Atsuko Sakaki provides a welcome challenge to the standard narrative of Sino-Japanese relations. She reconsiders through an analysis of Japanese and Chinese texts from the tenth to the twentieth century the typical narrative of Sino-Japanese relations. In particular, she focuses on “how Japanese writers and readers revised or in many cases even devised rhetoric to present ‘Chineseness’ and how this practice has helped form and transform the discursive self-fashioning of the Japanese” (p. 1). Through the incorporation of postcolonial and feminist theory regarding ideas of “nation” and “culture,” Sakaki shows that the relationship between Japan and China has been a two-way exchange in both premodern and modern times; the contrary assumption, she argues, was necessary for constructing concepts of “nation” and “national culture,” especially Japan's need to define itself and its culture. Sakaki looks at the Sino-Japanese relationship mainly from the “plane” of Japan because, as she explains, “Since ‘Japan’ views its relationship with ‘China’ while enclosed within ‘China’ rather than standing at a point from which it commands an unrestricted and ‘perfect’ view, its observations are not even, smooth, or structured so as to conform to one single norm” (p. 13).

The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 looks at how Japanese travelers in China and Chinese travelers in Japan are portrayed and viewed by other characters, and thus how they observe themselves and the people of their host countries. Chapter 2 examines how China and Chinese figures were depicted in fiction and theater written in wabun from the tenth to the eighteenth century during a time, Sakaki points out, when empirical knowledge of China was largely unavailable, and when fictional travelogues were often composed by authors who had not traveled to China or were not experts on China, but rather people who exoticized it. Chapter 3 discusses gender in Sino-Japanese relations and, in particular, challenges the idea of onna de as a reflection of an indigenous Japanese way of writing and thinking. Chapter 4 looks at early modern and modern Japanese representations of male and female intellectuals, whom Sakaki contends have been marginalized in Japan's literary canon because of their insistence on using classical Chinese and literary Chinese in their writing, despite the fact that during the time they wrote, they were central figures in premodern cultural production and consumption.

The two chapters that I found most fascinating were chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 brings attention to two very interesting Tokugawa female writers who were sinophiles: Arakida Reijo (1732–1806), who was an amateur historian and fiction writer, and Ema Saikô (1787–1861), a painter, calligrapher, and poet in Chinese verse. Sakaki writes, “Although Arakida Reijo and Ema Saikô wrote as intelligently and knowledgeably as Murasaki, they have not made their way into the literary canon as she has. I hope to help undo the conventional link among the indigenously Japanese, the feminine, and the natural and redefine both Japanese literature and gender as cultural practices rather than natural entities” (pp. 105–6). Chapter 3 also challenges the concept of onna de as a special trait of indigenous Japanese culture during the Heian period and, in particular, provides a refreshing reconsideration of Murasaki Shikibu's knowledge of Chinese culture by noting the Chinese works that Murasaki Shikibu and the imperial consort Shôshi would have read, and also how the Tale of Genji reveals Murasaki's understanding of Chinese cultural influences. Sakaki cites Motoori Norinaga's emphasis on the poetic nature of the Tale of Genji as one of the main reasons Murasaki and Tale of Genji have been read as articulations of a special Japanese aesthetic.

Chapter 4, which focuses on the state of literary Chinese in Meiji Japan, challenges ideas of temporality in the Sino-Japanese relationship that imagine the “past” in terms of timelessness and homogeneity, paying no heed to the reality of China's historic transformations. Sakaki looks at how applications of classical Chinese are used in the modern genre of the shôsetsu and how they facilitate communication amongst intellectuals across national boundaries, thus presenting “an alternative to hegemonic modern ideologies such as imperialism, nationalism, and ethnocentrism” (p. 145). She notes that in modern Japan, knowledge of classical Chinese was no longer necessary for promotion in the civil service, and thus literary Chinese ceased to be the lingua franca of East Asia; yet, she contends, it was a means by which writers escaped a nationalist mother tongue. Here Sakaki analyzes a political novel written in the 1880s, Kajin no kigû (Unexpected Encounters with Beauties) by Shiba Shirô (1852–1922), and Nakamura Shin'ichirô's (1918–99) 1960s novel Kumo no yukik (Traffic of Clouds).

One interesting point made in this chapter is in reference to the lawsuit against a Chinese version of Kajin no kigû titled Jiaren qiyu (1898) by Liang Qichao, the results of which indicated that in modern times, the author became the sole possessor of the text he or she had created. Sakaki concludes the chapter by stating that “[l]iterary Chinese and the canon written in it presented a medium with which intellectual expatriates could escape the constraints of a national language. . . . The tradition of kanshibun, which thrived on the incidentality of ethnicity and gender, thus had to be brought to a halt in modern Japan” (p. 175).

The final chapter is titled “Coda: Folding the Subject into the Object.” Sakaki explains that she did not want to end her book summarizing the main points. Rather, by ending in an atypical fashion, she puts into material form the intellectual ideas she is discussing in terms of questioning the obvious and the arbitrary. Her coda is a discussion of works by Tanizaki Jun'ichirô, as she argues that “there seems to be no one in Japan who better articulates the contingencies of space, language, gender, and time than Tanizaki Jun'ichirô” (p. 179). She argues that his stories have been “misconstrued as embodying a Japanese aesthetic essence by the same modern sensibility that has wrongly formed and maintained the Sino-Japanese dialectics” (p. 179). A standard conclusion, she argues, would “reestablish a faith in empiricism and chronology, whose legitimacy this study set out to modify” (p. 179).

In conclusion, I highly recommend this work. The chapters are well structured with a clear articulation of the goal of each chapter at the beginning and the end. Moreover, Sakaki's writing style is refreshing, and her reference to postmodern theorists to frame her arguments, as well as her rethinking of standard interpretations of some of Japan's canonical works, are intriguing. I think Obsessions makes a very compelling contribution to postmodern ideas of national identity formation through literary canons and raises important questions about the construction of cultural identity. Like the entire premise of her book, which seems to be a giant question mark, Sakaki even challenges conclusions by ending inconclusively with a question of her own. The final line of her work is as follows: “How long will we be treading upon the fine line between the awareness of an arbitrary distinction and an immersion in the binary? We have yet to see” (p. 189).