Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender and Status in Edo Japan (review)

In this elegantly written book Laura Nenzi takes her readers on a journey of exploration through the rich culture of travel that developed in Japan over the course of the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). The physical movement of people around the Japanese archipelago was hardly new to the pax Tokugawa, of course, and at various points Nenzi discusses the ways in which earlier travel experiences and, in particular, the poetic record of them, continued to shape the manner in which landscapes were perceived and imagined. Her central concern, however, is with "travel as a conscious sociocultural act, undertaken not out of practical necessity but from the simple desire to break with the ordinary and engage with out-of-the-ordinary space and time" (p. 2). This kind of recreational travel, she notes, became commonplace in Japan only from the seventeenth century and has much to teach us about the broader culture and society of the time.

As Nenzi notes in her introduction, one important point of departure for her work is the concluding chapter of Constantine Vaporis' Breaking Barriers, which provides a lucid overview of the rise of recreational travel and the warrior state's response to it.¹ Nenzi, however, is not so much interested in the state, as in the ways that individual travelers experienced the road. Overall, she argues, recreational travel in the Tokugawa period was not merely about pleasure and fun, it also opened a path to re-creation, offering individuals opportunities for self-assertion and expression outside the strictures of everyday existence. In developing her argument she explores a fascinating range of related topics including the proliferation of maps and the growth of the publishing industry, travel literature and art, religious institutions and pilgrimages, the culture of prostitution, the popularity of "medicinal" visits to hot-springs, and the rise of a commercial economy, as exemplified by the thriving trade in travel souvenirs and "famous local products" (meibutsu) from around the country. Her interest in these topics links Nenzi's work to the growing body of recent English-language literature on the cultural history of the Tokugawa period and readers will find interesting resonances with the work of scholars such as Marcia Yonemoto, Mary Elizabeth Berry, Sarah Thal and Gregory Pflugfelder.² At the same time, however, by keeping a clear focus on the question of travel, Nenzi successfully blends her many findings into a synthesis that is always original, fresh and engaging. She also makes an important contribution to the literature on gender history, devoting a significant part of her book to an examination of the particular experiences of women travelers. After providing an overview in the first chapter of the emergence of a multilayered understanding of space that allowed people to appeal to different logics of movement to justify travel, Nenzi turns in the second chapter to an examination of the obstacles that women travelers in particular faced, most notably the restrictions imposed by the warrior state, and the bans to entry (nyonin kinsei) traditionally maintained by many religious institutions. She goes on to examine the ways in which women were able to routinely circumvent official restrictions, however, and to argue that over the course of the Tokugawa period a combination of "mercy" and "pragmatic financial needs" led many religious institutions to actively encourage female visitors by providing services designed to appeal directly to them. In spite of the formal barriers, then, the picture that Nenzi paints is one of a society in which women from a fairly wide range of social backgrounds could hope to travel recreationally at some point in their lives, a finding that adds another valuable layer of nuance to the old view of the Tokugawa period as a generally dark age for women. As fascinating as Nenzi's discussion of the experiences of women wayfarers is, however, she also demonstrates that the understanding of travel as...