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Chinese and Japanese figures in British and American novels, 1920s

from “The Reader’s Guide,” Conducted by May Lamberton Becker, in The Saturday Review of Literature (May 1, 1926) : 761-762
via google books : link

Paragraphs and even sentences are reformatted in list form, to facilitate reading (and transcription). Titles, that were in quotation marks, are here italicized (and mostly link to hathitrust scans); years of publication are added.
This page may be considered a footnote to the previous two, devoted to the usage of the expression “a something of” in the novels — most of them set in Asia — of Louise Jordan Miln.

Μ. Κ., Iowa City, Ia., is making a study of the tendency in modern fiction to present the yellow race, particularly the Japanese, in an unfavorable light, so that prejudices against them result, and asks for aid in documentation.

The first effect of a preliminary survey of material at hand is surprise at the number of Chinese and Japanese figuring prominently in British and American novels of the last year or two, and the widely differing parts they are made to play.

There are the Californian yellow-peril outcries, Gene Stratton Porter’s Her Father’s Daughter (Doubleday Page, 1921), and Seed of the Sun, by Wallace Irwin (Doran, 1921), that present the Japanese in California as a social as well as economic menace, and Peter B. Kyne’s Pride of Palomar (Cosmopolitan, 1921), in which an easterner gets into a Californian inter-racial mix-up.
There are novels of English or American life among residents in Japan, in which the native appears mainly as background but in which he is almost always treated sympathetically: one of these is Raymond Weaver’s [yes, the Melville scholar] extraordinary psychological study of missionary life in Japan, Black Valley (Viking, 1926; NYTimes review) — here the native comes closer to the reader because he, or more often she, is seen through the eyes of a youth whose whole life has been spent in the Far East.
Another is Lenox Fane’s Legation Street (Little Brown, 1925), which shows the round of social duties and violations of duty, taking the time of a group of ladies and gentlemen gathered in China for diplomatic service. It reminds me of a play by Maurice Baring, His Majesty’s Embassy (Little Brown, 1923); the two together would give a young man a pretty good idea whether he would like to shine in the corps diplomatique.
There are the novels of intermarriage, like those of Louise Jordan Miln, Mr. and Mrs. Sen, and ~~Ruby~~ Ruben and Ivy Sên (Stokes, 1925), the first a story of a true union of individual lives that none the less cannot stand against social and racial pressure and at last kills with homesickness the Chinese husband who has taken his wife back to England. In the second the son and daughter pay spiritually rather than socially for their double, conflicting heritage. In Mrs. Miln’s Feast of Lanterns and In a Shantung Garden (Stokes) the Chinese ladies, drawn with a sympathetic, even affectionate touch, renounce possible personal happiness abroad for fealty to family and nation.
H. W. Kinney’s Broken Butterflies (Little Brown, 1924) are Japanese girls educated in the United States and returning to take up a life in Japan, with which they have been set at variance.
John Paris’s Kimono (Boni, 1922) is written throughout in a tone of sick and passionate disgust; in his Sayonara (Boni, 1924), a quieter novel, the Japanese wife kills herself.
The east-west mixed-marriage question is reasoned upon at length in Arthur Weigall’s The Way of the East (Adelphi, 1924).
Two new books approach the question of assimilation indirectly through biography: John Paris’s Banzai (Boni, 1926) is a study of a real Japanese boy, flying from his country to England; An Immigrant in Japan, by Theodate Geoffrey (Houghton Miffin, 1926) makes the country real as no book of travel could do, for this American woman adopted native customs, learned the language and ate the food of the people with whom for these years she made her home. The book is different from the very title.
Then there are the thrillers that introduce the yellow race as a mysterious element, whether or not it involves crime, as in the novels of Sax Rohmer, notably Yellow Shadows (1926); a new novel by Gene Wright, Yellow Fingers (Lippincott, 1925), the reprint of Earl Bigger’s first-class detective story, Fifty Candles (Bobbs, 1926), the Yu-Chi Stone, by Edmund Snell (Macaulay, 1926), which involves Borneo-Chinese torture, and the supercrook in Edgar Wallace’s The Sinister Man (Small, 1925).
The Chinese priest in John Taintor Foote’s The Number One Boy (Appleton, 1926) sets his psychic powers to work for the happiness of an American officer.
In Mrs. Jay Gelzer’s The Street of a Thousand Delights (McBride, 1921) the Chinese in Melbourne, Australia, are represented rather as sinned against than as sinning, and in the novels and the even finer autobiography, The Wind and the Rain (Doran, 1924), of Thomas Burke, the Chinaman generally gets the best of it in matters of the spirit.
Wang the Ninth, by Putnam Weale (Dodd Mead, 1920) is the story of an almost ideal Chinese youth, told from the native standpoint.
Elizabeth Cooper’s The Heart of O Sono San (Stokes, 1917) is a Japanese companion-piece to her famous My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard (1914), and is meant to give American women an idea of the circumference of a Japanese lady’s interests and occupations.
In the Claws of the Dragon, by G. S. de Morant (Knopf, 1921), a French girl marries a Chinese of high rank, but they can be happy only by their return to Paris.
Then there are the translations, not only the delightful and well beloved Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaki (Houghton Mifflin), but a modern Japanese novel, Toyohiko Kagawa’s Before the Dawn (Doran, 1924), that sold half a million copies in the Far East and depicts an idealistic dreamer.
There are translations from the classics scattered through the beautiful new book about the outer and inner life of China, A Chinese Mirror (Houghton Mifflin), by Florence Ayscough, the collaborator with Amy Lowell in Fir Flower Tablets, Chinese poems in English verse, and in The Inconstancy of Madam Chuang and Other Chinese Stories, translated by E. B. Howell (Stokes,, 1924), will be found some of the tales, vivacious and otherwise, familiar there and here as yet little known, with fine notes.
I cannot see any predominant tendency in all this; the motif seems to be used to serve the immediate purposes of the individual author.

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