Love Quote by Lafcadio Hearn

Hearn is doing something sly: he flatters the reader into a moment of self-awareness, then flips the gaze back onto the West. The line doesn’t scold so much as re-balance a conversation that, in his era, was lopsided by default. Late-19th-century Western writing about “the East” often treated Asia as aesthetic raw material - incense, silk, mystery - a stage set for romance. Hearn, a wanderer who made Japan his home and wrote from inside its daily life, punctures that confidence with an almost casual equivalence: your confusion about “Western subjects” is the same confusion your poets have about “Eastern subjects.”

The intent is less “cultural relativism” in the modern slogan sense and more an attack on asymmetry. Western readers were trained to assume their own categories traveled well, that a novelist’s instincts about character, desire, and plot were portable. Hearn implies those instincts are local habits dressed up as universals. “Writer of romance” is a sharp choice: romance, as a genre, loves projection. It turns other people into mirrors for your longing. In that frame, the East becomes legible only when it’s been edited into Western fantasies.

The subtext is practical, almost methodological: if misunderstanding is inevitable, humility is required; translation is labor, not a vibe. Hearn is also defending Eastern complexity against the tourist gaze. By making incomprehension symmetrical, he denies the West its favorite privilege - being the default setting of meaning.