CARMEN WAS AN acute observer of detail — whatever the subject, but especially Nature and people — which is evident throughout her writings. She relished language, had a natural instinct for the bon mot and displayed her fine descriptive powers in whatever she wrote, as can be seen in what is published in this volume, not least in her diary entnes. Underpinning this was a great sensitivity, a wonderful and sometimes ‘wicked’ sense of humour — perhaps on occasion with a certain Chaucerian gloss — combined with an incisive mind, and an instinctive warmth and empathy. These qualities were also invanably echoed in her great gift of delivering the spoken word in what always seemed an effortless musicality in her delightful mellifluous voice, that would engage, entertain and sometimes entrance her audience.

Below are a random selection of quotations from her diary that speak to her life and literary legacy:

1937. WRITING ON BABA TATSUI

Perhaps I am one of the last people to have made serious use of Baba's Grammar. On rereading it after so many years, I feel for it a flow of gratitude and affection. I realize now that I understood almost nothing of what it had to teach, but it came to me as an amulet, a talisman which promised marvels in the years to come. And as an amulet it has proved wonderfully efficacious. Little did I dream, when I first held the maroon book in my hand, of the joys, the treasures, the ennchment of my life which were to come to me through the study of Japanese.

1945. ON A BUS WITH T.S. ELIOT

1951. AT KEIŌ UNIVERSITY LIBRARY