Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit (review)

Aesthetic Life is an expansive study of the concept of feminine beauty and of the bijin (beauty or beautiful person) in Meiji literature. Arguing that Meiji authors treated the concepts of beauty, Japan, art (in the broader sense of media, including literature), and women as interrelated problems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit traces the bijin (a term that in the modern period applied almost exclusively to women) through literary works, journalistic essays, pictures, and ephemera such as postcards and photographs. Seven chapters underscore feminine beauty as a subject of central symbolic importance if not national obsession in literature and thought from the 1880s through the end of the Meiji period. The author begins by considering Meiji Japanese consciousness of mid- to late nineteenth-century Western fantasies about Japanese women. It shows how by 1889 Japanese writers began to define the bijin as "a woman perfect in spirit and appearance," a prognosis that assumed mastery of both "Western morality" and "old morality."¹ From roughly this date onward, the works of critics, novelists, magazine and newspaper writers, department store and advertisement copy writers, and others reflected a flurry of activity to articulate the characteristics of the bijin.

As Tomi Suzuki has written, "In the mid-1880s, both the 'reform of fiction' and the 'reform of women' began to be discussed seriously and widely."² Aesthetic Life gathers a diverse range of literary and popular writing to show that these discourses were not merely occurring in parallel but were deeply intertwined. Magazines and advertisements marketed to women, massreproduced pictorial or photographic idols and advertisements directed toward men, and literary novels and short stories addressing both sexes show that the bijin, like the Western Orientalist construct of the "geisha girl" analyzed in chapters 1–2, was a leitmotif that stretched beyond discourses of femininity. The quest to define the bijin was part of the broader Meiji search for new ideals which sought to define or redefine almost every aspect of national customs, beliefs, and cultural forms. In seeking to understand why the bijin was so pervasive, the book points to the many literary and visual constructs, starting with those from the West, whereby idealized images of women also functioned as articulations of an ideal Japan, past, present, and future. The discourse on women and bijin in this sense transcended the sphere of gender. Even so, gender is nonetheless essential to understanding how women—in particular, women defined as visually enticing—were objectified to the extent that they could serve as stand-ins for the nation.

In her first two chapters, Lippit emphasizes that nineteenth-century European and U.S. writers established the "geisha girl" in particular and "Japanese women" in general as literary and cultural figures that facilitated the Western objectivization and trivialization of Japan as a feminized object of Orientalist male enjoyment. In doing so, these writers were engaging in an already established trope whereby Western Orientalist representations of the East simultaneously asserted fantasies of the West's dominance over the East together with "fantasies of men's limitless power to enjoy the bodies of women."³ It is well established that the hegemonic attitude of Europe and the United States toward Japan and Asia, which led in art to "interpretations of Japanese perception and expression as childlike," also invited the Western feminization of Japan as another means of expressing and emphasizing Euro-American dominance and masculinity.⁴ The rhetorical device of the work of art (such as a painting, photograph, or sculpture) concretized the arrangement by visualizing the literal objectivization of Japan and of Japanese women, doubling the image of masculine Western appropriation of the feminine Japan.

In Aesthetic Life, we see Japanese authors inherit and at times speak back to the Western Orientalist discourse of a feminized Japan. However, we almost never hear how women readers and writers in Japan intersected with this discourse...