CARMEN BLACKER WAS an outstanding scholar of Japanese language and culture. She had a penetrating eye, a rare descnptive ability and a sensitive understanding ofjapan. Her particular interests werejapanese religion and folklore. Withouther flair and commitment Japanese studies at Cambndge would not have survived.

This book is designed as a tnbute to Carmen's life and accomplishments. It is neither a biography, nor a memoir although it combines elements of both. It presents some of the best of her wn tings about Japan.

Her close fnend and colleague (and latterly husband) Michael Loewe has contnbuted an introduction, which descnbes Carmen's life and career from the development of her interest in Japan as a schoolgirl to her retirement from Cambridge University. As he recounts she continued to visit Japan and to pursue her researches until ill health forced her to cease travelling. Even under such circumstances, she managed to complete a work she had begun over sixty years earlier: this was the translation of Santō Kyōden's Mukashi-Banashi Inazuma-byōshi. published as The Straw Sandak Or the Scroll of the Hundred Crabs.

The first section of the book consists of a biographical memoir of Carmen wntten by Dr James McMullen for the Bntish Academy, of which Carmen was a Fellow, a biographical portrait of her by Professor Peter Komicki published in volume VII of the Japan Society's senes Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits and a personal essay of ‘memones’ by Yokoyama Toshio. Dr James McMullen was one of her outstanding pupils and became a Japanese scholar at Oxford University. Professor Peter Komicki succeeded Richard Bownng as Professor of Japanese at Cambndge and had been a colleague of Carmen at the University.

The next section (PART II), which may be seen as the core of this volume, consists of extracts from the copious diaries, which Carmen kept intermittently throughout her life (the last extracts being from 1992), and of personal accounts of her experiences, which she wrote for various publications The diary extracts have been selected principally for the light which they throw on her sensitive response to her expenences of and in Japan. This section also draws extensively on Carmen's personal accounts of climbing holy mountains in Japan, which are key elements in The Catalpa Bow, her outstanding work dealing with Shamanistic practices in Japan.