Ford Madox Ford wrote nearly every day of his life from adolescence onward, and produced eighty-two books, edited two very influential magazines—the English Review and the Transatlantic Review—discovered Lawrence, patronized Pound, publicized Joyce, employed Hemingway, and collaborated with Conrad. He achieved in his writing what Henry James called ”the real right thing.” Yet apart from The Good Soldier (a masterpiece impossible to ignore), and perhaps the tetralogy Parade’s End, this extraordinary man is hardly known today outside the peripheral roles he plays in the biographies of his more famous contemporaries. It will be difficult, however, for him to be so ignored again. Rarely is a half-forgotten writer rescued by such intelligent and engrossing enthusiasm.

Izumi Kyoka (1872-1939) wrote some 300 stories, plays, and essays. In the first book-length study in English of Kyoka, Charles Shiro Inouye argues that his writings were a refinement of a vision that came into focus around 1900. This narrative archetype formed the aesthetic and ethical bases of his work. Kyoka does not fit the conventional story of Japanese literary modernization. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not jettison the Japanese literary tradition in favor of modernist imports from the West. The highly visual mode of figuration that was Kyoka's compromise with the demands of literary modernism allows us to see the continuation of Edo culture in the Japanese modern and expand our understanding of literary reform in the early twentieth century.