Being an American is, in Henry James's phrase, "a complex fate." The life of Sadakichi Hartmann, characterized as it was by multiple allegiances, was in truth sufficiently complex; yet it was, as H. L. Mencken observed, "thoroughly American." Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born in 1867 (the exact date is unknown though he often said that his birthday was 8 November), on Desima, an island in Nagasaki Harbor, of a German father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, and a Japanese mother, Osada Hartmann. He received his early education in Germany. An "orphan-immigrant" to the United States at age fifteen, Hartmann set about educating himself in the years before World War I to a new life in the New World (he was naturalized in 1894) and also educating his new countrymen in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and the hinterland about the Old World, east and west, eking out a precarious existence as journalist, critic...