Wenceslau de Moraes

Wenceslau José de Sousa Moraes was born on May 30, 1854, in Lisbon. He was a naval officer, but his great inclination was writing. In 1888 he arrived in Macau and there had a relationship with a Chinese woman, with whom he had two children. On a service commission in 1889, he went to Japan and was moved by the exuberance of the landscape, the art, the keen sense of dignity and honor, its cult, and the delicacy of the women. Later, in 1898, he settled in the Japanese city of Kobe as Portuguese consul, where he married a beautiful geisha, O-Yoné, who was perhaps responsible for his dedication to writing and describing Japan. But O-Yoné, with failing health, died, and the writer's grief was immense. He lived in Kobe for 33 years until his death. Alongside her intense diplomatic activity, which she pursued for 15 years, she studied Japanese civilization to better understand what she saw and experienced, becoming a major source of Portuguese information about the Orient and sharing intimate experiences of Japanese daily life with national readers, as if she were a native of the country. In 1964, Kobe erected a bust in her honor. In the 1990s, school textbooks still reproduced her portrait and some of her texts. A major Japanese publisher released the complete works of Wenceslau de Moraes in 1969, which quickly sold out. Some of the author's books include: Traces of the Far East, Dai-Nippon, Letters from Japan, The Cult of Tea, Japanese Life, A Glimpse into the History of Japan, Afternoons in Japan and A Glimpse into the Japanese SoulShe is the only Portuguese person to whom Japanese people of both sexes recite sutras during the Bon-Odori festival for the dead, which the writer describes so well in one of his books. She died on July 1, 1929, in Tokushima, at the age of 75.