Review: Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa, Japan and Japonisme in Late Nineteenth Century Literature (Routledge, 2025)

Abstract

Japan and Japonisme in Late Nineteenth Century Literature draws on diverse literary genres – ‘the French novel, the modernist novella in proximity to the German Bildungsroman or the Anglo-Saxon short or ghost story’[i] – to explore how the ‘poetic aestheticization’ of Japan played a crucial role within ‘an “eclectic” adoption of modernity’ in fin-de-siècle literature both from Japan and the West (p. 1, p. 6). Following in the footsteps of Japanese studies scholars such as Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams (Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature, 2006), Fukuzawa argues that a ‘mutual process of exoticism and autoexoticism’ shaped ‘the transnational modernization process in Meiji Japan (1868-1912)’ (p. 2). This work is therefore a valuable addition to the trend, carried by scholars such as Stefano Evangelista and Jennifer Yee, approaching Japonisme and exoticism as multipolar phenomena at the intersection of discourses on colonialism, modernity, and self-identity.

[i] Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa, Japan and Japonisme in Late Nineteenth Century Literature (Routledge, 2025), p. 212. All subsequent references are provided inline.