With Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance, Tomie Hahn has produced an extraordinary study of the complex ways in which nihon buyô, a form of traditional Japanese dance, is transmitted and translated between bodies. Hahn mines her lifelong experience as a dancer in the Tachibana school as a means of exploring how culture comes to be embodied, refigured, and passed on through this art form. Her thoughtful analyses build from this lived experience as the ground upon which the cogent, meticulous, narrations that she develops can inform the reader most clearly, and signify with the utmost richness and intensity.

Hahn provides not just glimpses—in the form of often plaintive poetic vignettes introducing each section of the book—but also, more significantly, insights into the multifaceted ways in which culture moves in relation to dance. Using a register that is both less formal and yet, importantly, more faithful to the experiential moment being described, the poetic notes attempt to convey an inkling of the broader sensorium through which particular movements were originally felt and incorporated. These creatively rendered vignettes supplement the more legibly academic quality of the extensive descriptions of interactions she gives in the chapters proper as both a grounding impulse from which those narrations depart, and as an ephemeral trace that attests to the inability of any description to capture the flow of structured movement fully.

Hahn's inclusion of these pithy encapsulations of distinct buyô sensations is a stylistic point whose subtlety evinces that of the deeper feminist and anti-essentialist politics of representation it simultaneously draws from and advances. Indeed, one of the most refreshing aspects of Hahn's work is the way in which she narrates the processes attending nihon buyô's transmission only after first situating her narration both within the broader personal context of her biracial Eurasian heritage, on the one hand, and against the Orientalist proclivities of the media's recent geisha infatuation, on the other. In extending the rich metaphor of the sensu, the special fan used in buyô, to discuss its role in stereotypical depictions of Japanese women, Hahn writes, “I simultaneously want to reclaim the trope of the fan as a lure—to reappropriate the exotic mystique of the ‘fan dance’ stereotype of the demure ‘Oriental lady’ who entices the onlooker's gaze by revealing and concealing her body. … Though this book is not solely about gender, one of my aims has been to reappropriate the fan, kimono, and hair ornaments to tell a very different story of Japanese performing women” (pp. 14–15). She further elaborates the political implications of her ethnographic engagement's stance in stating the goal of her work, explaining, “My aim is to playfully arouse understanding through activity—in the text and the DVD—to pose a sensual dis-orientation through presenting another subculture's practice of sensual orientation” (p. 17). This purposeful disorientation manages to enliven the analysis without endangering the narrative continuity of the ethnographic portrayals. Moreover, it persistently prompts questions about the overlapping processes according to which one's knowledge of dance is corporeally instilled.

Through the metaphor of sensu, as “fan,” but also as “sense,” “sensibility,” and “sensation,” Hahn shifts adroitly among different facets of the dances she examines, scrupulously balancing accounts of the gestural minutiae of performance practice with an acute cognizance of their theoretical ties and implications. The interrelated segments that make up the “bones” of the five chapters of the “book-as-fan” (p. 16) range from discussions of historical details of buyô's development and explanations of its hierarchical social structure; to deep descriptions of everything from the significance of details of the floor, for example, “The surface nicks and stains, while insignificant in themselves, are a tangible result of meaningful physical exertion during lessons—generations of dancers' marks layered upon each other” (p. xiii); to a transcription of the verbal musical cues used to teach the dance Echigojishi, which is accompanied by video footage on the book's included DVD (p. 126).

Each of these parts displays an episodic quality that withholds a sense of surefootedness from the reader. For example, chapter 3, “Unfolding Essence—Energetic Sensibilities and Aesthetics,” slides quickly from Yuasa Yasuo's notions of artistic cultivation's debt to Zen meditation, to Zeami's fifteenth-century adages, to quotes from Kûkai. Among these, Hahn intersperses personal perceptions and recollections: brief pauses employed to convey the reader from a purely analytical space to one in which some aspect of the negotiations constantly occurring within the keikoba, or dance practice area's atmosphere, might be shared. These interruptions take the form of the poetic, italicized head notes to chapters, lending an impressionistic quality to the book, but assume a more pointed, elaborated form in the special “Orientation” sections arranged throughout the text. A strong pedagogical current animates the entire book, but bristles most tangibly in these parts, where instructions to listen closely and guide questions direct the reader to consider thoroughly the material they encounter in the video examples.

In these inventive sections, Hahn invites (and challenges) the reader to engage actively in the dances' haptic, visual, and aural texture. In these moments, Hahn is not just describing the nuances of buyô to us, she is also training our eyes and ears to attend to these nuances more critically: she consistently opens spaces for us to consider not just the mechanics of the performances, but, more profoundly, to self-reflexively question the perceptual qualities of our own personal apprehension of them. I simply cannot overstate what a remarkably valuable strategy this represents both as a pedagogical and ethical intervention.

One of the aspects of Hahn's book that I found particularly compelling was her unabashed commitment to deriving theory from the practice of dance. She takes her metaphors seriously, extending the breadth of their terms in a committed attempt to apprehend the subtleties of embodiment. Her reading of the school's vestibule as a space of both literal and symbolic transaction stands out in this regard (pp. 75–77), as does her astute reading of perspective in the practice studio, where she discusses the concept of kinesthetic empathy, explaining, “The alignment between bodies via kinesthesia imprints movement and reinforces kinesthetic empathy for future lessons. At Hatchobori we learn how to look, how to see, and how to consume movement through sight. … The student's gaze toward Iemoto metaphorically mirrors the hierarchical iemoto structure as it reenacts the historical path of transmission through daily practice” (pp. 84–85). Because Hahn's analytical commentary emerges directly out of the language and diligently observed motions of her teachers and fellow students—she borrows the vivid “worn floor” metaphor from the Tachibana headmaster, for instance—it resonates viscerally, with an organic quality that is all the more absorbing for the patience and sincerity with which it is put forth.

The DVD, which even includes an abbreviated lesson, offers a particularly rare contribution to Japanese dance analysis and pedagogy, one that Hahn should be proud of and that her editors at Wesleyan University Press should be lauded for so generously including. With its painstaking attention to cultural, kinesthetic, and phenomenological detail, Hahn's account will not only contribute vitally to the fields of dance studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology, to which it is most directly addressed, but also will serve as an invaluable resource for those of us teaching courses on Japanese drama, performing arts, and cultural studies. As a scholar working primarily in the fields of premodern Japanese literature and performance, I found the work to be a welcome breath of fresh air. I hope that those of us working in the field of Japanese studies more broadly will heed the challenge this vibrant text poses to the numbed habits of thought and writing that have become normative—particularly with regard to the endemic absence of either sustained, reflexive reckoning with the personal investments girding our research agendas, or explicit connection to the world in which we live and work. In its deft and unapologetic weaving of personal reflection with informed scholarly analysis, Sensational Knowledge radiates with a palpable commitment to the practice of engaged teaching and learning we should all endeavor to embody.