New Perspectives on “The War-Prayer” Essays on “The War-Prayer” Mark Twain and Gensai Murai: A Japanese Inspiration for “The War-Prayer” Kevin MAC DONNELL While the probable inuence of various writings and events on Mark Twain’s com- position of “The War-Prayer” can be debated, in at least one instance there is irrefutable evidence that Mark Twain had in his hands a book that likely inuenced his language and imagery, and perhaps even supplied the central theme of his anti-war protest. The book is Gensai Murai’s Meiji romance, Hana, A Daughter Of Japan. Gensai Murai (1863-1927) was a popular and prolic newspaper editor, a descendant of a distinguished samurai family, and author of a massive ctional saga that lled twelve volumes with over 1,200 chapters. In the midst of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, Hana was published in English by the Hochi Shimbun, Murai’s newspaper publisher in Tokyo. It was intended to introduce Murai’s adult ction to American readers, with the explicit hope that it would be followed by more English translations of his works, but only one new translation of his work appeared, in 1905. Hana was printed in Japan, and bound in a tra- ditional Kangxi binding (with six stab-holes instead of the usual four), with three beautiful polychrome illustrations and nine other tinted woodcuts by Suzuki Kason, and housed in a traditional silk folding case with ivory clasps. That same year, one of Murai’s works for young readers, Kibun Daizin, Or, From Shark-Boy To Merchant Prince, was published by The Century Company in New York. Although printed and bound in Japan, the English text of Hana was set in Ronaldson Old Style Monotype, a new type-face rst introduced in 1903 and already put into use by The Century Company (Harper, Houghton-Mifin, MacMillan, and other American publishers were using other older variants of Old Style rather than this new monotype version). While it cannot be veried in Publisher’s Trade- List Annual or the new publications listings in Publisher’s Weekly, it seems probable that the type-setting for Hana was executed by The Century Company, who probably also act-
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