The Breath of the Gods

Yuki, the daughter of a Japanese diplomat, brought up in Washington, comes home to Tokyo on the eve of the war with Russia and must choose between the French attaché Pierre Le Beau and what her country asks of her. Sidney McCall was the pen name of a woman who had lived in Japan and wrote it while the war was still being fought. Fifty-seven plates of war and its waiting, from Munch to Whistler, give the novel's private choices a European backdrop of trenches, hospitals, and maneuver.