Musashino in Tuscany: Japanese Overseas Travel Literature, 1860-1912 (review)

From the late Tokugawa period through the Meiji era Japanese traveled abroad, whether to Europe, the United States, or other Asian countries, in steadily increasing numbers. Most of these travelers were male. Some went, or were sent, as students. Others were attached to government missions, and many went as independent travelers. Naturally, many kept some kind of record of their trip, sketchy or detailed, prosaic or poetic, personal or public. Susanna Fessler focuses on those Japanese travelers to Asia and the West between 1860 and 1912 who produced "literary" accounts of their travels, and she is particularly interested in those records that extended and adapted the Japanese literary tradition of the travelogue, kikōbungaku, whose prime examples include poems from the Man'yōshū, Ki no Tsurayuki's Tosa Diary, and Bashō's Oku no hosomichi.

The best of the earlier Japanese kikōbungaku was characterized by allusions to uta-makura, "poetic pillows," or expressions laden with imagery and emotion related to specific famous sites, meisho. Writers from the poets of the Man'yōshū in the eighth century to Bashō and other traveling poets in the Tokugawa period used and reused such utamakura, and some late Tokugawa and Meiji Japanese travelers to Asia and the West incorporated analogous features in their accounts. Other aspects of traditional/ domestic Japanese travel literature that appear in these later literary reports of foreign countries include nostalgia and feelings of loneliness and separation from one's home (ryoshū). The hardships of travel at any time could also induce feelings of travel weariness, melancholy, or tedium (ryojō).

Fessler does not claim to present a comprehensive study of all Japanese travelogues to the West written between 1860 and 1912. Her goal is to trace overseas travel writing as a developing literary genre and identify significant trends within it. Her ultimate criterion for selection and judgment is literary sensibility-the lyrical and poetic qualities of the work and its sensitivity to nature. She makes it clear at the outset that she is not interested in accounts of overseas travel that are merely descriptive, such as those in Fukuzawa Yukichi's State of the West (Seiyō jijō) or the diaries of government officials who participated in diplomatic missions to the West in quest of treaty revision or Western technology. For Fessler, the tradition of kikōbungaku is only achieved in a Western context when travelers from Japan, looking beyond Western technology and their own immediate personal experiences, begin to incorporate the attentiveness to nature and the natural landscape that was such a feature of traditional kikōbungaku and to invest famous foreign locations, meisho, such as the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, with their own distinctive utamakura.

After an introductory chapter on the history of travel and the aesthetics of travel writing in Japan, Fessler devotes the three following chapters to an analysis of early foreign travelogues of the late Tokugawa-early Meiji era (1860-1880), transitional travelogues of mid-Meiji (1880-1900), and mature literary travelogues of 1ate Meiji (1900-1912). In these she traces the growing extension and sophistication in the application of the kikōbungaku tradition. She introduces more than one hundred travelogues and analyzes in some detail the writings of sixteen travelers, from the student Nakai Hiroshi (Ōshū), who went from Yokohama to Paris in 1866, to Anesaki Masaharu, the scholar of philosophy and world religions, who made several extended visits to Europe after 1900. Some of the early travelogue authors she discusses, such as Nakai and Nomura Fumio, for instance, are now all but forgotten. Others, including Shibusawa Eiichi, Mori Ōgai, Tokutomi Roka, and Nagai Kafū, are well-known Meiji personalities and literary figures.

In her quest for Japanese travelers' extension of the kikōbungaku tradition to foreign lands, Fessler begins by surveying accounts by the late Tokugawa shipwrecked travelers Daikokuya Kōdayū, Hamada Hikozō, and John Manjirō and the explorer Mamiya Rinzō. These men all produced accounts of their travels and...