Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. ix, 263 pp. (Figures, maps, tables.) US$48.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3957-4.
This is a fascinating and illuminating account of the travails of a poet, prognosticator, and educator from rural Japan who was compelled by cosmic signs and rational analysis of contemporary events towards extraordinary political activism at a crucial moment towards the end of the Tokugawa (1600–1868) era. The author laudably nuances both our understandings of women’s roles in late Tokugawa loyalism, and rural commoners’ contributions to late Tokugawa ideology and society (3-4).
One of Nenzi’s principal aims is to locate the story of one woman, Kurosawa Tokiko, in the broader context of political and ideological developments in the latter half of nineteenth-century Japan. She intricately weaves Tokiko’s story into discussions of broader themes—such as the negotiation of gender norms and expectations, political activism, expressions of loyalty, and dissent—at a tumultuous moment in modern Japanese history: the fall of the Tokugawa military government and installation of a young emperor as national sovereign.
The book comprises three parts organized around Tokiko’s story, beginning with a framing of organizing principles of the book, including the importance of a specific locale (a village in Mito domain) and connections beyond it. The thread throughout the first and second parts is the analogy of a bird’s flight outlined in the introduction. A second analogy—that of a theatrical performance—is introduced in the second part, which treats Tokiko’s decision to deliver in person an appeal to the emperor in Kyoto, and her journey from Mito that involved illicit travel and covert assistance along the way from people connected by poetry and other networks. The third part treats the telling of Tokiko’s story, both by herself and, after her death, by others. In this section, Nenzi cogently demonstrates that Tokiko’s story lent itself to reconstruction by local officials, memorialists, biographers, novelists, cinematographers, illustrators, and women’s magazine editors, and that the resultant versions reflected particular contemporary political purposes. The historiographical sensitivity that leads Nenzi to refer to the work of other scholars of Japanese history is here carefully deployed to elucidate a multiplicity of accounts spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Kurosawa Tokiko is a gem of a find: as a well-educated and connected poet, not only did she leave ample documentary evidence from which her story could be reconstructed but also she seems to have been a remarkably self-conscious and confident individual. How was it that she determined that she had a role to play in national events? Nenzi is adamant that Tokiko should not be seen as representative of rural women loyalists in the bakumatsu era (1853–1868), comparing her to other women who have attracted scholarly attention. She repeatedly reminds the reader why her story is meaningful—her deployment of divination, encounters with ghosts and appeals to cosmic forces—but this reader would also have appreciated some more direct consideration of what underpinned Tokiko’s self-assuredness and, more broadly, what exceptional figures tell us about particular moments of time. The absence of such a discussion is surprising in view of the emphasis on Tokiko’s exceptional characteristics by historians and local officials when reconstructing her story in the latter half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century.
Nenzi’s argument about macro- and micro-history is challenging: How do historians ascribe significance to ordinary people, especially at times of radical or revolutionary change? A useful summation of the lessons to be drawn about locating the ordinary individual in “large-scale history,” and a statement on the significance of Tokiko’s story (201) is provided in the conclusion.
Nenzi employs several analogies throughout the book to explain Tokiko’s actions: Tokiko is at times a nesting bird or one in flight, an aspiring playwright, an actor in a theatrical performance. Nenzi seems particularly taken with the idea of performance, variously referring to theatrical and cinematic performances and scripts, spotlights, backdrops, extras, and main actors, and raises significant historical questions such as: How should historians understand the self-consciousness of individual historical figures at what are, in retrospect, particularly significant moments in time?
The analysis is creative but not entirely convincing in places. Nenzi interprets in Tokiko’s creative projects a proprietary concern with her own story and historical legacy, without providing substantive supporting evidence that Tokiko was concerned about her place in history. That Tokiko saw her journey to Kyoto as a pivotal event in her story is a recurring theme in an exegesis of her memoires and poetry (chapter 5), and the basis for a lengthy forensic analysis of the staged self-portrait that is reproduced on the front cover (chapter 8). Perhaps echoing Tokiko, Nenzi also reads significance into coincidence, describing the fact that Tokiko is cross-examined by authorities at about the same time as better-known male loyalists as “a remarkable instance of an extra sharing the spotlight with some of the lead historical actors” (121). Nenzi attributes keen awareness of the nature of political debate and change to her protagonist, and a tenacious determination to negotiate this change in her own favour, while also strategically protesting her insignificance on occasion: Tokiko “reinvented her role as a pivot between community and cosmic forces, between the small and the large scale, in the wake of the 1864 Mito civil war” (120).
The multiple interpretative layers that give so much texture to Nenzi’s account of a complex persona become in some places burdensome. A careful editor may have recommended a judicious selection where multiple analogies overlap, as well as ameliorated occasional inconsistencies in translated poetry (for example, the last line of the first poem on page 132 “yama ni hairu hito” is translated as “go deep into the mountain” but immediately below is described as an allusion to the Shugendō practitioners who “enter the mountains”).
The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko is not readily accessible for readers without a basic understanding of the national political developments of mid-nineteenth-century Japan but a careful reading will reward anyone interested in fringe political activism and identity construction (gender, local, national) at a critical juncture in the modern history of an important nation-state.
Vanessa B. Ward
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
pp. 667-669