With A Daughter Of The Nohfu (Hurst and Blackett, 12s.
Gd.) Madame Sugimoto completes the trilogy, begun so auspiciously with A Daughter Of The Samurai, of novels dealing with family life in modern Japan. The Nohfu are small farmer-landowners, the yeomen of a disappearing feudal system. and as one would expect from her previous work, this picture of village life in transition is colourful and charm- ing. It is hard to believe that the village of Takiva is typical, or that such a paragon otpiaidenly virtue as 0 Ham exists— even in Japan. Perhaps this is unjust to Madame Sugimoto and Japanese village maidens ; anyway, it does not really matter, as this Is it- neVerof ideas rather than character, and each personage is made to represent various attitudes to westernisation, and the story as a whole is meant to illustrate, for the benefit of Occidentals, how Japan is achieving true progress by a careful blending of old and new ideas. Their problems are more or less the same as those which face English rural communities : electrification, mechanisation, motor roads, the flight of population to the towns, falling prices, but the way 0 Ham and her friends of the Young Men's and Young Maidens' Associations actually settle some of these problems puts to shame the activities of our English village Institutes. They should add this book to their libraries immediately.
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