Victorian Women’s Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship by Tomoe Kumojima (review)

To open her study of friendship in women’s travel writing, Victorian Women’s Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship, Tomoe Kumojima offers an introductory chapter with broad sketches of three subjects: Japan and Britain’s post-1868 relationship; scholarship on British women’s travel writing about Japan; and the portrayal of Japan in British imaginative literature at the fin de siècle. The ambiguity of Japan’s position visà-vis British power, Kumojima argues, makes literature by Westerners about the country both compelling and often overlooked. Without being able to theorize about power and discrimination, Kumojima suggests, Victorianists have expressed little interest in analyzing travel writing, fictional writing, or archival materials about Britain and Japan.

Chapter 1 presents the theoretical underpinnings of the book’s exploration of themes of friendship, hospitality, and cross-cultural mutuality. Here, Kumojima ranges among the writings of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Blanchot on brotherhood and friendship, Virginia Woolf’s texts on female friendship, and the work of recent scholars applying concepts of sympathy and affection to imaginative literature. Though she makes a strong case for why we should care about positive international contact and hospitality, she does not provide theoretical justification for the unspoken assumption that underlies her project—the belief that women are uniquely able to offer a friendly, hospitable appreciation of Japan and Japanese people. The book treats European or Euroamerican (in the case of Mary Crawford Fraser) women as kinder and gentler than men, or at least more aware of power dynamics and more willing to try to dispense with them. Kumojima expects her readers simply to agree that women are more invested in friendship and mutually respectful relations than men are.

The three chapters that follow the introductory chapter each take one Western woman traveler to Japan as the subject, but, innovatively, they do not stay confined only to the nonfiction travel texts produced by those writers. Kumojima approaches these women and their writings as embedded in transhistorical, transcultural, and transtextual webs. She deftly connects published texts with archive-held materials, and she puts Victorian and Edwardian texts in conversation with later writings, including literature published by Japanese writers in Japanese. This is where Kumojima shines as a researcher and writer: her fluency in both English and Japanese allows her access to a wealth of materials little known by English-exclusive scholars.

Isabella Bird, the most studied of the three women profiled in the book and the only one of the three to publish her travel writing during the Victorian period, is the focus of chapter 2. Kumojima finds fissures in Bird’s sometimes overtly racist prose in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), emphasizing the way, for instance, that Ainu women offer silent yet strong resistance to Bird’s condescension. She finds moments of “feminine bonding” in Bird’s writing, and she emphasizes the potential for friendship and hospitality in Bird’s text by delving into a modern Japanese novel that she says recovers and extends the possibility for cross-cultural friendship found in Bird’s treatment of her guide-cum-servant, Ito (100). Surprisingly, however, Kumojima does not reference the work of another scholar, Shizen Ozawa, who has published on Japanese fiction inspired by Bird’s travel writing and who has, like Kumojima, written on the differences between various editions of Unbeaten Tracks.

Chapter 3, centered on Mary Crawford Fraser, best illustrates both the achievements and the limitations of Kumojima’s approach to travel writing. Kumojima displays a rich and nuanced understanding of not only Fraser’s body of work about Japan but also her web of relationships during residence in Japan in the early 1890s. She uses public and private documents to illustrate the “female literary circle”—a circle that included both European and Japanese women—that may have influenced Fraser’s sympathetic portrayal of Japan in her nonfiction travel books, including A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan: Letters from...