BJ. William Plomer

30. Reviews of Sado (5), 1931.

a. Harwood, H. C. Saturday Review (London) 152 (1931): 359. Harwood finds the value of Plomer’s work in its ‘attempt . . . to describe Young Japan’. In this regard the novel is ‘more serious and . . . sane than any other’ Harwood has seen that addresses the topic.

b. Quennell, Peter (Ap). ‘New Novels’. New Statesman and Nation NS 2 (1931): 442. Quennell notes that Plomer’s writing about Japan ‘never tumbles into the quagmires of the picturesque’, and while ‘few fields are so prolific of absurdities as the social scene in twentieth-century Japan’, and ‘it is easy work—perhaps too easy—picking them out’, Plomer evokes more completely than any writer Quennell has read ‘all that is pathetic’ in the life of young Japanese. Perhaps only readers who had ‘set foot on Japanese soil’ may realise how ‘penetrating’ Plomer’s observations are in Paper Houses (3), and this work is ‘kindlier if not more tolerant’ than most that address the subject.