Lafcadio Hearn: The Soul of an Outsider

Re “Outsider Captures Soul of Japanese” (Nov. 19): To quote from the third paragraph of the article, he is “the first Westerner to write a serious novel in Japanese.”

May I infer that your writer Teresa Watanabe does not consider Lafcadio Hearn’s work to be serious? Hearn preceded Levy by almost 100 years and wrote under the pen name Koizumi Yagumo.

I am not enough of a scholar of his works to be able to identify all of them, but he did write one book at least in Japanese. It was produced as a motion picture that played in the United States under the title “Kwaidan.”

C. E. VOIGTSBERGER

Ventura