What we're playing is a game of associations.  The problem is, I'm only an amateur, I'm not a scholar, I'm a stranger myself here.

Small world, isn't it. 



Detail from a screen telling a story from the Tale of Genji, Japanese 17th century. 

M. contributed the image and the reference.  Let's see if I can pull it all together.  [Something I used to hear a lot in the old days: "For godssake, try and pull it together, my parents are downstairs."]

Lafcadio, son of an Anglo-Irish father stationed in the Greek islands during the British occupation and a Greek mother, winds up emigrating to the States and becoming a journalist in Cincinnati, Ohio where he breaks the law by marrying a black woman [Mapplethorpe connection here], then moves to New Orleans, and from there to Japan [world traveler, see Charles Freer association, also Leyland the shipbuilder] where Lafcadio finds himself at home in a way he'd never felt before, takes a Japanese name and wife and proceeds to publish a series of books which popularize -- some would say 'exoticize' -- the "Oriental Aesthetic" for a western audience, just as, in a similar fashion Whistler did in art.  Whistler's obsession with black leads to Wagstaff's and back to Tanizaki... 

Here I recommend "Shadows on the Screen, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro on Cinema & 'Oriental" Aesthetics,' by Thomas LaMarre [Michigan, 2005], because Tanizaki's remarks on film take the discussion past the stage we were at the other day with photography [Muybridge as the stepping stone from photography to moving pictures].  

"I can't escape the feeling that the you who lives here is an image, and what moves in the film is your true substance.  If I may stretch the point, could it be that the entire universe and all the phenomena of this world are like film, from moment to moment everything continues to change, yet the past remains spooled up somewhere?  And so we are but images, soon to vanish without a trace, while our true substance lives properly within the film of the universe?  The dreams and fantasies that we see are actually light cast in our heads from the film of these pasts, and not mere illusions at all..." [Tanizaki from Nikkai [A Lump of Flesh, 1923]

Murasaki means wisteria blossom, doesn't it?  That's what I've always thought.  Meaning the lavendar color of this border.  

By 1904 steamship travel which had begun around the time of Lafcadio's birth had circled the globe, Hong Kong to San Francisco and everywhere else.  The world was connected in all ways, literally, and the California ground squirrel was found to be infected with the "Old World" bubonic plague bacillus by 1900.

Small world, isn't it.  Be kind.