Laura Nenzi draws readers into a fascinating world of samurai, shipwrecks, nocturnal monsters and partying crowds, in this richly detailed, illustrated and evocative history of the night. The world over, the installation of public lights transformed the night, reshaping expressions of authority; altering centuries-old forms of production and consumption; and enabling the expansion of legitimate daytime activities into the night hours. The cities of Tokugawa Japan, however, lacked any kind of public illumination until the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, Nenzi shows, many of the attributes associated with the modern night were firmly in place in cities and villages well before the age of streetlights. This exploration of the transformation of early modern Japan after dark challenges accepted definitions of modernity, encouraging readers to rethink the way we write history.

‘Laura Nenzi’s delightful book embeds an important critique of our understanding of the transformative power of modern forms of artificial illumination in a lively cultural and material survey of lighting in early modern Japan. She guides her readers everywhere from wax to wick, lantern to beacon light, urban pleasure quarters to rural houses.’

David Howell - author of Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan

‘This ground-breaking book lays out an array of ways to understand what illumination meant in Early Modern Japan - how it was generated and paid for – and what the eternal polarity between light and dark actually meant to people.’

Timon Screech - author of Shogun Avatar: The Worship of Tokugawa Ieyasu in Early Modern Japan

‘In this imaginative work, Laura Nenzi guides us through a little-known landscape alive with economic, legal, and cultural activity. From bustling markets for fish-oil lamps and sumac candles, to tussles over shipping and fishing after sundown, to literary adventures and ethnographic excursions in the shadows of curfew, Japan after dark turns out to have been a busy place—and one with provocative implications for global history. Nighttime will never look the same.’

Kären Wigen - co-editor of Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era