The Journal of Japanese Studies

Scholars and critics of Japanese literature were reading the textual city with a deep appreciation of space and place even before the "spatial turn" of the late 1980s. Maeda Ai, to cite only the most obvious example, grounded his criticism in a penetrating exploration of urban geography, and more recent scholars such as Miriam Silverberg, Seiji Lippit, and Jordan Sand have deepened our understanding of the cultural production of the city and its role in broad social developments. Much of this work has focused on Tokyo. The new collection Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City joins this ongoing scholarly discussion, drawing on both the spatial turn and another important development in critical theory dating back to the 1980s: the memory "boom." [End Page 125] Its eight collected essays offer close readings of recent works of literature (including fiction and nonfiction) and cinema, the earliest from the 1980s and most from this millennium. These essays consider the capital, its neighborhoods, and its more intimate spaces as "sites of memory" or lieux de mémoire, building on the work of Pierre Nora. They combine this historical approach, which primarily addresses such sites' symbolic dimension, with inquiry into the physical dimension, several citing in particular Jinnai Hidenobu's highly influential study Tōkyō no kūkan jinruigaku. All are worthwhile additions to the discussion, and the best are models of scholarship on the imagined city.

Edited volumes are especially appealing when themes and images surface in multiple chapters, cross-pollinating in unexpected and interesting ways. The most sustained image here is the familiar one of Tokyo as palimpsest. Although the cycle of destruction, reconstruction, and renewal is hardly unique to Tokyo, writers and scholars of that city seem especially devoted to identifying traces of the past beneath the surface of the modern capital. Several essays employ the image of the palimpsest to productive effect. In chapter 3, Mark Pendleton produces a rereading of Hino Keizō's Yumenoshima (Isle of dreams, 1985), focused on memories of the yakeato, that is, the city in ruins after the fire-bombings of World War II. Adapting a figure that Hino himself employed, Pendleton argues that history and memory "intertwine" like the sides of a Moebius strip, set in motion by sites of memory and slowly decaying. This essay offers one of the most evocative discussions of memory in the collection and combines it with a thoughtful use of spatial analysis, explaining how "the city functions as a protagonist" (p. 55) in Hino's novel.

Yakeato memories resurface in chapter 7, as Angela Yiu considers Nakajima Kyōko's novel FUTON (2003) and its intertexts. Yiu identifies allusions to postwar works by Sakaguchi Ango and Ishikawa Jun in Nakajima's description of a fictional Tokyo neighborhood. She riffs on the idea of the palimpsest by examining the accretion of Katai's classic 1907 novel, Nakajima's rewrite, and those allusions, with special attention to how the layers reveal themselves in language. Yiu's essay also calls back to chapter 2, in which Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt reads Fujita Yoshinaga's peripatetic novel Tenten (From here to there, 1999) together with its 2007 film adaptation, directed by Miki Satoshi. Iwata-Weickgenannt's analysis of the unreliability of memory, and of film adaptation itself as palimpsest, shifts intuitively between texts, much as the narrative in Tenten shifts between present and past as the main characters traverse the city.

Among the many historical layers to this collection, the 1980s draws special attention. Several of the primary works discussed, including Hino's novel, appeared in that decade, and a few of the more recent works look back to it. In addition, Jinnai's study, cited in the introduction and four chapters, appeared in 1985, as the acceleration of Tokyo's redevelopment [End Page 126] lent urgency to the project of recording what was being lost. Chapter 4 addresses this among several historical moments. Evelyn...