Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao by Michael Lucken (review)

In Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts (translated from the French with rare clarity), author Michael Lucken interrogates a prejudice that is still very much at the core of the Euro-American sense of superiority over Japan—and the rest of the world: that “we,” the Euro-American West, hold the copyright on progress, creativity, and genius and that by extension we also own the enterprise of modernity. Familiar to anyone acquainted with orientalism and postcolonial theory, this sense of privileged agency directs our disparagement of the Other so that all those from non-Western nations, when working outside the sphere of the “traditional,” are perceived as doing nothing more than copying the “modern” Western model. Thus Japan, the first non-Western, modern capitalist state to arise as a challenge to the West, is labeled “copycat”—an epithet Lucken critiques in the title of his opening chapter, “Copycat Japan.” Postmodernism, despite its elevation of montage and the copy, does not seem to have erased this tension.

Far more than a simple debunking of the myth of Copycat Japan, this quietly provocative study declines to tackle the issue head-on. The Western-derived binary of his title, imitation and creativity, he explains, is not something he insists on, but merely the “critical knot” (p. 59) he circles around. Lucken concurs with Homi Bhabha’s critique of the “strategy of containment” (p. 5) and seeks instead “to relativize and compare, through a historical approach, the dominant values of the modern era in Japan and the West” (p. 3). These are the concerns of part 1 of the book. In part 2, wary that “any attempt to theorize in advance only reinforces the logic of domination” (p. 5), the author unfolds his interpretations of four major works from the twentieth century—a series of paintings, a film, a photographic album, and a prize-winning anime. In these analyses, he teases out the various aesthetic concepts that underlie each work and reflect the cross-cultural amalgamation of modern/contemporary Japan.

At first blush, parts 1 and 2 seem only loosely connected. In the six short chapters comprised by part 1, Lucken presents a sophisticated contemplation on mimesis and originality in both the West and Japan. Part 2 offers evocative interpretations of Kishida Ryūsei’s portrait series of his daughter Reiko (1914–1929), Kurosawa Akira’s masterpiece Ikiru (1952), Araki Nobuyoshi’s photographic album Sentimental Journey—Winter (1991), and Miyazaki Hayao’s award-winning anime Spirited Away (2001). This section of the book is richly suggestive without being dense, and each of the four chapters in part 2 can be appreciated on many levels by a wide audience. While each contains a fascinating analysis that can productively be read independently, the themes and concerns resonate suggestively with one another, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Even more intriguing because of its subtlety is the counterpoint that develops between the first and second parts of the book, with the interpretations of the latter replying eloquently to the issues raised by the former. I intend no criticism in saying that in many ways the intricacy and profusion to be found in this book strain the terms of its title, “imitation and creativity.” Upon reflection I find that Lucken has produced a meditative essay on the ways in which some Japanese critics and artists have transcended the binary of imitation and creativity.

In part 1, the author maps out that binary in relation to associated notions such as mimesis/model and progress/tradition. Locating the invention of this polarization in the West, Lucken uses the binary to heuristically inquire into Japanese aesthetics, both before the country opened its gates to Western ideas and afterwards. He begins by showing how ideas of “Copycat Japan” that started in the eighteenth century are still alive today, then traces the philosophical origins of...