SOURCE: A review of River Mist and Other Stories, in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, August, 1984, pp. 757-58.

In the following review of River Mist and Other Stories, Fowler takes exception to David Chibbett's critical assessment of Doppo and critiques Chibbett's translations of the author's stories.

How wonderful to have, at last, [River Mist and Other Stories] a book-length collection in English of Kunikida Doppo's works; yet how very disappointing that it is so severely flawed.

Doppo was not an author of the first rank, but he most certainly deserves to be anthologized, even three-quarters of a century after his premature death in 1908. Modern Japanese literature may have begun before Doppo, but few writers were more instrumental than he in setting its scope and tone at the turn of this century. Qualities that we have come to associate with most Japanese fiction—brevity, fatalism, the...