Au Japon

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. East Asia Studies. Translated from the French by Daniel Kane. In what was by all appearances a relatively short life, Amedee Baillot de Guerville was by turns an instructor of French at a women's college, a newspaper and magazine owner and editor, Honorary Commissioner for the World's Columbian Exhibition, popular lecturer, war correspondent, author, and general "globe-trotter." Immigrating to the United States as a very young man in the 1880s, de Guerville gained his widest fame as a New York based correspondent and lecturer in the 1890s, before returning to his native France in 1898. In AU JAPON (1904), de Guerville recounts with mostly comical gaze--and perhaps a touch of imagination--his experiences in the Far East during the years 1892 and 1894. As the author himself confesses, "each of us sees things in our own way." After a century, that of Monsieur de Guerville is worth rediscovering.