Shóyó Tsubouchi (1859–1935) was a pioneering figure in the development of Japan's literary modernity. He is best known today for his translation of Shakespeare's canon and for his treatise on Japanese literature, Shosetsu Shinzui (1885–6). Tsubouchi was also a playwright, whose works for kabuki and shinpa stages were part of a self-styled aesthetic vision towards a new theatre based on the juxtaposition of cultures. In Tsubouchi Shóyó's Shinkyoku Urashima and the Wagnerian Moment in Meiji Japan, Daniel Gallimore finds in the musical drama Shinkyoku Urashima a nexus of Tsubouchi's ideas and influences, which he unpicks through detailed analysis, with reference to the impact of Richard Wagner's operas. Gallimore offers a compelling portrait of Tsubouchi as a writer wrestling with problems of inter/intracultural practice against the backdrop of a Japanese state with increasing imperial ambitions.

In his discussion of Tsubouchi's aesthetic theory, Gallimore explores the writer's relationship with Japanese Romanticism, an influential movement in comparative Meiji literature, which, as he notes, ‘shares with the European Enlightenment a mythological dimension that also characterizes Japan's transition from a feudal to a modern nation state’ (p. 39). Despite Tsubouchi's training under literary rival and proponent of Japanese Romanticism Mori Ogai, and despite his studies and translations of European Romantic poets, including works by Wordsworth and Scott, Gallimore argues that the kind of Romanticism that Tsubouchi embraced in his own fiction owed more to ‘the heroic narratives of Shakespearean drama and his native kabuki’ (p. 4) than to Wordsworth's emphasis on affective life or Coleridge's theory of imagination. Tsubouchi discovered in Shakespeare ‘an ally in his assertion of “the hidden ideals” (botsuri) of the literary text against Ogai's Goethean, even Faustean Romanticism; the text could not state its own ideals’ (p. 12). Gallimore shows how Tsubouchi's reading of Shakespeare through kabuki plays with students at Waseda University in the 1890s functioned as a ‘crucible of historical styles’ (p. 14). It was Tsubouchi's interest in native aesthetic forms, such as furigoto (stylized dances in kabuki accompanied by nagauta – love songs), and the mythological narrative of the Urashima legend that provided the basis for his artistic vision.

One of the most compelling through-lines of this book is Gallimore's analysis of the Tsubouchi–Wagner dyad. Wagner's works were first popularized in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, but the turning point or ‘Wagnerian moment’ came in 1902, following the publication of a series of letters on Wagner's ideas in the journal Taiyo by comparative-religion scholar Masaharu Anesaki (p. 41). For Gallimore, Tsubouchi's interest in Wagner was less in the composer's politics and more in his use of mythology as a cultural matrix to negotiate the sociopolitical changes of modernity. Tsubouchi drew inspiration from Wagner in the development of his new dramatic form called Shingakugekiron, at the heart of which was the desire for a ‘shift of power from Tokugawa culture to a modern society capable of forming its own traditions’ (p. 48).

The central scene in Tsubouchi's dramatic adaptation of the folk tale is the first meeting between the fisherman Urashima and the sea princess Otohime. Despite Tsubouchi's insistence on using furigoto as the main expressive mode to translate his new aesthetics, this mimetic dance form was only used for this scene. Gallimore reads it as ‘the meeting of the worlds of dream and reality, nature and the supernatural’, and argues that it ‘aspires towards the total Wagnerian effect of lyric, music, dance and stage design that Tsubouchi had in mind’ (p. 82). Whereas the couple's sexuality is usually understated in written and performed versions, Gallimore suggests that Tsubouchi develops a more explicit rendering of this relationship, drawing an interesting comparison between Otohime and Tsubouchi's wife Sen, who used to work as a shougi (an indentured prostitute) in the Nezu red-light district close to the Imperial University (p. 113).

Gallimore's book is a masterful study of Tsubouchi's aesthetics and brings a fresh look at the complex and often eclectic – and even chaotic – fusion of Japan's cultural modernization process. The book will be of interest to readers of Japanese theatre history in the schizophrenic psyche of wakon yosai, or Japanese spirit with Western learning.