YOSHIO MARKINO: A Japanese Artist in Edwardian London, revised edition, by Sammy I. Tsunematsu, preface by Ross S. Kilpatrick. London: The Soseki Museum, 2008, 208 pp. ¥1,850 (paper) Born in 1869, died in 1956, Yoshio Markino, an artist better remembered in England than in Japan, spent much of his life abroad.

Though he had lived in San Francisco, New York, and Paris, it was London that he most loved.

Here, he wrote, nobody shouted at him, nobody spat, nobody threw stones, as they had in San Francisco, perhaps mistaking him for a Chinese. Here he at once knew he had come to a better place because in contrast to his American experiences the customs officers were so pleasant. Indeed, he was later to write, "I felt I had come to paradise in this world, and I was quite melted with comfort."

Particularly, he liked the mists and fogs of the place. "I think London without mists would be like a bride without a trousseau," he once wrote, adding that "I do not feel I could live in any other place but London."