As a reception study this account of Twain in Japan does diligent if selective good service, a well-taken map of translations; editions; and visual illustrations, from book versions to anime, manga and stage productions like the 2004 Tokyo revival of Big River; together with a helpful working bibliography. Although it was Twain's stories which first gave him his Japanese bow in the 1890s, Ishihara's focus falls mainly upon Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer (usually translated as Huckleberry no Boken and Tom Sawyer no Boken). Both, however, are tracked from the 1920s onwards within the overall Japanese-language roster of translations – from “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” through to Twain's speeches, letters and autobiography. There is also a keen eye to elisions and the differences within successive versions.

In this, Twain becomes an especially revealing figure as to Japan's own cultural–political history. That embraces Japanese attitudes to race and slavery, the role of the “I” novel as it became known, and the imaginative impact on key authorship like that of the vernacular and samurai writer Jiro Osaragi; the Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe, who from childhood onwards was drawn to Twain's moral courage; and the popular juvenile novelist Shin Shikata. Ishihara also gives a well-annotated account of how Twain almost disappeared under government censorship against American and British literature during the 1930s and 1940s. In the US occupation which followed there were still not-so-muted worries that Twain's boy-literature might license delinquency, but also a growing welcome for the democratic push behind the writings and even an appreciation of nearly always impossible-to-translate wit and irony.

In this, Ishihara might have gone further, the Twain read in Japan in English as well as Japanese and the extent to which Twain has been understood beyond the sobriquet of regionalist or children's author. Rightly, however, he calls attention to how Japan has given Twain back to the world, notably in the hugely successful anime versions of The Raft Adventures of Huck and Jim (1976) and Tom Sawyer (1980) as hits both in Japan itself and (suitably dubbed or subtitled) across the global media. His study closes with the statistic that by the 1970s there had been more than a hundred translations of Twain, proof positive of continuing attraction. What next would be of timeliest benefit is a study of how Japanese literary-critical critique has come to deal with Twain as Japanese insider as much as outsider.