two races rather than upon purely political and statistical studies of the
complicated questions involved in the present war. The Russian people have
had literary spokesmen who for more than a generation have fascinated the
European audience. The Japanese, on the other hand, have possessed no such
national and universally recognized figures as Turgenieff or Tolstoy. They
need an interpreter.


It may be doubted whether any oriental race has ever had an interpreter
gifted with more perfect insight and sympathy than Lafcadio Hearn has
brought to the translation of Japan into our occidental speech. His long
residence in that country, his flexibility of mind, poetic imagination, and
wonderfully pellucid style have fitted him for the most delicate of
literary tasks. Hi has seen marvels, and he has told of them in a marvelous
way. There is scarcely an aspect of contemporary Japanese life, scarcely an
element in the social, political, and military questions involved in the
present conflict with Russia which is not made clear in one or another of
the books with which he has charmed American readers.


He characterizes Kwaidan as "stories and studies of strange things." A
hundred thoughts suggested by the book might be written down, but most of
them would begin and end with this fact of strangeness. To read the very
names in the table of contents is like listening to a Buddhist bell, struck
somewhere far away. Some of his tales are of the long ago, and yet they
seem to illumine the very souls and minds of the little men who are at this
hour crowding the decks of Japan's armored cruisers. But many of the
stories are about women and children,-- the lovely materials from which the
best fairy tales of the world have been woven. They too are strange, these
Japanese maidens and wives and keen-eyed, dark-haired girls and boys; they