The author's account of travelling through Japan in 1878. This is a narrative of travels in Japan communicated via letters. First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The intrepid explorer recounts her 1878 excursion into the back country of the Far East. Bird describes the vicissitudes of her journey — the difficulties as well as the excitement and rewards.

This volume complements other published works about travel by nineteenth-century women writers by locating and creating ‘space’ for Japan which is missing within recent critical discourses on travel writing. It examines the narratives of women writers who travelled to Japan from the mid-1850s onwards, when Japan was first opened to the West, and became a highly desirable travel destination for decades thereafter. Many women travelled in this period, and although most left no record of their journeys, enough did to form a discrete body of literature spanning more than fifty years – from the end of the feudal Tokugawa era to the rise of Meiji Japan as a world power. Their narratives about Japan occupy a culturally significant place, not only in the genre of Victorian female travel writing, but in Victorian travel writing per se. The writers who are the subject of this book are divided into two groups: those who were ‘travellers-by-intent’, namely, Anna D’A, Alice Frere, Annie Brassey, Isabella Bird and Marie Stopes, and those who ‘travelled-by-default’ as the wives of diplomats, namely Mrs Pemberton Hodgson, Mrs Hugh Fraser and Baroness Albert d’Anethan.

Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship examines forgotten stories of cross-cultural friendship and intimacy between Victorian female travel writers and Meiji Japanese. Drawing on unpublished primary sources and contemporary Japanese literature hithero untranslated into English it highlights the open subjectivity and addective relationality of Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes in their interactions with Japanese hosts. Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan demonstates how travel narratives and literary works about non-colonial Japan complicate and challenge Oriental stereotypes and imperial binaries. It traces the shifts in the representation of Japan in Victorian discourse from obsequious mousmé to virile samurai alongside transitions in the Anglo-Japanese bilateral relationship and global geopolitical events. Considering the ethical and political implications of how Victorian women wrote about their Japanese friends, it examines how female travellers created counter discourses. It charts the unexplored terrain of female interracial and cross-cultural friendship and love in Victorian literature, emphasizing the agency of female travellers against the scholarly tendency to depoliticize their literary praxis. It also offers parallel narratives of three Meiji women in Britain - Tsuda Umeko, Yasui Tetsu, and Yosano Akiko -and transnational feminist alliance. The book is a celebration of the political possibility of female friendship and literature, and a reminder of the ethical responsibility of representing racial and cultural others.

A discussion of one of the great interpreters of Japan. The Japanese have always revered Hearn and this book shows the West why he is revered. Experts look at his writings and discuss his integrity as an observer and interpreter of Japan and the Japanese.