Love Quote by Lafcadio Hearn

There is a sly anthropological trick hiding in Hearn's polite sentence: he uses the imagined gaze of the "Japanese student" to make English literature look suddenly strange, even provincial. The line performs a cultural defamiliarization. By filtering the English canon through an outsider, Hearn exposes what readers inside that tradition rarely notice: how insistently Anglophone fiction and poetry treat romantic love not as one theme among many but as the theme, a kind of emotional master key.

The phrasing is telling. "Extraordinary predominance" sounds like a statistician losing patience. He doesn't argue that love is bad; he suggests the obsession is disproportionate, almost comical in its repetition. The "astonishment" is a mirror held up to Victorian and post-Romantic sensibilities, where the private self, marriage plots, and the eroticized interior life became proof of seriousness and depth. In that literary ecosystem, to be fully human is to be romantically complicated.

Hearn's context matters: a Western writer who lived in Japan and wrote for Western audiences hungry for "Japan" as alternative and critique. The Japanese student is partly real and partly a rhetorical device, allowing Hearn to question Western norms without sounding like a scold. Subtext: other civilizations can center different virtues - duty, harmony, filial ties, seasonal beauty, social obligation - and still produce art that feels complete. His sentence quietly asks why English literature needs love to do so much ideological work: to domesticate rebellion, to give moral stakes to desire, to turn social constraints into emotional drama. The shock he stages isn't about Japan; it's about England's self-portrait.