Jiro Osaragi's Homecoming, originally published in 1950 as kiyko, was the first contemporary Japanese novel to be transleted into English after World War II. Against a background of often confrontational and coincidental meetings and partings, fleeting joys and regrets, initially in Singapore and than Japan, it describes the author's anger at the trival attidutes that surfaced after the war through a gallery of magnificent contenporary portraits: Kyogo, whose exile and Europeanization have made him yearn for old-fashioned ways; Professor Oki, an oppertunitic and hypocritical bureaucrat shaped by war and its aftermath; Saeko, the adventuress, and her husband, the ineffactualson of an aristocratic family; Otane, his passive mistress, the prototype of the geisha; Admiral Ushigi, who represents the attitudes of former offiser toword new times in Japan; Toshi, yhe slick undergraduate who justifies his "democratis" egotims with glib argument; and Yukichi, the repository of Japan's hope. The novel is an honest portrayalof postwar Japanese feelings and characteristic from a purely internal point of view.