Text
and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity
by Maeda Ai
Duke University Press, Durham and London,
2004
408 pp., illus. 7 maps, 6 tables. Trade,
$89.95; paper, $24.90
ISBN: 0-8223-3334-1; ISBN: 0-8223-3346-5.
Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg
andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com
This volume of essays of Maeda Ai, the
Japanese literary and cultural critic,
will bring his work to the attention of
a wider audience. Maeda's essays enquire
into the process of the modernisation
of Japan, which began in the late nineteenth
century. Maeda was a prolific writer and
an avid scholar not only of his own country's
literature and social history but also
of Western theorists from Marx, Baudelaire
and Benjamin to Barthes, Foucault, Bachelard,
Lefebvre, Jakobson, and Derrida.
The 11 essays in this volume are prefaced
by brief introductions by scholars of
Japanese language and literature that
situate the subject and assist the non-specialist
reader. James Fuji's Introduction and
James Sibley's Afterward are also helpful
in introducing Maeda's work to a wider
Western readership concerned with examining
the nature of representation, cultural
studies and, above all, modernity as an
international project. Maeda's essays
are brilliantly perceptive and deal with
subjects as diverse as popular fiction,
women's magazines, visual media, prison
systems and utopias, Japanese literature
and theatre, and maps. His great and recurring
subject is the city, of urban space as
the site of the great international project
of modernity. Maeda seems to have exhaustively
walked the streets of every city he visitedBerlin,
Chicago, Paris, Shanghaiand
above all, Tokyo. Maeda also examines
the process of walking the streets, of
mapping and reading urban spaces. His
analysis centres on the body and the construction
of the ideology of the modern subject.
Maeda is not a mere flaneur but
rather a new kind of ethnographer. His
extensive knowledge of Western critical
theory and the leading cultural critics
of modernism allowed him to distance himself
from his own culture and examine it as
an anthropologist would, while his own
training as a scholar of traditional Japanese
literature and his immersion in his own
culture provided him with a depth of knowledge
rarely found in anthropological studies.
While Maeda's essays are of obvious interest
to students of Japanese language, literature
and contemporary culture, the real significance
of this book is, in my view, its attempt
to locate Maeda's work in a far wider
world. If Maeda was a new kind of ethnographer,
he was also one whose ethnography was
describing a new way of looking at the
study of modernity, and it is in this
context that his work deserves wider recognition
and study. In his Introduction James Fuji
describes how all the essays in this volume
describe Japan's great modernist transformation
as an instance "of what Frederic Jameson
has called a "singular modernity," making
Japan's inflection interchangeable with
modernising experiences found elsewhere
throughout the globe and thus as accessible
as any other instance of the modern to
seekers of the meaning of modernity".