The Lady of the Decoration. (Hodder and Stoughton. 6s.)— There
are a good many curious details about life in Japan in this volume, which will tend to make the reader half forgive its anonymous author for having chosen the dfficult form of a story told in letters. The correspondence, too, is one-sided ; and a further difficulty in realising the principal character is that no name whatever is signed, and therefore it is impossible to think of the heroine except as the pronoun "I"; "the Lady of the Decoration "—the name given her by the Japanese children— being too long for the reader's patience. The correspondent to whom the letters are addressed is called by the heroine "Mate." The context shows her to be a woman, but "Mate" is not a nickname calculated to make any one feel that the lady addressed is a sympathetic confidante. In a book of this kind there is very little story. A wedding is introduced at the end, but this seems to be provided merely for the sake of rounding off the volume. The interest lies entirely in the pictures of Japan, and especially in the sidelights which the author gives us of Japanese female education. The reader will wish that all the sentimental part had been left out, and that the author had given us frankly a book of sketches of Japan made from the particular standpoint of her heroine, that of a missionary school-teacher. Of course, the descriptions of scenery, which are also attractive, would still have been in place in such a book of sketches, and as it is impossible to care much about the sentimental vicissitudes of the heroine,
the volume would have greatly gained by being compressed the manner suggested. As it is, just as the reader imagines that something curious about Japan or her people is coining, the author branches off into the heroine's own feelings of home- sickness and the tantalising irregularities of the American mail. The accounts of the assembling of the soldiers just before the war, and of the arrival of the sick and wounded after the first battles of the campaign, would also be interesting if they were given in fuller detail, and the reader would generally be very grateful if the book had been so planned as to give a little more fact and a little less sentimental reflection.
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