1 Despite the title of this volume of fewer than one hundred pages by a Japanese professor of English Literature at Shinshu Umniversity Nagano, Japan, there is little new in the volume. It reads like a study guide, proceeding in a systematic reading of passages through the novel, with commentary on key scenes and principal characters. Although the readings are by and large unobjectionable, they retrace largely known grounds. There is a consistent and genteel approval of James and his craft, but little awareness of the acrimonious debate that The Wings of the Dove has occasioned. The novel has been called by some the best of James and by Maxwell Geismar in Henry James and the Jacobites "singular, fantastic, baroque and Byzantine in its values and in its form alike, a silly melodrama." The author's access to criticism on James was largely restricted to some major works on James (Leo Edel is not mentioned), and no access to the periodical literature. These are severe restrictions, and one wonders what motivated this work and who was the intended audience. Still, one stands in awe at a Japanese making his way through James's torturous method, and writing about it in a reasonable, if not always idiomatically correct, way. The linguistic bridges the author traverses, not only across languages so distant from one another but also across James's English and standard English, are formidable. Native speakers are driven to exasperation by James's style and method in his so-called later phase, of which The Wings of the Dove is part. I cannot imagine that James gets better in foreign translation.

2 It is the constant circling about a personage or situation and the deliberate distancing of the reader from direct statement that can try the patience of even the most devoted reader. The first volume of The Wings of the Dove is sheer torture. To be sure, James justified this procedure by an appeal to the complexities of sensibility and consciousness. When he is at his best, his endless circlings can take us to an astonishing labyrinth of delicacies of sensibility and consciousness. James shows us, as an example, how an exquisite aesthetic sensibility, as in the character of Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady, can at the same time, by way of that aesthetic sensibility, be cruel and corrupt. And James also shows us how someone as good, intelligent, and mature as Isabel Archer can be blind to such corruption. It is not that a corrupt person can be, at the same time, both cruel and sensitive to beauty. It is the very sensibility that can be both. In the best of James every understanding is a call to further understanding; every insight grounds for further insight.

3 But this is not so in The Wings of the Dove. Seven hundred pages of circling around a rather simple and sordid situation is an exercise of a method going nowhere. When we abstract the essentials of this drama from the biomass of wordage, not much is left except for a mixture of greed and cruelty expended on a beautiful dying girl. It simply stretches probability or even common sense that Densher would give up the money for the abstract love of a dying and then dead girl. We are never shown in any persuasive way that Densher experiences the emotional changes that are posited about him. Nor is the object of so much analysis and reflection, Millie, ever convincingly presented. Although we are led to believe in the celestial purity of Milly, the purity is stated but not shown. She seems at times merely a necessary proposition in the deadly game of Densher, Kate, and Mrs. Landau. Nor is the "love" of Densher and Kate presented in any convincing way. James was never able to write about love as believable passion. The best he can do here, even though the novel hinges on Milly's love for Densher, is to give us a few polite and choreographed scenes of courtship. We are a half century since the James' "mania" in the sixties and see him now as a writer of some excellent works and some bad works. This is a bad work.

4 I don't see what this small study contributes to the history of criticism on James, and perhaps it was not intended to do so. If, as it seems, the study is intended as a guide for Japanese students in the study of English literature, then it may serve this purpose. We are not told, by way of bibliography or comment, whether there exists other works on James in Japan and how this study modifies or amplifies these works. The volume holds little of use for the English reader, but commentary on how or if James has been received in Japan would have been of interest to English and American readers. We know that he has not been well received in Europe and that, when Russian readers are asked about him, they invariably confuse him with his brother, William James.