This is an extremely rare book. It was not very popular and not many copies survive (in contrast with Madame Chrysanthème, by Pierre Loti, published the same year and still in print today in pocketbook format). It was originally published serially in the Atlantic Monthly January-August 1888, and that version is readily accessible in an easy-to read format online at the Cornell University Libraries Making of America website.

 Atlantic Monthly volume LXI  p. 1:  chapters 1-5
p. 146: ch. 6-10
p. 335:  ch. 11-14
p. 433: ch. 15-18
p. 625:  ch. 19-21
p. 723: ch. 22 -25
volume LXII  p. 29: ch. 26-29
p. 169:  ch. 30-35

The novel is very lively and readable, but unsensational. At times it reads like a version of Jane Austen's Emma told by Mr. Knightley; however, the love between the narrator, a doctor about 50, and his young protegée, is explicitly defined by him as one that will not lead to marriage (he rejects that possibility when it is proposed, twice; he watches her marry a Japanese; later, he tries to arrange her marriage to a young American with whom she is in love--the Frank Churchill of the story). Perhaps if the ending had been romantic, instead of hagiographic, the novel might have gone down better with readers.

As in most romantic novels, however, "Japan" is represented by young women; two of the characters are the sole surviving heirs of great Samurai families, and well aware of the masculine past which they are barely able to represent. Both young women are spotlessly virtuous and wise. However, the heroine's grandmother and aunts are cruel women who make of her a Cinderella and eventually marry her as they see fit. The two young women's fathers are depicted briefly as men who, having lost their income and status, suffer nobly and die, one in battle and one by hara-kiri. The only male Japanese character who has an opportunity for dialogue is Yone's husband, a rough, lower-caste boatmaker, whose crudeness is emphasized again and again. The West is represented by three men: Doctor Charwell, the narrator; Arthur Milton, a rich American idler who falls in love with Yone; and Mr. Roberts, an "underbred" Yokohama tradesman and Scots widower whose "girl," his sex partner/housekeeper/babysitter, is promoted to wife when he realizes she is a descendent of a fine old family. There are however plenty of Western women in the story, in particular four cruel and narrow-minded missionaries or teachers. By way of contrast, Marion Gibson, a Bostonian missionary, is presented as intelligent and capable of understanding and appreciating Japanese virtues.

The purpose of the novel is the very opposite of Loti's. House makes Japan a familiar place, examining  the politics, manners, and philosophy of the Japanese with relentless rationality and moral clarity. He satirizes the hypocrisy and mores of the foreign community in Japan--the missionaries, globetrotters, and tradesmen--and condemns foreign "gunboat diplomacy" for having brought social and economic upheaval to Japan. From the first page to the last, he is ferocious in depicting hypocritical women missionaries: "Why in God's name do all the women who come here leave charity and humanity behind them?" (ch. 32 p. 178). In one case, that of British and German diplomats who overrulled, with force, the Japanese attempt to quarrantine a German ship coming from a cholera-ridden port, he speaks of "the perversity and arrogance of two ruthless agents of foreign oppression" (ch. 31, p. 179;  he does however note that U. S. Grant seems to have protested this, ch. 18, p. 42). He speaks damningly of the unequal treaties which press Japan to assert her sovreignity where she can but make her unable to protect her people.

In particular, House is concerned to depict the lot of Japanese women in a way directly contrary to Loti's fantasy of semi-human creatures. House insists on the need for reform of the traffic in women, along with better education for women as well as men. He analyses Japanese women's  manners, their apparently unpredicable coquetry, their readiness to volunteer for mercenary marriages or sexual work, in the context of their culture. He particularly condemns the Western men who are willing to abuse the culture to seduce women or to hire women to act as temporary wives (he does not present an example of a legal Japanese marriage, easily dissolved, such as Loti's). In two cases, Western men are convinced to marry, in Western consulates, the Japanese women they are interested in. In Doctor Charwell's world, while marriage to a man one is in love with is preferable, there is in the end not too much wrong with Yone's marriage to a man who learns to appreciate her industry and household skills, and also to tolerate her predilection for study and association with foreigners.

Judy Shoaf, December 2003