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Bibliographic Data: Nenzi, Laura. Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.
Main Argument: With the goal of examining the ways that moden travel intersected with "life in and around the floating world," Nenzi argues that travel in the early modern period became "an active stage" on which meaning could be produced, "in sharp contrast to the predominantly static spaces of the ordinary" (1, 2). In turn, the work of travelers on this stage created what Nenzi calls a "cartography of self-assertion on the part of the individual," noting that women travelers "seemed particularly devoted to the search for validation in preferred sites of lyrical authority and gendered power" (2, 4).
( The age of movement )
Critical assessment: This is one of the stronger studies I read for my class on "the spatial turn" in Edo historiography last semester; one of the true virtues of Nenzi's book is her unabashed foregrounding of questions of gender and how it affected travelers and their experiences, as opposed to (as is so often the case) shoehorning it in at the end or not dealing with it systematically at all. I think she finds a reasonable middle ground between hyperbolic claims about the freedom travel afforded women and grim assessments of women's lack of freedom to travel or indeed to do anything in the Edo period, which have been rather the common assessment among interested historians.
That said, she does get carried away by her sources at times; travel simply cannot have been quite as subversive as she seems to think it was, if only because so many people indulged in it over the course of the period without the Tokugawa regime falling into ruin. There's a difference between escapism and subversion that Nenzi seems not to heed, and in addition, although I do think the Edo period was undoubtedly fairly fluid, particularly in terms of status distinctions, as time wore on, characterizing the entire Edo period (which, commendably, Nenzi does not collapse into one ahistorical moment) as "the floating world" is misrepresentative. It's modernity, after all, in which all that's solid melts into air, but there's little sense of that distinction in Nenzi's limpid writing.
Still, with these caveats, this is a very good book, peppered with very enjoyable accounts of and by women travelers throughout.
Further reading: Jilly Traganou, The Tôkaidô Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan; Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire
Meta notes: One gets the sense from reading this book, as well as Japan in Print, that aspects of the early modern Japanese city/informationscape may well have offered an experience that is the analog analogy to today's Google Maps. I'm not sure what to do with this insight, but it's definitely worth bearing in mind.
"Shank's mare" is a colloquialism meaning "on foot."
Main Argument: With the goal of examining the ways that moden travel intersected with "life in and around the floating world," Nenzi argues that travel in the early modern period became "an active stage" on which meaning could be produced, "in sharp contrast to the predominantly static spaces of the ordinary" (1, 2). In turn, the work of travelers on this stage created what Nenzi calls a "cartography of self-assertion on the part of the individual," noting that women travelers "seemed particularly devoted to the search for validation in preferred sites of lyrical authority and gendered power" (2, 4).
( The age of movement )
Critical assessment: This is one of the stronger studies I read for my class on "the spatial turn" in Edo historiography last semester; one of the true virtues of Nenzi's book is her unabashed foregrounding of questions of gender and how it affected travelers and their experiences, as opposed to (as is so often the case) shoehorning it in at the end or not dealing with it systematically at all. I think she finds a reasonable middle ground between hyperbolic claims about the freedom travel afforded women and grim assessments of women's lack of freedom to travel or indeed to do anything in the Edo period, which have been rather the common assessment among interested historians.
That said, she does get carried away by her sources at times; travel simply cannot have been quite as subversive as she seems to think it was, if only because so many people indulged in it over the course of the period without the Tokugawa regime falling into ruin. There's a difference between escapism and subversion that Nenzi seems not to heed, and in addition, although I do think the Edo period was undoubtedly fairly fluid, particularly in terms of status distinctions, as time wore on, characterizing the entire Edo period (which, commendably, Nenzi does not collapse into one ahistorical moment) as "the floating world" is misrepresentative. It's modernity, after all, in which all that's solid melts into air, but there's little sense of that distinction in Nenzi's limpid writing.
Still, with these caveats, this is a very good book, peppered with very enjoyable accounts of and by women travelers throughout.
Further reading: Jilly Traganou, The Tôkaidô Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan; Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire
Meta notes: One gets the sense from reading this book, as well as Japan in Print, that aspects of the early modern Japanese city/informationscape may well have offered an experience that is the analog analogy to today's Google Maps. I'm not sure what to do with this insight, but it's definitely worth bearing in mind.
"Shank's mare" is a colloquialism meaning "on foot."