259 pp. 10 full-page plates and text decorations by Yeto. Half tan textured cloth and decorative boards with laid down color illustration of a Japanese girl writing. First Edition.

While the eminent Japanese poet and writer Yone Noguchi was not an American citizen – and, indeed, strongly supported his homeland’s battle with the United States during World War II – he spent more than 10 years of his early life in the US, living in San Francisco (among the California “bohemians”) and New York from 1893 to 1904. This anonymously written book, which he published at age 26, was his first novel, and, arguably, was the first “Japanese-American” fiction. While the first novel of ‘Onoto Watanna’ (pseudonym of Edith Eaton’s sister Winnifred), published two years earlier, is considered “the first known novel by an Asian American”, Winnifred, like Edith (see her listings in this catalogue) was of Chinese-British descent, though most readers of her popular, and beautifully produced, romance novels believed her to be Japanese.