Many people recognise the octagonal shaped logo on the red capped bottle of Kikkoman's naturally brewed soy sauce, but few realise that this company is much more diverse than just condiments. Along with soy sauce (which has been in production with this family since 1630), this Japanese business makes Del Monte foods in the Pacific Rim under the name Nippon Del Monte. Then, there are the various soy sauce based condiments such as teriyaki sauce and oyster sauce used to make Oriental foods. Kikkoman has their own western style wine (Mann's wines) as well.

However, the fastest growing segment of the company is the biotechnology section. It is here that part of the ancient technology of bacteria (which were used in soy sauce fermentation) is being put to use in a modern context for such things as pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. Gene splicing technologies are being used to make new hybrid plants such as the Oretachi orange, which will be able to grow in cooler climates.

The story of Kikkoman began in the 1600's, when a woman named Shige Maki escaped from a slaughter in Osaka castle with her young son. The victorious shogun hunted for them, but they became farmers in Noda where they eventually started brewing soy sauce, or shoyu. They changed their names to Mogi and the same family now runs the company to this day. The current president, Yuzaburo Mogi, was the man behind the idea of building the first fully running Japanese plant on US soil.

Others in the company were sceptical because many Americans had never heard of soy sauce, but the demand for it kept rising and the costs of shipping wheat and soybeans from America to Japan was high. In 1972, the American factory became a reality in Walworth, Wisconsin. The local farmers in the area were upset that prime farming land was being used for a factory, but the company allowed farmers to rent pieces of it for crops. Some people were concerned about smells and pollution, but the production of soy sauce requires clean air and water and the smell of roasting wheat is not offensive. Kikkoman has proven to be a great corporate neighbour.

The company has a mission statement that is seventy years old but unlike many of its American counterparts, Kikkoman takes their company philosophy more seriously than just a paper pinned up on the wall. The basis of the statement is that the company should have respect for people and other living things. The statement is also the way the members of the Mogi family are expected to live their lives.

Kikkoman is an innovative company as well as a traditional one and this book tells the story well. There is a lot of information about soy sauce, marketing techniques, and Japanese culture and business practices. The author has got his information from many sources besides Kikkoman and Yuzaburo Mogi. The story of this diverse and adaptable company is so fascinating that anyone would enjoy reading it.

This is the third volume to appear in an edition that will be the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation of all of Nietzsche's work. Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray, was published in 1995; Volume 3: Human, All Too Human (I), translated by Gary Handwerk, was published in 1997. The edition is a new English translation, by various hands, of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition, which has been acclaimed as one of the most important works of scholarship in the humanities in the last half century.

The present volume provides for the first time English translations of all of Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks from the summer of 1872 to the end of 1874. The major works published in this period were the first three Unfashionable Observations: "David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer," "On the Utility and Liability of History for Life," and "Schopenhauer as Educator." Translations of the preliminary notes for these pieces are coordinated with the translations of the published texts printed in Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations.

The content of these notebooks goes far beyond the notes and plans for published and unpublished Unfashionable Observations, encompassing numerous sketches related to Nietzsche's major philological project from this period, a book on the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers. The ideas that emerged from Nietzsche's deliberations on these early Greek thinkers are absolutely central to his thought from this period and contribute in significant ways to the development of several of his major themes: the role of the philosopher vis-a-vis his age and the surrounding culture; the relationships among philosophy, art, and culture; the metaphorical nature of language and its relationship to knowledge; the unmasking of the modern drive for absolute "truth" as a palliative against the horror of existence; and Nietzsche's "unfashionable" attack on modern science and modern culture, especially on the Germany of the Bismarck Reich. These notebooks represent important transitional documents in Nietzsche's intellectual development, marking, among other things, the shift away from philological studies toward unabashed cultural criticism.

Richard T. Gray is Professor of German at the University of Washington. Among his publications is Stations of the Divided Subject: Contestation and Ideological Legitimation in German Bourgeois Literature, 1770-1912 (Stanford, 1995).