Lafcadio Hearn, also known as Koizumi Yakumo, was a Greek-Japanese writer, translator, and teacher who introduced the culture and literature of Japan to the West. His writings offered unprecedented insight into Japanese culture, especially his collections of legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. A Greek national, he lived and worked as a journalist in the Unites Stated before before moving to Japan and becoming a Japanese citizen. In 1890, Hearn met and married Koizumi Setsuko, the daughter of a local samurai family, with whom he had four children. His writings about Japan offered a glimpse into a world that was largely unknown to Westerners of the time.

Kent Williams is an accomplished painter, comics artist, and draftsman, known for his richly textured and expressionist paintings, his striking cover artwork for Marvel, DC, and Vertigo, as well as The Fountain, a graphic novel adaptation of Darren Aronofsky's 2006 epic film. In addition, he is a prolific multimedia artist with notable forays into printmaking, photography, and film. He has won multiple silver medals from the Society of Illustrators and a Gold Award from Spectrum, and was awarded a 2001 fellowship at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab.

Darren Aronofsky's directorial debut π won the Director's Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Independent Spirit award and the Open Palm. The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010) earned countless accolades and multiple nominations; Black Swan won an Academy Award. His biblically inspired epic Noah (2014) was his first film to open at #1 at the US box office.

Kyoko Yoshda is a fiction writer, translator, and professor of American Literature at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Her debut short fiction collection Disorientalism came out in 2014. She has translated books by Masataka Matsua, Ai Nagai and Dave Eggers.

Bon Koizumi is the great-grandson of Lafcadio Hearn and director of the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum, and a specialist in folklore studies. In 2017, he was awarded the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Commendation in 2017 for his contributions to cultural exchange between Japan and Ireland.