In the Shade of Spring Leaves

Higuchi Ichiyo, Japan's first woman writer of stature in modern times, was born in 1872 and died at the age of twenty-four. In her brief life she wrote poems, essays, short stories and a great, multivolume diary. This book is made up of a critical biography, interlaced with extracts from the diary, and Robert Danly's translations of nine representative stories.