Contemporary Japanese Women's Theatre and Visual Arts develops the concept of a girls’ aesthetics to reveal the subversive politics in the works of female artists who cultivate ‘girls’ as an aesthetic category in twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual media and performance. Anan defines girls’ aesthetics as a celebration of ‘girls who reject stereotypically defined female material bodies’ (p. 1). By creating imaginary spaces of immateriality, these artists resist patriarchal, heteronormative social structures. Anan provides valuable historical context that traces the evolution of girls’ aesthetics from their roots in girls’ magazines of the early 1900s through pre-war, wartime and post-war Japan. This contextualization demonstrates how girls’ aesthetics, while escapist, display an acute awareness of the oppressive social structures under which Japanese women live. Anan's analysis of girls’ aesthetics as manifested across different artistic forms is a major contribution of the book to the field of contemporary Japanese performance and feminist performance more generally. Her discussion ranges from theatre and dance to manga, visual art and Takarazuka, the all-female revue genre. This variety of forms, some experimental and some popular, demonstrates the reach of girls’ aesthetics within Japanese culture and the interplay between these forms in shaping the aesthetics.

Anan organizes her study thematically, based on the unifying elements of girls’ aesthetics: time and space, the body, sexuality and nationalism. Chapter 1, ‘Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space’, investigates the role of time and space in girls’ aesthetics to show how artists carve out a separate sphere distinct from, but subject to, the pressures of patriarchy and the state. Here, case studies of experimental theatre troupe YUBIWA Hotel, visual artist Yanagi Miwa and playwright and director Kisaragi Koharu illuminate the boundaries of this imaginative space and the price exacted from girls who seek access to it. In Chapter 2, ‘Girlie Sexuality: When Flat Girls Become Three-dimensional’, Anan explores the use of the androgynous body and same-sex eroticism with particular attention to how these aesthetics evolved within the context of the two-dimensional medium of manga. She presents a layered analysis of Hagio Moto's girls’ manga The Heart of Thomas (1974) to uncover the female and male attributes of the bodies drawn therein. She interrogates how these androgynous bodies translate into three-dimensional performance forms. Chapter 3, ‘Citizen Girls’, examines how girls’ aesthetics can be co-opted by a nationalist sense of citizenship through their eschewing of the outside world and overt political statements. Anan's case study here is Ikeda Riyoko's girls’ manga The Rose of Versailles (1972–3) and its subsequent adaptations into Takarazuka and film.

A girls’ aesthetics that evacuates the female body and women's material existence raises the question of the extent to which these aesthetics can be viewed as feminist. Anan's fourth chapter, ‘“Little Girls” Go West?’, is an extended meditation on the possibility of political engagement within girls’ aesthetics. She focuses on how the dancers in the experimental troupe KATHY blur the boundary between reality and the imaginary in their parody of Singin’ in the Rain in their video work Mission/K (2002). Ultimately, Anan argues that girls’ aesthetics are ‘actively creating an alternative, ideal space in order to survive their oppressive reality’ (p. 178). In her conclusion, she highlights the persistence of this resistant aesthetics over the past century to underscore its tenacity. However, the resistant potential of the aesthetics in performance is not always clear. With the exceptions of YUBIWA Hotel and KATHY, many of the performance troupes struggle to adapt an aesthetics honed in two dimensions into an embodied form and thus shed the more subversive aspects. Nonetheless, Anan's richly researched and meticulously detailed study invites us to expand our ideas of feminist aesthetics and question the primacy of the material body as a site for activism and experience.