CURIOUSLY, IT IS A BOOK I haven’t read. I saw a copy once: a dark blue, leather-bound Modern Library edition that sat unread on my girlfriend’s uncle’s shelf. It was all I could do (i.e., my girlfriend said, No!) not to steal it. I have loved Lafcadio Hearn’s writing since my introduction some eight or nine years ago in Japan via a friend’s vivid recounting of two of the weird and lovely tales (“Mimi Nashi Hoichi” and “Yuki Onna”) that make up his most famous book, Kwaidan, a work that I quickly purchased and quickly—largely in hopes of assimilating its peculiarly effective blend of quaintness and ferocity—devoured. Some writers one reads to saturation, to exhaustion; others are taken in brief, startling doses. For me, Hearn falls among the latter. Which is to say that if I have loved Hearn, I have also, for considerable periods of time, not read him, and that each unlooked-for rediscovery (Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields) has been invigorating, strange, good. But that is only part of the reason why every time I go into a used bookstore I check to see if they have the above-mentioned edition of Some Chinese Ghosts.
In Borges’ great story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” he writes of a certain class of objects, very rare, that are brought into being by hope. When I walked into my girlfriend’s uncle’s living room, I had very much been hoping, as we drove down from Vermont and into Massachusetts—excellent used bookstore country—to encounter a slim, elegantly bound edition of stories by Hearn of the same otherworldly stamp as Kwaidan. And there, of a sudden, it was. Two other times I have experienced something like this. The first time, on my birthday a few years ago, I went to the Strand bookstore in New York hoping (I had no idea whether or not such a thing existed) to find a small hardback copy of Kafka’s parables, perhaps, I pictured it, bound in red. After searching that overheated chaos of stacks and shelves and turning up only a dogeared copy of the selected stories, I left. Once outside the doors, however, a strong impulse, almost physical, made me turn toward the dollar racks outside. There, bound in red, on the first shelf I consulted, it sat. The second incident, almost identical to the first, involved a twin-volume set of the correspondence of Edward Fitzgerald.
Probably everyone has a secret wish list: one with which reality occasionally intersects. There are other books on mine. I would love, for example, to walk into a bookstore and discover some unknown work by W. G. Sebald; or a volume collecting all the early drafts of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrien; or a second volume of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino; or, let’s really go for it here, a facsimile of Tamsen Donner’s journal, the one that was lost. Extravagances aside, I know that somewhere out there (and certainly on a certain shelf in Massachusetts) Some Chinese Ghosts, the one that I had hoped for, exists. I just have to put my hands on it again.