In all English-language literature it is difficult to find a writer more mysterious and strange than Lafcadio Hearn. Rather, like this: he himself is as mysterious and strange as those strange and mysterious stories that he composed. He was changing things all the time. Homeland, citizenship, name, language - tumbleweed writer. He was Greek, Irish, American, lived on the island of Mauritius - all in order to finally establish himself in Japan and from Patrick Lafcadio Hearn turn into Yakumo Koizumi. Here are such metamorphoses. The stories he wrote are full of ghosts and strange events. Japan, described by him, is an unreal, fantastic country in which demon kings and the most ordinary people get along. Because, as he himself once said: "Art does not exist without fantasy. Truly artistic is necessarily fantastic."