Japan's Political Marketplace Book

This is an eclectic collection of stories, anecdotes, essays and journal entries. The stories tend to the melancholic, which is well served by Hearn's elegant, atmospheric style. They've probably aged better then the essays, which are quite of their time. References to racial type, which might be quite reasonable in other words, grate. And the Japan that Hearn describes is quite different from Japan now, certainly when it comes to the cityscape. You wonder what he'd think of how things have changed. But most of the essays are actually rather metaphysical, being on Buddhism, or the Japanese concept of the soul. Some of them are better than others, but they all paint an intriguing picture of another world - a world now distant in time, and not just space.