Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit's Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan explores the development of Japanese aesthetics through the fluid concept of bijin (美人, beautiful woman) during the Meiji period and its lingering legacy into the Taishō and early Shōwa periods. Therefore, it is fitting that the volume begins with the 1913 painting On First Becoming a Painting (E ni naru saisho) by Takeuchi Seihō. Here, the model demurely holds her kimono in front of her as a kind of screen protecting her nude body from the gaze of the artist and public. Lippit posits the model as a figure of “dismay,” self-consciously contemplating “whether she should become an artistic subject” (p. 2) and an object of beauty (美, bi). In the course of her study, Lippit situates the bijin—which Takeuchi's model exemplifies—in a broader cultural historical context, underscoring the stakes of aesthetic discourses in representation (both literary and visual, Japanese and Euro-American) at a tumultuous time when regional, national, and international identities were in flux.

Aesthetic Life brings to the fore primary sources and Japanese-language secondary sources to address an issue that had yet to be discussed in English-language scholarship with the kind of detailed complexity that Lippit brings to her project. The introduction notes how the Meiji bijin emerged from manifestations of male and female beauty from the Edo period and from forms transcendent of gender such as Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion (p. 8). These precedents prompt Lippit to pose two foundational questions: “What accounts for the shift whereby the figure of beauty, or bijin, comes to be gendered as feminine? What was it about the woman that lent itself to operating as a representative body or person (hito or jin) for the embodiment of beauty during the Meiji period?” (p. 8) To address these questions, Lippit asserts that the concept of bijin was a critical part of negotiating Japanese feminized identity, aesthetics, and cultural values in Japan and mapped onto Japan in Euro-American publications.

In support of this argument, chapter 1 discusses the relationship between the Meiji feminization of bijin and Japonisme, noting the foundational roles played by “feminine beauty” and Japanese women in the cultural exchange with the West. Chapter 2 builds on this conscious construction of beauty in feminine terms by examining the powerful physical and discursive presence of bijin (read now in the United States as the ubiquitous “geisha girl”) and Japanese art on the grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904.

Chapter 3 moves into more philosophical minutiae as it explores the intersection between “beauty,” “truth” (shin, 真, read as the “transmission of the essence or spirit of things” [p. 78]), and the Western notion of surface realism. The fourth chapter refocuses attention on the visual and textual construction of bijin, this time in Meiji illustrated magazines such as Bijin (1889), Nihon no Bijin (1891), and Bijin Gahō (1910–11). Spotlighting photography as a medium here, Lippit addresses how women participated in bijin photography as a form of self-expression and how their images became models for emulation.

Chapter 5 revisits the concept of “realism” initially broached in the third chapter; here, though, Lippit examines the bijin of Meiji-era literary realism. By comparing the bijin Miya from The Gold Demon (1897–1902) by Ozaki Kōyō and Namiko from Hototogisu (1898–99) by Tokutomi Roka, Lippit reflects on the influence such figures had on the development of bijin illustrations and, relatedly, the ongoing transformation of bijin in visual art, be it Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) or yōga (Western-style painting). The sixth chapter, too, focuses on literature, this time addressing The Three-Cornered World (1906) and Sanshirō (1908) by Natsume Sōseki as vehicles through which to further understand the textual intersection between modern Japanese identity, painting, and bijin. Chapter 7 then examines the emergence of bijinga (paintings of beautiful women) as its own distinct painting genre during the Meiji period and its relationship to bijutsu, Nihonga, yōga, the debate regarding the nude (prompting a brief return to the Takeuchi Seihō painting that opened the book), and the visualization of fūzoku and ryūkō (trends and fashions) (p. 192).

From an art-historical perspective, the final chapter is a high point of Aesthetic Life, since it attended to the visual construction of bijin in greatest detail. Lippit's discussion of Takahashi Yuichi's iconic 1872 painting Beauty (Courtesan) (Bijin [Oiran]) is particularly compelling. Drawing out the difficulty scholars have had with the so-called beauty of a painting that has been described as “strange,” “barbarous,” and “grotesque” (p. 204), Lippit underscores how media mattered in representing bijin: media like ukiyo-e and Nihonga allowed for “idealization” and “beautification,” key elements in the expression of beauty (p. 205). However, given yōga's insistence on realism, Lippit powerfully notes of Takahashi's courtesan, “she is not a bijin (a beauty); in fact, not only is she not a bijin, she barely looks like a woman” (p. 205).

Unfortunately, Aesthetic Life offers in-depth analysis of visual media in just a handful of cases; most of the thirty-six illustrations are addressed only in passing, taking a secondary position to Lippit's multifaceted literary analysis of texts by cultural luminaries such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Okakura Kakuzō, Nagai Kafū, and Mori Ōgai. Perhaps because of the emphasis on text rather than image in this volume, there were some surprising artistic omissions: for example, the beginning of the seventh chapter points to the ready association of Nihonga artists Kaburaki Kiyokata and Uemura Shōen with the genre of bijinga (p. 195). Yet, while Lippit delves into a fascinating analysis of Kiyokata's Tsukiji Akashi-chō (1927) vis-à-vis the need to “read” the dress of the bijin in the painting in historically specific terms (p. 213), she makes no further mention of Shōen or her work. Granted, Lippit is interested in moving beyond assumptions of what should be included in the category of bijinga (and this intervention is appreciated); nonetheless, the exclusion of Shōen misses an opportunity to address from a different perspective the theme of female agency and self-expression, enhancing the concept of bijin discussed in the fourth chapter and balancing the preponderance of male cultural voices dictating bijin's many frameworks.

Despite these points, Lippit's Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan is an invaluable philosophical and cultural treatise about aesthetics in Japan, offering interdisciplinary insight into the Meiji period and the concepts of nation, art, beauty, and femininity that emerged at that crucial transitional time.