BROWSING THROUGH MAGAZINES at a Japanese flea market late in the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn found a decades-old copy of Atlantic Monthly with an article entided ‘Japan,’ alongside pieces by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman. Hearn plunked down half a yen, read the piece – by a Mr. House – and pronounced himself impressed by the writer's grasp of Japanese history.

Well he should have been. The 1860 article was one of America's earliest journalistic treatments of Japanese history, and its author, New York Tribune reporter Edward H. House, had helped to shape a generation of American attitudes toward the Asian archipelago, just as Hearn would do with his ghostiy tales and exotic narratives at the turn of the century.

When Hearn happened upon the Atlantic piece, House was in Tokyo, nearing the end of a thirty-year career as a pioneer of American journalism in East Asia, a career that had placed his writings in most of the New York newspapers, as well as in almost every significant American journal. At his death in 1901, the British journalist Frank Brinkley called him ‘the most brilliant writer ever connected with journalism in the Far East,’ while the private secretary of political giant Ōkuma Shigenobu said his writings had laid Japan ‘under a deep obligation.’

A key to House's influence – and a primary reason for his midcareer move to Tokyo in 1870 – lay in the diverse nature of his interests and ambitions. As a Boston teenager, he had been a musical prodigy, copying out Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser note-by-note and producing a symphony of his own. As a member of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune reportorial staff, he helped make John Brown and Mark Twain famous and gained note for his coverage of early Civil War battles. He also wrote endless essays, plays, and short stories, many of the latter featuring a forbidden romance between an aristocrat and a commoner, with the protagonist's inherent goodness trumping the pretensions of some high bred snob. Beyond all that, he tried his hand at theater management, climbed mountains, took balloon rides, and performed daredevil feats on three continents.