The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan by W. Puck Brecher (review)

Jim Morrison was right after all. People are strange. Take early modern Japan. The place was full of oddballs, some of whom parlayed their eccentricity into artistic and literary fame. Let us take eccentricity seriously, W. Puck Brecher urges in The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan, for it serves as a window onto changing artistic and intellectual practices and ideas during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.

The book examines how assertions of strangeness served to situate artists, poets, and intellectuals within their genres, circles of practitioners, and society more generally. It does not look much beyond the world of arts and ideas—that is, it is not a general history of eccentricity and madness in early modern Japan. Although the introduction includes a brief, dutiful review of attempts by psychologists and others to define those concepts, Brecher focuses his analysis exclusively on the cultural history of a set of tropes. That is fine—the book’s expansive subtitle will not deceive many readers—but it does beg the question of how “mad” artists looked to their contemporaries when compared to genuinely mad laypeople.

Brecher’s keywords are ki (畸 or 奇) and kyō (狂)—“eccentricity” and “madness,” respectively. These renderings are appropriate and probably serve about as well as any possible alternatives—imperfectly—to capture the multitude of meanings encompassed by each term. An eccentric (kijin) could be quirky or unconventional; or he could be a real weirdo. Yet a kijin could also be a moral exemplar: in Brecher’s core text, Ban Kōkei’s Kinsei kijinden (Eccentrics of recent times, 1790), paragons of Confucian virtue such as Nakae Tōju (1608–48) and Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714) are “eccentric” because they lived up to a standard few people could even aspire to. Kyō is trickier. In the names of art forms such as kyōgen and kyōka, kyō is comic or farcical—ludic, maybe, but not lunatic. When attached to a person in kyōjin or kyōsha, it could refer to mental imbalance of a sort suggested by “madness.” However, the author offers examples of nominally mad men who seem scarcely to have been unstable at all and of others who marketed themselves by assuming a mad persona: I’m not a crazy person, but I play one in the streets of Edo. Whatever its particular mode of expression, at the core of eccentricity in early modern Japan lay “subjectivities that privilege[d] individuality, emotion, and intuition over conventional behavior” (p. 5).

Almost any cultural figure might be stuffed into the portmanteau of eccentricity. In the realm of aesthetics per se, an eccentric identity could serve as an assertion of an artist’s status as an outsider, amateur, or recluse—even when he was in fact a well-connected professional living in the heart of Kyoto. Eccentricity was not an empty vessel, however: Brecher’s oddballs all laid claim to having at least one foot out of the mainstream. Nakae Tōju, the Confucian moral exemplar, for example, was attracted to Wang Yangming’s thought rather than conventional Zhu Xi Neo-Confucianism. That hardly made him an out-of-control rebel, but it did place him slightly to the heterodox of center.

Inevitably, scholarly discussions of eccentricity in Tokugawa Japan get tied up with questions of politics. Brecher generally expresses discomfort with scholars’ inclination to read a political agenda into assertions of oddness, whereby they see eccentrics stepping outside the political order to protest its constraints. Mostly it was about the art, he argues, particularly in the seventeenth century, when painters and poets self-consciously adopted identities modeled on those of Chinese literati (wenren; J. bunjin), whose amateurism and independence was their defining feature. Nevertheless, Brecher does occasionally see eccentrics as politically engaged, even if their embrace of peculiarity was not a deliberate ploy to cloak dissent in the mantle...