The name Miyazawa Kenji will be familiar to most people with even a passing knowledge of significant writers of modern Japanese fiction. Certainly, Japanese critics have given an extraordinary amount of attention to Miyazawa's work. In the West, his popularity has emerged mainly through the relatively large number of translations available in English. For example, at least two translations exist of his best-loved work, Ginga tetsudô no yoru (Night of the Milky Way, 1927). The title of Sarah Strong's version (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1991) even offers Miyazawa as a kind of imaginative landscape waiting to be discovered: the title promises to provide its readers with “a translation and guide.” Various short story translations also stand out, including John Bestor's Once and Forever: The Tales of Miyazawa Kenji (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1993). Miyazawa's poetry has found willing translators. Most recently, Roger Pulvers's Strong in the Rain: Selected Poems (Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books) came out in 2007. As far as critical works in English are concerned, however, the list is lamentably short. Mallory Blake Fromm produced a PhD thesis (The Ideals of Miyazawa Kenji, London) in 1980, and various articles have appeared from time to time. Most recently, an interesting piece by Kota Inoue, entitled “A Little Story of Settler Colonialism: Imperialist Consciousness and Children's Literature in the 1920s,” on the role of colonialism in Miyazawa's “Wolf forest, basket forest, and thief forest” (“Oinomori to zarumori, nusutomori,” 1921) has appeared in Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique (Michele M. Mason and Helen J. S. Lee, eds. [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012], pp. 188–208). In view of the paucity of critical work in English, Hoyt Long's book, which sets out to explore “Miyazawa Kenji and the making of place in modern Japan,” is very welcome.

Long's book will certainly disappoint those who expect a straightforward, author-based “life and times” biography. Long spells out what he aims to cover in the book's prologue, where he sets out his wish to explore the cultural significance of Miyazawa's literature through “the intersection of geographical unevenness, place-based identity, and cultural production in Japan's interwar period” (p. 2). In other words, he uses Miyazawa the author as a key to uncovering a plethora of discursive practices surrounding literary production and power configurations of place in Japan of the 1920s and 1930s. Most intriguing (for me at least) is Long's acknowledgement of the difficulty in trying to negotiate “the contested space of the author . . . in the writing of literary history” (p. 6). The question is this: even in a critical work that eschews the author-based approach, how is it possible to give appropriate credit to the authorial presence in relation to the text and the wider context?

A central theme running through the book relates to Long's understanding of Miyazawa's literature as a sign of economic and social power. Should his stories constitute a source of power centered round provincial literary production, or are they best understood as a confirmation of economic might emanating from the metropolitan center of Tokyo? In part one, “Thinking the Local,” attention is given to the political and social implications of literary texts emerging from the Tōhoku region. Long asserts that Miyazawa sought to present his native Iwate not as a backward region of modern Japan, but as “an alternative agrarian future” (p. 31). On the other hand, the emergence of a modern publishing industry ensured that ultimately there was no possibility of an autonomous, nonurban artistic movement without the financial backing of metropolitan capital. Part two, “The Marginal Case and the Texture of Locality,” proposes that Miyazawa created the toponym of Iihatov in order to subvert power relations between metropolis and the provinces. Miyazawa's use of this fictional literary term instead of Tohoku or Iwate amounts to “a representational strategy for decentering dominant mappings of social space” (p. 103). In part three, “The New Roles of Local Engagement,” Miyazawa is portrayed as trying to overcome his position as disengaged artist and intellectual by somehow bringing together the needs of art and agrarian labor. The key term here is “farmers' art” (nōmin geijutsu). This section of the book offers a detailed examination of the fascinating attempts, undoubtedly influenced by the Russian revolution, to bring together creative and physical labor through a truly transformative praxis. Long carries this out through an extended reading of Poran's Square (Poran no hiroba), one of only four plays that Miyazawa wrote. According to Long, he sought through this play to transform the lives of his students by imagining “alternative realities and the alternative future selves” (p. 150).

Apart from his innovative theoretical angle, Long does find time to provide some genuinely interesting close readings of Miyazawa's stories. For instance, his reading of Kaze no Matasaburō (Matasaburō of the Wind, 1924) reinterprets a folkloric tale of a local wind spirit both as an entirely localized phenomenon and also as a force that breaks beyond the boundaries even of national Japanese self-identity. In general, the author's willingness to go beyond a “life and times” approach and find links with such a wide range of social, cultural, and economic factors is commendable. However, as is often the case, the downside is closely related to what makes his work so interesting. Long's adherence to a strongly theoretical exploration of Miyazawa will make his language inaccessible to some of his readers at times. At one point, for instance, he suggests that the fictional space of Iihatov was “unable to overcome a lack of spatial capital and it thus failed to gain entry into the necessary circuits of distribution and institutions of value distinction” (p. 101). In short, On Uneven Ground will not be everybody's cup of tea, but Long has undeniably produced a very welcome, thought-provoking, and novel intervention in the study of this important Japanese writer.