Book Review

Asia

This is a formidable book. In it, Harry Harootunian engages the Japanese response to modernity. Noting that the modern "Japanese sensibility" was characterized by a "consciousness that oscillated furiously between recognizing the peril of being overcome by modernity and the impossible imperative of overcoming it" (p. x), the author puts his finger on the ideational and ideological reverberations that shook interwar Japan. Although the book's dustjacket displays evocative images of material modernity—an eye-catching, modernist matchbox cover, industrial machinery, staged folk dancing—Harootunian is quick to point out that his book is not "concerned with retrieving the experience of modernity as lived by the Japanese … but rather how that experience was thought about and discussed, and how contemporaries recalled what they lived through" (p. xi). Accordingly, he introduces us to the manifestoes, meditations, and musings on modernity of artists, critics, philosophers, poets, and social scientists, among others. Although it is easy to get lost in the effusive rhetoric and forced logic of some of their writing, and sometimes difficult to follow the thread of Harootunian's highly nuanced interpretations, these meanderings also bring readers to some dramatic vistas of the contested conceptual landscape of interwar Japanese modernity. The book is a challenging and sometimes maddening read, but one that rewards us with a terrifically insightful and poignant evocation of Japan's tortured attempt to come to grips with the modern world into which it was thrust and into which it then threw itself.

. . .