Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan, and: The Tōkaidō Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (review)

As a scholarly destination, the journey has evidently arrived. No longer relegated to magazine and memoir, travel has been reconfigured as a subject of formal analysis in the humanities, and a central one at that. Heeding James Clifford's call to turn our collective gaze from roots to routes, a generation of critics has recast culture as a thing in motion, knowledge as the product of an itinerary.¹ The volumes under review partake of this trend, bringing Japanese travel history into a global conversation.

Laura Nenzi and Jilly Traganou are European scholars who bring a cosmopolitan sensibility to bear on the question of sojourning. Both situate themselves at the interstices of history, literature, and the visual arts, where this interdisciplinary subfield has swelled over the past decade. And both draw on the idiom of cultural studies, citing Caren Kaplan, Michel de Certeau, and Dean MacCannell as formative influences. Identity, imagination, discipline, and subversion are the key conceptual categories through which both authors interpret mobility in the Japanese past. For all that they share in background and theoretical vocabulary, however, each author formulates her analytical object in a personal way, yielding distinctive and divergent accounts.

What interests Laura Nenzi is the transgressive and transforma-tive potential of travel. In a society where status and gender hierarchies largely determined a person's place, she argues, wayfarers found a rare freedom to escape from everyday life; during the Edo era, the road was a special place where commoners and women could imagine and construct alternative identities for themselves. Jilly Traganou paints a different picture. Although she too at times describes the roadways of the Tokugawa era as a "space of play and release" (p. 1), her emphasis lies more on the collective imagination, and her vision is darker. Convinced that the idea of looking through one's own eyes is in itself a modern conceit, Traganou takes as her subject not the individual traveler but "the social subjectivities that are involved in the business of traveling" (p. 7). From her perspective, people are as much products of discourse as producers of it; the fleeting freedoms of the road are largely illusory; and the regulatory apparatus is never far from view.

This contrast colors everything else about these two books, beginning with their source-base. Both authors make deft use of maps and aerial views to explain the infrastructure of Tokugawa travel, and both books unfold as genre studies. But the balance of genres considered is very different. Nenzi's account of travel as self-discovery proceeds primarily through personal diaries—a logical choice, since the blank page offered a privileged place for wayfarers to rewrite their lives and recast their identities. Only in the last part of the book, where she turns to the commercialized milieu of late Edo, does Nenzi engage extensively with printed sources (fiction, guidebooks, and board games). By contrast, Traganou's focus on the social imaginary leads her into print matter from the start.

If each author has a distinctive archival locus, each also brings a different strength to the topic of travel. Jilly Traganou, who trained in architecture and design, is most in her element with visual material. The eighty images assembled for The Tōkaidō Road—nearly half of them reprinted in color—appear not as illustrations but as evidence. Thus, when Traganou wants to show that mobility was a "departure from the feudal condition" (p. 6), she makes her case by contrasting government drawings of the Tōkaidō with their commercial counterparts. Official maps and views depict the Tokugawa turnpike as a stark landscape of control, devoid of human figures and dominated by government barriers...