Perhaps no westerner has been held in greater esteem by the Japanese than Lafcadio Hearn who, in 1890, penniless and half-blind came to Matsue, a remote town on the northwest coast of Honshu. There, in the fading twilight of feudal Japan, he was able to interpret for the Western world - from a Japanese point of view and as no one had done before - the forces that had moulded the soul of this unknown people. In his "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" and in the dozen or so books that followed, he recorded the minutiae of life in the ancient Izumo province. This selection by Francis King gathers together the finest essays on the customs, lore and scenes of Japanese life from the individually uneven, and now largely neglected, published works of Hearn.