SOURCE: A review of 'The American Diary of a Japanese Girl ', in The Bookman, January, 1913, p. 240.

In the following essay, a review of The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, a critic observes that the book's supposedly naive narrator possesses a knowledge of western culture on a level with Noguchi's own.

Mr. Noguchi, the poet, we have long admired; he is one of the two Japanese authors who have captivated us in the net of their imperfect, very skilfully imperfect, English. He seemed to us before to be a Japanese butterfly which had strayed somehow into a Hebridean sunset and had grown deliciously intoxicated. At the same time he strayed no more out of himself than did Shelley, and we apprehended that in attempting to depict a Japanese girl on whose untutored mind America thrusts itself [in The American Diary of a Japanese Girl], Mr. Noguchi would...