THE COLUMBIA ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE, Volume I: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945, edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel, with poetry selections by Amy Vladeck Heinrich and Leith Morton, introduction by J. Thomas Rimer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 864 pp., $49.50 (cloth).

Walter Raleigh (not the famous one but a 19th-century lecturer and critic) said that "an anthology is like all the plums and orange peel picked out of the cake." And so such collections often are.

Not this one, however. It differs from all of its predecessors by including not only the occasional tidbits but also great wide slices of the quoted work itself. It is by far the largest of anthologies of modern Japanese literature. Finished (there are to be two volumes), it will be 2,000 pages long. And it is the most inclusive.

Earlier anthologies -- those of Donald Keene, Ivan Morris, Howard Hibbett, Theodore Goosen, Lawrence Rogers and others -- were circumscribed by their length. These excellent introductions of modern Japanese writing could not include everything the compilers would have wished for. We remain grateful to their work for what it is.