little, she says, she came to understand that it was because he threw himself in too deeply.

In November 1891, Hearn moved to a school in Kumamoto, on the island of Kyushu. Setsu and her adoptive parents went along too.

Hearn described one day in Kumamoto in a letter to a friend. When the alarm clock rings at six in the morning, his wife gets up and wakes him, with a serious greeting from the old samurai days.

At night, Hearn sometimes kept writing in bed with a pencil in his hand. Even then, his wife, who went to sleep first, would always say, as in the old custom:

"Excuse me for going to bed before you."

Hearn tried to make her stop being so humble. But he could not make her stop, the letter says.

Perhaps the stubborn one was not only the husband.

In the summer of 1892, they traveled around the Oki islands. It was a place where people had never seen a Westerner, and crowds of onlookers gathered like mountains. Once, the onlookers who had climbed onto the eaves of the house across from the inn fell, eaves and all.

Hearn was truly bothered by the fuss. Even so, he told Setsu, acting calm, "Nothing is so interesting as this." It was to comfort and cheer himself, Setsu wrote.

In November 1893, their eldest son, Kazuo, was born.

Hearn wrote to a friend in America. His wife was safe, but he had worried. And he went on:

"When I remembered that there are men in the world who mistreat the woman who gives birth to their child, it felt as if heaven and earth went dark for a while."

From around then, Hearn had begun thinking of becoming Japanese.

If he married before a consul as an Englishman, Setsu would become English too, and lose the right to own property in Japan. A Japanese-style wedding alone would not be a legal marriage. And if he became Japanese, he would lose any hope of being hired at the high pay given to foreigners. He knew all this and still chose to become Japanese himself, the letter says.

Setsu later said that Hearn had put up with so much and worried so much for the sake of his wife and children, and that this was true of the naturalization too.

In February 1896, the paperwork was done. Hearn became Japanese by entering Setsu's family.

His new name was Koizumi Yakumo.

Koizumi was the name of Setsu's family.

Before long, a book of Japanese ghost stories, kaidan, would be published across the sea. The name printed on its English cover was Lafcadio Hearn. Setsu's name is not there.