ISABELLA BIRD AND UNBEATEN TRACKS INJAPAN

ISABELLA BIRD, WHO was born in Boroughbridge in Yorkshire in 1831 and died on 7 October 1904 in Edinburgh, left her mark on all the continents except South America in the years between 1854 and 1901 and merits more attention than any other woman traveller in history. She belongs at the pinnacle of travel history, and not just among female travellers, by virtue of the long time-span of her journeys, the broad swathe of territory they covered and the huge amount of written and other work she produced about them. Her forthright opinions and the immediacy of her descriptions combine to transport the twenty-first century reader to the site of her journeys with a remarkable degree of contemporary appeal, borne out by the increasing tendency there has been to reissue the travelogues of many travellers since the 1970s. There are a considerable number of titles to choose from, it is true, but the numerous reproductions of Bird's books is enough to attract attention in itself. Representative among these are not just Unbeaten Tracks in Japan but other works such as Six Months in the Sandwich Islands and A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. As far as I could ascertain, more than forty publishers have reissued Unbeaten Tracks in Japan since 1971.

THE THREE REASONS FOR PUBLISHING THIS BOOK

Why then have we published this book? There are three reasons, the first of which is that it has features absent from previous reissues that give it its own gloss; it is not just a reproduction of the original. I believe its value has been enhanced by the insertion of a large number of my translators notes to Birds text, and also through the a translation (suitably edited for an English-speaking readership) of the detailed Commentary that accompanied‘Unbeaten Tracks in Japan - A New Translation’ (Heibonsha, 2014, ‘The New Translation’when referred to here).

But no matter how accurate a translation into Japanese of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan is, that on its own does not adequately convey to the reader the meaning latent in the original, or its topicality, for it is a work for which the numerous detailed notes that accompanied my‘Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: the Complete Translation’ and the equally numerous but short notes that augmented the text are essential.