of Jōruri which it contains is limited to one of the seven acts of which this play is composed which seemed to demand a more poetical treatment. It is one of a trilogy which deals with the history of the Hōjō regents. The time is the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the subject the crimes and intrigues into which Maki no Kata, the wife of the Regent, was led by her ambitions on behalf of a favourite son. The Maki no Kata is decidedly melodramatic. There are several murders and bloody combats, and two hara-kiri by women. But there are also some really forcible scenes, and although no supreme height of excellence is anywhere attained, there is careful workmanship and a gratifying freedom from the extravagances of the earlier school of Japanese dramatists. Of pivot-words and such-like rhetorical devices there are the merest traces. Most writers of the Tokio period show a marked tendency to dispense with these contrivances.
The specialty of Sudō Nansui is the political novel. This author belongs to the progressive party in politics and social science, and his pages bristle with allusions to "things European." He quotes glibly, "To be or not to be, that is a question" (sic), and talks familiarly of Shakespeare, Dumas, Gladstone, and O'Connell. The extent and variety of his reading may be inferred from an airy reference in one of his prefaces to Lytton, Bakin, Scott, Tanehiko, Hugo, Shunsui, Dickens, and Ikku.
The Ladies of New Style (1887) is a good example of his works. It is a novel of the future, when Tokio shall have become a great port, with all the appliances of an advanced civilisation, such as wharves, docks, tramways, and smoking factory chimneys. The heroine,
