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Reviewed by:
  • Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan
  • Ronald P. Toby (bio)
Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan. By Laura Nenzi . University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2008. xi, 260 pages. $57.00.

Laura Nenzi's insightfully argued, elegantly written new book surveys the panorama of what she so aptly terms "recreational travel" in early modern Japan from an interdisciplinary vantage point where the literature of space and movement, on the one hand, intersects with that of gender and identity, on the other. While hers is but the latest in the growing body of scholarship on early modern travel, 1 I have no fear that it will be lost in the crowd, for both the exceptional breadth of Nenzi's empirical research and her theoretical and methodological range distinguish the monograph as a harbinger of [End Page 405] what one hopes will be a new level of sophistication in the history of space, place, and travel in early modern Japan. As a bonus, Nenzi's book is simply a delight to read-and reread.

Nenzi's approach differs significantly from other recent contributions. In contrast to Marcia Yonemoto and Mary Elizabeth Berry, 2 both of whom focus closely on a few selected cartographic, verbal, and visual texts they take to be paradigmatic, Nenzi has read more widely across the landscape of Edo-period travel writings, engaging empiricists and poets, officials and pilgrims, women and men. She attends closely to the legal and customary framework of travel, which is not part of Yonemoto's or Berry's brief. The matrices of law and custom are particularly important to Nenzi's larger argument, where she deploys them to dissect the discourses of gender and power that unfold along the road and the bodies of travelers as they interact with the crisscross mesh of national and local, sacred and secular authority that combine to govern human movement across the landscape.

For Nenzi, gender is as much a part of the geography of travel as the inns, checkpoints, and pilgrimage sites lining the highways and byways of early modern Japan. Where the voices we had heretofore heard in the literature on early modern travel-in both monographs such as Constantine Vaporis's Tour of Duty and translations of contemporary travel writing-were almost always male, 3 Nenzi attends to voices in a higher register as well. Her approach amplifies our understanding of both "gender" and "travel" across the board, listening to the hitherto muffled voices of women's and men's experience of the road and examining the wide variety of unofficial travel and travelers.

We might roughly summarize the authorities' default position on popular travel-honored largely in the breach-by saying that, absent a compelling reason to travel and the documents to prove it, no one, woman or man, ought ever leave home. But a woman who took to the road, Nenzi shows, found herself particularly challenged by "the identification of female immobility with [public] order [which] emanated from a central political discourse" [End Page 406] (p. 51). Both the bakufu and the domains, she shows, went to great lengths to discourage women's travel. Akita domain proclaimed in 1806 that "under no circumstances are women permitted to leave the province" (p. 52). When women did travel, they were far more likely than men to be harassed, delayed, turned back, or even arrested at the checkpoint barriers that bestrode every major highway, and, ironically, the higher a woman's status, the more punctilious-and degrading-her treatment at the barriers.

Nenzi's argument is steeped in the anthropology of travel, especially the work of Norman Graebner and Victor Turner, and to good effect. But in addition to being richly textured, extensively researched, and beautifully written, Excursions in Identity is also the most thoroughly delightful monograph I have read in many years-not just original and important, it is simply fun to read. And it is not just for historians, Edo specialists, or, for that matter, "Japan" specialists. It will be equally compelling reading for anthropologists, literary scholars, and students of gender, travel, and religions...

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