HELEN WADDELL'S WRITINGS FROM JAPAN, edited and introduced by David Burleigh. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005, 184 pages, with b/w illustrations, 42.50 euros (cloth), 25 euros (paper).

Now famous as a medieval savant, author of "The Wandering Scholars" and "Medieval Latin Lyrics," Helen Waddell (1889-1965) was born in Japan and her first writings were about this country. The well-known later works have obscured these early beginnings, but they remained important to the author -- all that was left of a strange and satisfying childhood.

Later she was to say that "the richest thing in my life has been Japan." She added a qualifying phrase ("outside books, I mean"), but the affection for the country was defining. When she was 3 and suffering from typhoid, her father, it is said, was only able to revive his infant daughter by speaking to her in Japanese.

This he was able to do because he was a Presbyterian minister and quite used to preaching in the local language. There is a report of his doing so in Ueno Park, across town from where the Waddells then lived. One of the gathered Japanese said: "His grammar is not correct. No foreigner can use properly the particles in Japanese grammar." "But," said his companion, "he is very honest. Wait a little, let us hear him longer." In an unpublished autobiographical essay, Helen called her father "the vicar of Wakefield turned Chinese scholar."

The last of 10 children, Helen was born in the year that saw both the promulgation of a new constitution and the completion of the railway link between Tokyo and Kyoto. She was thus in a good position to witness the various trials of modernity in her adopted country.

This she may have done but, if so, left no record of it. As befits a future medieval scholar, her interest was entirely in the old Japan she had seen vanishing. She is remembered in her native country, Ireland, as "the last of the romantics" and there is reason for this.

Her writings about Japan, all completed in the 1910s, long before her later works, consist of five autobiographical stories (one incomplete), three tales about legendary events, the two-act play made from one of these, and two literary essays -- all of them about a vanished past.

That the play is named "The Spoiled Buddha" indicates the degree to which the past is regretted. Its single performance (at the Belfast Opera House in 1915) was, however, remembered for other reasons. "The setting was very artistic and beautiful and the costumes were good and the acting was fearfully bad." The actor playing the Buddha (one of Helen's brothers) brought "great dignity" to his part, but the actor playing one of the other deities upset the critics, it is said, by playing the part with an Irish brogue.

These early writings are informed by the author's readings in Isabella Bird, Basil Hall Chamberlain and Lafcadio Hearn -- she includes her own version of the latter's version of the peony-lantern ghost story. Also influencing these early writings are such romantic favorites as Theophile Gautier. In these stories Waddell joins those who penned that symbolist genre that Hearn had approved of as filled with a "beautiful weirdness."

The autobiographical stories offer a reason for this romantic recreation. All of them are about Helen and a favorite brother, Billy -- four years older, an attractive and unfortunate person, later lost at sea. The stories constitute an effort to recreate that lost idyll when she and he were together in Japan -- one of them even recasts them as twins.

This will to validate a childhood is a noble one, especially when emotion compels it. (In a later letter Helen remembers Billy. He was lovable, but "there was always a sort of half-whimsical tragedy about his gaiety. He had an ugly mouth -- and when he smiled it took the dearest curve I know.") This love created these moving evocations of the life of a little girl in the old Tokyo more than a hundred years ago.

That we now know so much about it and about Helen Waddell herself is entirely thanks to David Burleigh, a name familiar to readers of this page, whose meticulous labors have uncovered not only this trove itself but all of the circumstances under which it was written. The 70-page introduction is a model of erudite endeavor, and from it we again see the loving, hoping child who turned into the great scholar we all know.

Burleigh is able also to show us how this early life in Japan enriched not only the writer but her work as well. He finds Billy in the brilliant but debauched Archpoet of "The Wandering Scholars," and in that wayward cleric, the hero of her only novel "Peter Abelard." He shows us that "the central impulse of her whole creative output may have derived from her concern with Billy." And with it the lost beauty of childhood in a vanished Japan.