Life and career
Grace Edith Marion James grew up in Tokyo in a family that moved between Japanese and British literary circles. Her father Thomas was a British naval officer. Her mother Kate, who published as Mrs T. H. James, told Japanese stories in English for children. Years later Grace acknowledged her mother by name as a source for one of her own best-known tales.
James continued to write about Japan long after childhood. For the Japan Society of London she contributed a paper on fairy tales and folklore in 1933, recollections of Tokyo in 1934, an obituary of Basil Hall Chamberlain in 1935 and a paper on ghost stories in 1936. Her book Japan: Recollections and Impressions gave those early memories a longer form.
Work and ideas
Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales appeared in 1910 with colour plates by Warwick Goble. James’s preface names sources as varied as the Kojiki, the theatre and stories she had been told. For The Matsuyama Mirror, in which a grieving child mistakes her own reflection for her mother, she specifically acknowledged Kate’s earlier telling.
James also created the John and Mary series, adventures in which two children could encounter family experience as well as fiction. John and Mary’s Aunt drew on her own upbringing in Japan. Across these books she wrote at different distances from the same childhood, sometimes recording what she remembered and sometimes giving it to invented characters.
