Harvard East Asian Monographs, 400. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2017. xv, 315 pp. (B&W photos, coloured photos, illustrations.) US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-97516-3.
Aesthetic Life is a volume with an attractive front cover that features a painting of a traditionally clad Japanese woman, an “illustrated masterpiece” by renowned Nihonga artist, Kaburaki Kiyokata. Depicting Miya, the female protagonist of Konjiki yasha (The Gold Demon), a novel serialized by Ozaki Kōyō from 1897 to 1902, the front cover of Aesthetic Life conjoins modern Japanese art and modern Japanese literature in an image that reflects the two disciplinary areas through which the author will develop the focal point of her text: the bijin, or beautiful woman whose glamour came to embody a “meta-aesthetic” (18) that helped to establish the genre, bijin-ga, or paintings of beautiful women, and also contributed to the development and construction of modern Japanese aesthetics. This is a lot to cover, and Aesthetic Life casts a wide net, bringing together a substantial array of exemplary material from both the visual and literary fields to illustrate the significance of this iconic figure as it was brought into prominence in Meiji Japan (1868–1912). Encompassing painting, woodblock prints, lithographs, photographs, and illustrations as well as literary and critical texts that portray and describe the bijin, Aesthetic Life provides a fulsome view of this figure and its role in the modernization of Japanese art and aesthetics. As can be surmised from the cover, the text itself is also a work of art, with a selection of excellent reproductions, intriguing chapter frontispieces, and glossy pages. Clearly, as the lengthy acknowledgment section reveals, Aesthetic Life is the result of extended and extensive scholarly research into the formation of the image of the bijin in modern Japanese art.
The volume consists of an introduction, seven chapters, and a coda. As the introduction informs us, the subsequent chapters seek “to examine the origins of the bijin that emerged in the final years of the Meiji period as the subject of the Nihonga painting genre of bijinga” (19). A brief overview of each chapter will indicate the trajectory of the volume as it delineates the emergence of this idealized figure. Chapter 1, “All Too Aesthetically: The Bijin in the Era of Japonisme,” traces the representation of the beautiful Japanese woman to nineteenth-century encounters with Western art and aesthetics, exploring cultural difference as viewed by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (albeit from the later Taishō period), Lafcadio Hearn, and other Japanese and Western commentators. Chapter 2, “‘Fair Japan’: Art, War, and the Bijin at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904,” takes up the notion of “aesthetic warfare” based on a lecture given by art historian Okakura Kakuzō at the fair and shows how Japan sought to utilize art and artworks featuring the bijin as a means of exhibiting its position as a powerful and civilized nation during the time of the Russo-Japanese War. In chapter 3, “True Bijin: The Debate on Truth and Beauty,” the concept of beauty is examined with regard to the bijin, who was deemed to possess an artificial beauty which, when juxtaposed against the “natural” beauty esteemed by the West, “posed a challenge to Western aesthetic ideals” (20).
Chapter 4, “Bijin Graphic: Illustrated Magazines and the Popular Ideology of Beauty,” moves into the domain of popular culture, where women’s magazines of the times offered ordinary women advice on how to cultivate the appearance of the bijin while male commentators commented on the bijin figure as a “natural resource or asset,” and posited the beautiful Japanese woman as a “national treasure” (122). Chapter 5, “‘Short-Lived Beauty’: Illustration and the Bijin Heroines of Literary Realism,” delves into two Meiji novels, Ozaki Kōyō’s The Gold Demon, and The Cuckoo (Hototogisu, 1899) by Tokutomi Roka. In these texts the demand for realism is seen as paramount, resulting in the deployment of less visual imagery in descriptions of female beauty and also less demand for accompanying illustrations, thereby allowing the Nihonga genre of bijinga to come into its own. Similar to the previous chapter, chapter 6, “Living Works of Art: Sōseki’s Aesthetic Heroines,” examines two novels, The Three-Cornered World (Kusamakura, 1906) and Sanshirō (1908). This chapter considers these works through analyses of the experiences of the male protagonists in their associations with bijin figures, leading to the formulation of particular aesthetic positions. In the former, the male painter protagonist comes to understand beauty through the mediation of the bijin figure, while in the latter, the male protagonist acquires maturity by becoming an interpreter of modernity through his understanding of the bijin as artwork. Chapter 7, “Bijinga: The Nihonga Genre and the Fashioning of Material Beauty,” returns to the focus on the bijin as a subject of Nihonga painting, exploring the costumes, styles, and trends that marked the bijin as a modern idealization of the feminine in contrast to the nude female figure in yōga, or Western-style painting. In the Coda, the word bijin is reconsidered in its association with the neologisms bijutsu (modern Japanese art) and bigaku (aesthetics), thereby suggesting further possibilities for interpretation of this figure.
While Aesthetic Life seems at times to acknowledge the bijin figure as a commodified object and an elaborate construction of masculine desire, a more informed and sustained discussion of these contexts would greatly enhance this volume. Nonetheless, Aesthetic Life offers a novel interpretation of modern Japanese art history by combining the study of art history, aesthetics, and literary text and is likely to be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese art and art history, particularly those focusing on japonisme, as well as others engaged in Japanese studies more broadly.
Janice Brown
University of Colorado, Boulder