Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan by Grace E. Lavery (review)

Reviewed by: Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan by Grace E. Lavery Preeshita Biswas (bio) Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan by Grace E. Lavery; pp. 219 Princeton UP, 2019. $41.95 paper. The second year of Bunkyu (1861) was coming to a wintry close when the English warship Odin sailed from the shores of Japan, under the command of the reigning Tokugawa shogunate, carrying forty members of the first Japanese Embassy to Europe in the nineteenth century. Fukuzawa Yukichi, a progressive Edo reformer and interpreter accompanying the Japanese diplomats, recollects in his autobiography that Odin was sent by the British government to "convey" the Japanese "envoy" (125). The ship undertook a transoceanic voyage, sailing halfway across the world through the waters circling the British empire. It docked at Hong Kong and Singapore, on the Indian Ocean Rim, before navigating the Red Sea to Suez, from where the emissaries continued their journey by rail to Cairo. After Odin sliced through the Mediterranean to Marseilles, the Japanese men travelled via rail to their first destination in Europe—Paris (125). The French capital was the first in a series of imperial cities that the Japanese delegates planned to visit, their grand tour of Europe eventually culminating in England. It was in this very heart of the British empire that one of the earliest seeds of Japanese transoceanic imperialism was sown. For a country emerging out of an eon of political isolation,1 engaging in competitive cultural exchanges with the British empire during the prime of nineteenth-century Western imperialism was anything but easy. The Japanese embassy travelled to Europe with a diplomatic mission: to negotiate "the deferment of the opening of [Japanese] cities and ports to foreign trade" with France, the UK, the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, and Portugal (Shimamoto 79). On witnessing the political and industrial advancement, economic prosperity, and cultural abundance of imperial England, Fukuzawa, on his return, founded Keio University—the oldest institution to establish a Western studies program in Tokyo, in 1858. As a pro-modernist Japanese intellectual, Fukuzawa's encounter with the West prompted him to contemplate that "it would not be impossible to form a great nation in this far Orient, which would stand counter to Great Britain of the West, and take an active part in the progress of the whole world" (334). [End Page 333] Grace Lavery's intriguing book Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan (2019) traces Japanese history to this crucial formative period of inter-imperial relations between the "Orient" and the "Occident." Nearly half a century before Japan—with its rapid militarization and ambitious conquest of Asian waters and nations—spiritedly entered the world stage of gladiatorial imperialism in the early 1900s, the cornerstone of this geopolitical development was initially embedded in the literary dialogues, exotic exhibitions, and cultural imports transacted between Japan and Great Britain. Lavery argues that over intercultural exchanges of fine porcelain and china, immaculate lacquer art, and the aesthetic sensuality of the Nihon vellum paper, Japan emerged in the Victorian mind as an "other empire," characterized by the reverse of everything that England embodied at the fin de siècle. Lavery cites the literary oeuvre of such renowned writers as Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin, who were enamoured with Japonisme. The French critic and collector Philippe Burty, in La Renaissance litteraire et artistique (1872), defined the term Japonisme as "the study of the art and genius of Japan" (qtd. in Ono 1). It captures the European fascination with Japanese arts and design at the turn of the century. Charmed by the aesthetic appearance of Japanese cultural artifacts, Victorian writers construed a culturally appropriated image of Japan quite distinct from the actual historical nation. It is this imagined image of Japan that Lavery refers to as the "Victorian Japan." Chronologically arranged, the five chapters of the book reflect Victorian aesthetic conceptualizations of Japan and the resonating influence of Anglo-Japanese cultural forms in a post-Victorian aftermath. At the very outset, Lavery critiques the Victorian perception of Japan that was entangled in a matrix of imperial dichotomies. In the English popular consciousness, Japan was etched as a complex idea...

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