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 year. Their dramatic gesture, the product of the same Confucian training which Mori himself had received, moved him so deeply that the novels he wrote from then on until his death are all panegyrics of the old samurai morality. One of the

novels of his last period bears a preface with his guarantee that every incident related in the book was factually correct. It would be hard to imagine a more complete rejection of the German literary traditions which he had so long admired, but Mori could not forget the lessons he had learned. Even when he was describing some samurai of a hundred years before who had disembowelled himself to