In all English-language literature, it is difficult to find a writer more mysterious and strange than Lafcadio Hearn. Or rather, this: he himself is as mysterious and strange as the strange and mysterious stories that he composed. There are homebody writers. They sit at a desk, scratching with a pen or tapping on the keys. Lafcadio Hearn from others. He changed something all the time. Homeland, citizenship, name, language - the writer is a tumbleweed. He was Greek, Irish, American, lived on the island of Mauritius - and all this in order to finally establish himself in Japan and turn from Patrick Lafcadio Hearn into Yakumo Koizumi. These are the metamorphoses. The stories he wrote are full of ghosts and strange events. The Japan he described is an unreal, fantastic country in which demon kings and the most ordinary people coexist. Because, as he himself once said, “art does not exist without fantasy. Truly artistic must be fantastic.”