Postmodernism is a publisher's dream. Copy out "Don Quixote" verbatim and you get a cultural reinterpretation, joked Jorge Luis Borges; give an old book a new cover and you get a tribal reclamation, proclaim the editors of this Race in the Americas imprint.
The result -- doctoral theses aside -- is a new edition of Onoto Watanna's "Miss Nume of Japan." It is a pretty little fin-de-siecle romance about an American encounter with the Orient, filled of course with plenty of ugly racial stereotyping.
A lovely coquette, Cleo Ballard, amuses herself on the long voyage out to join her fiance, the U.S. consul in Kyoto, by flirting mischievously with Harvard-educated Orito Takashima.