In 1869 a half-blind Greek-Irish teenager named Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the age of twenty-four became the city's most famous reporter.

Chased out of Cincinnati for his brief marriage to a freed slave, Hearn wandered from New Orleans to New York to the Caribbean before finally settling in Japan, where he was the first Westerner to champion Japanese culture in the West. He eventually wrote twelve groundbreaking books explaining the life, customs, and folklore of Japan, which are still treasured today, nearly a century after his death in 1905.