THE THREE BAMBOOS—Robert Standish—Macmillan ($2.75).
"Robert Standish" is a pseudonym for an Englishman about whom the publishers say they know nothing. The Three Bamboos is a novelized version of the history of Japan's famed House of Mitsui (Japanese for "The Three Wells"). It pictures that family as a succession of brilliant, cruel and profoundly devious fanatics, a power in Japan, dedicated for 50 years to a gamble for world conquest.
Standish's House of Fureno begins to rise through the prodigious exertions of Tenjo Fureno, sent by his samurai father to learn the secrets of...
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