Ó-Yoné e Ko-Haru.

Porto, Renascença Portuguesa, 1923.. FIRST EDITION. 8°, contemporary or near-contemporary maroon half sheep over marbled boards (spine faded), spine gilt with raised bands in five compartments, gilt letter in second compartment, marbled endleaves, top edge rouged, original illustrated wrappers bound in. Halftone portrait of a Japanese woman tipped onto front wrapper. Publisher's mark on title page. In very good to fine condition. Initials "F.L." ("Fernando [?] de [?] Landa" [?] ) stamped in gilt at foot of spine. Frontispiece, 279 pp., (3, 1 blank ll.). *** FIRST EDITION. Wenceslau de Moraes (Lisbon, 1854-Tokushima, 1929) was one of the most important interpreters of Japan to the West, playing a role for the Portuguese similar to that of Lafcadio Hearn (a contemporary) for the English-speaking world. Moraes's works are steeped in orientalism and exoticism. He was a noted translator of haiku, and wrote verse influenced by Symbolism.After studying at the Naval College, Moraes served aboard several warships of the Portuguese Navy. In 1885 he traveled for the first time to Macao. Having settled there, he served as deputy to the captain of the harbor and taught at the Macao Secondary School from its creation in 1894. He also married Vong-Io-Chan (a.k.a. Atchan), a Chinese woman with whom he had two sons, and he established a friendship with the celebrated poet Camilo Pessanha. In 1889 Moraes traveled for the first time to Japan, a country that charmed him, and where he returned several times in the following years on official business. He visited Japan in 1897 with the governor of Macao and was received by the Emperor Meiji. The following year he deserted Atchan and his two sons to move to Japan, where he took up a post as consul in Kobe.Over the next thirty years, Wenceslau de Moraes wrote prolifically, becoming the great Portuguese source of information about the East. He shared his intimate experiences of day-to-day life in Japan with readers in several Portuguese newspapers and magazines. Moraes had a love affair with Ó-Yoné Fukumoto. After she fell ill and died, Moraes renounced his post as consul and moved to Tokushima, her birth place. In the face of growing hostility from the local inhabitants, he began to dress, eat and live like the Japanese. He lived with Ko-Haru, Ó-Yoné's niece, until Ko-Haru's death. The increasingly reclusive Moraes died in Tokushima in 1929. He is honored with a small museum atop Mount Bizan in that town.Renascença Portuguesa was a cultural and civic group founded in 1911 by Teixeira de Pascoaes, Jaime Cortesão, Raúl Proença, António Sérgio, Leonardo Coimbra, Álvaro Pinto, Augusto Casimiro, and others. The group's literary review, Á Aguia, continued publication until 1932. Pascoaes, Proença, and Sérgio soon disagreed on the long-term goals of Renascença Portuguesa, and the movement became the mouthpiece of Saudosismo. The educational influence of the Renascença Portuguesa continued to be felt through its Universidades Populares and hundreds of publications under the Renascença Portuguesa imprint on history, law, economy, literature, etc. On Renascença Portuguesa, see Mário Garcia in Biblos IV, 694.*** Not in Kyoto Nipponalia, which lists other works by the author. Saraiva & Lopes, História da literatura portuguesa (16th ed.) pp. 1023, 1034. See also Álvaro Manuel Machado in Dicionário de literatura portuguesa, p. 325; Maria José Meira in Biblos, III, 937-9; and Dicionário cronológico de autores portugueses, II, 364-6. NUC: MiU, NNU, MH, DLC-P4, InU.