Lafcadio Hearn's Cosmopolitan and Interdimensional Fairyland: The Exchange of People and Spirits between Japan and Europe

• In Event: Evolutions and Diasporas of the Fantastic: Spirits, Supernatural Beings, and Fairies in the Imaginary of Japan

Abstract

Victorian elves and fairies (yōsei) have become naturalized citizens of the media worlds of manga and anime, just as Japanese yōkai became commonplace elements in mythological Western fantasy worlds. This paper seeks to explore the media ideologies and affordances on both sides of the equation that potentiated such a transfer. The Victorian refashioning of the folkloric fairy seems almost predestined to enable a "traffic in spirits": their winged fairy became feminine, diminutive, "cute" and was decoupled from specific folkloric landscapes. The new fairy was cosmopolitan, able to haunt not only its traditional territories but the unfamiliar landscapes of Australia ("Australian flower fairies"). This reimagined fairy was prototypically representative of late 19th century notions about "fairyland". Fairyland expressed Victorian ambivalence about modernity: it could be used to denote both the contemporary media ecologies inhabited by fairies produced by modern print and other media technologies, but also the diegetic worlds of fantastic picturesque landscapes lost with the onslaught of modernity. For Lafcadio Hearn, fairyland could mean a media form (1) "clearly and sharply outlined as the artistic fantasies of Christmas picture-books" or (2) the diegetic space of fantasy these afforded. Media forms thus produced fantasies of interdimensional transfer comparable to Otaku media ideologies of 2.5 dimensionality. Japan itself seemed like such an interdimensional orientalist "fairyland" space. Hearn described going to Japan as "entering bodily into fairyland", writing that "everybody describing the sensations of his first Japanese day talks of the land as fairyland, and of its people as fairyfolk.

Author

• Paul Manning, Trent University