Kotto. By Lafcadlo Hearn. (Macmillan and Co. 6s.)—The contents of
this volume are various. In it we find nine translations of Japanese tales, some fragments from the diary of a Japanese working woman, and several essays more or less connected with Japanese subjects. The diary is, perhaps, the most interesting part of the whole. It begins with the writer's betrothal, and ends just before her death. She describes a very simple, and indeed a very hard, life. The translator explains to us the material conditions of the existence here recorded: " The couple occupy a tiny house of two rooms—one room of six mats and one of three; the husband earning barely Li a month,
the wife sewing, washing, and cooking (outside the house, of course). No comfort of fire even during the greatest cold." This woman tells us of her very small pleasures and her very great sorrows. She loses all her children one after another. The pleasures she takes calmly without gaiety. The sorrows she accepts without murmuring as just punishments incurred by
wrongdoing in a former state of existence. -
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