Some Translation

Here are some basic translations from Japanese; although, we can argue these days that the internet makes such instruction pointless, everything being only a click away [I reserve the right to be bitter about my expertise]:

Lafcadio Hearn –　[Ra-fu-kaa-di-o Haa-n or ラフカーディオ・ハーン in Katakana]

Koizumi Yakumo –　小泉・八雲 Koizumi [ko-i-zu-mi, or こいずみ in Hiragana] is the family name of his adoptive Japanese family. “Ko” uses the character 小, which means small. “izumi” uses the character 泉, which means “spring of water”. Thus we have the surname “Little Spring”.

Hearn chose the first name “Yakumo” [or やくも in Hiragana] in deference to the gods whose shrines are found near Matsue: a place he wrote of in The Chief City of the Province of the Gods in his Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan vol. 1. The “ya” is a prefix meaning “eight”; the “kumo” means cloud. And so we have “Eight Cloud”; “Little Spring Eight Cloud” in western order.

Kwaidan – 談 The second character, “dan”, was easy to find. It combines “to say”, “fire”, and “fire”, to form “talk”; but this character is frequently used at the end of a word to mean “story” or “tale”. Bless my Kodansha dictionary for then pointing out to me that the first character,怪“kwai”, is actually modernized as “kai”, or in English, “mysterious”. Thus we have literally “mysterious stories”; comprehended by the Japanese as “ghost stories” in the term “kaidan”怪談 . [ka-i-da-n かいだん　in Hiragana.]

Kokoro –　心　This is a simple one-character word meaning “of the heart”, “heart”, “spirit of the heart” … ect. [ko-ko-ro or こころ in Hiragana,　心 in Kanji.]

Koizumi Setsuko –　小泉・節子　Much more difficult to find due to Japanese homonyms—and as Setsuko is often spelled in Hiragana—the characters tried to eluded me. 節 setsu, meaning “season”or “knuckle/joint”, ko, meaning “child.” I, however, assume the meaning to be one of lesser use; and one that is in relation to samurai ethic. That is, “loyalty/allegiance/fidelity/integrity/honor/chastity”…ect. As for the “ko”, Hearn himself states clearly that “ko” is used as a suffix for women’s names in his Japanese Female Names from his section of Japanese Studies in Shadowings. Also in this essay, “setsu”, is listed as meaning “(‘True,’—tender and true)”.