Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

purely political and statistical studies of the complicated questions involved in the current war. The Russian people have had literary spokesmen who, for more than a generation, have fascinated European audiences. The Japanese, on the other hand, have possessed no such national and universally recognized figures as Turgenev original: "Turgenieff"; Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) was a major Russian novelist who helped introduce Russian literature to the West. or Tolstoy Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was the world-famous author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.. They need an interpreter.

It is doubtful whether any Eastern original: "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 the terms of our Western original: "occidental" speech. His long residence in that country, his flexibility of mind, his poetic imagination, and his wonderfully clear original: "pellucid" style have fitted him for this most delicate of literary tasks. He has seen marvels, and he has told of them in a marvelous way. There is scarcely an aspect of contemporary Japanese life—and hardly an element in the social, political, and military questions involved in the current conflict with Russia—which is not made clear in one or another of the books with which he has charmed American readers.