From a Goodreads Review:

Lafcadio Hearn lived a kind of loose cannonball life, but both interesting and productive. Born half Greek on an Ionian island to a British military doctor and local woman, he grew up there, in Ireland, England, and France with little or no home life. Deserted by his parents and ultimately by all his relatives, he was sent to America where he struggled to survive but eventually became a newspaperman in Cincinnati. He married an African-American woman for a couple of years, but they separated. He then worked ten years in New Orleans and reported from Martinique for a couple of years as well. He translated works of Zola, Maupassant, and Flaubert into English. Sent to Japan as a correspondent, he fell in love with the country, became a Buddhist, married a Japanese, changed his name and became a citizen. He taught English in the provinces, but eventually wound up a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, dying of a heart attack at age 54 in 1904 after 14 years in Japan. If I were you, I’d read any of his interesting writings on all these places where he lived or his collections of ghost stories and other tales. I probably wouldn’t read this particular volume.
The reason I say this is that Japan basically flummoxed him. Westerners had scarcely begun to delve into Japanese history or culture. Anthropology was quite new and had nothing written on Japan yet. I found this book in the tone of “Wow! These people are so strange and different. You will never understand them, no matter what. You may love the place, but it will remain outside your ken.” In 2019, I don’t think this is a plausible direction. If you learn the language, if you come to know the culture and history, if you live among them, you may understand quite well. On the other hand, I don’t believe anyone can totally understand any large country, nor even small societies. It’s a question of your personality and your personal history as to how you perceive what surrounds you. So, the intoning and constant comparisons with Greece, the defense of Japan as a “great civilization worthy of respect and study” are very much out of date. You may grow tired quickly of such stuff. However, the man himself deserves to be remembered as one who did not look down on the Japanese, who did not want to convert them to Christianity, and tried to explain their ways to the West.