In Nagai Kafū's Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self, Rachael Hutchinson examines Kafū's writings, following him in America, France, the Orient, and Japan, presenting a fresh rethinking of Kafū's works. As Hutchinson points out in the introduction, the familiar image of Kafū as a “pleasure-seeking man about town” and an “irresponsible hedonist,” has in Japan always been balanced with an image of Kafū as a serious critic, a scholar and thinker, “on a par with Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki” (pp. 3–4). Hutchinson's work successfully introduces and further develops this latter, critical side of Kafū, which has largely been ignored in the Western literature. Kafū thus emerges as a complex writer, thinker, and an important voice and critic of the Meiji government and its modernization program.

Nagai Kafū's Occidentalism is largely chronologically organized, tracing Nagai Kafū's writings from his stay in the United States (Chapter 1), followed by France (Chapter 2), the “Orient” (Chapter 3), before returning to Japan (Chapters 4 and 5). The reader thus follows Kafū on his travels abroad, and learns how Kafū's engagement with Western literature informed his own observations and writings, and how this dynamic relation changes over time. Kafū's vision of France and Paris, for example, was formed largely through his readings of French literature, and he drew heavily from French and British orientalist literature when describing the Orient. Simultaneously, the narrative also follows a certain logical trajectory in which Kafū continuously reassesses his views on the West, Japan, and identity itself.

Hutchinson argues, convincingly I think, that Kafū's writings have to be understood as the employment of “Occidentalism” and, more precisely, a form of “anti-official Occidentalism,” which she describes as “a local or peripheral discourse used against the status quo,” and that “Kafū's appropriation and use of Western orientalist discourse to his own ends, to protest against the façade of Western culture without substance that was dominating Meiji thought and the face of Tokyo itself, constitutes a critique and counter-discourse to the Meiji state” (pp. 15–16). Kafū initially posited “America” as a land of modernity and freedom in opposition to the restrained and conformist Japan, but America is replaced by France and especially Paris, as a “genuine” civilization which had been able to gracefully modernize while keeping its own identity, this in contrast to the superficial break-neck speed modernization of Japan. In Hutchinson's analysis, after returning to Japan, Kafū's later writings on Edo/Tokyo continue this strategy of Occidentalism (Hutchinson rejects the interpretations of Kafū's Edo-writings as a form of self-orientalism, reverse-orientalism, or escapism), allowing him to construct “Edo” as “a counterspace to Meiji” (p. 168). In “Edo,” Kafū finally finds a genuine Japanese “Self,” and “Meiji modernity has replaced the West as the contrasting Other to Kafū's essentialized Japanese past” (p. 182). Kafū's “Edo” was a string of interconnected ideas, including the “oriental” heritage from China, “in the form of aesthetics governed by a sense of sorrow,” the physical remnants of the old city, and he especially admired what he saw as the urban townsfolk (chōnin) culture of freedom.

Hutchinson's work is firmly grounded in both the English and Japanese scholarship on Nagai Kafū, and introduces the reader to larger as well as more detailed debates on Kafū's works. The argument is also, as might be expected, well positioned within the current theoretical apparatus of Orientalism/Occidentalism, which has come a long way since Edward Said's Orientalism. The book provides a valuable contribution to this body of scholarship by exploring what happens when a writer from the non-West engages in complex and shifting ways both with various regions in the West, the “Orient,” and the home country, as well as with orientalist literature. The tight argument and focus on a limited body of Kafū's texts, and the rich analysis of these, which are a delight to read, are strengths of the book, and Hutchinson rightly refrains from extrapolating from Kafū's writings to make totalizing claims on Meiji intellectual life as a whole.

Nevertheless, while Hutchinson does make references to other writers (such as Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki), and to some larger themes in modern Japanese intellectual life (such as the “return to Edo”), at least from the viewpoint of this reader outside the field of Japanese literature, at times the analysis of Kafū's texts could have been placed in a somewhat richer historical context and ideas in Meiji Japan. For example, Kafū's critique of the modernization program of the Meiji state as forced, “trying to graft on foreign ‘material civilization’ rather than nurturing the inner substance of indigenous civilization” (pp. 153–54), was a criticism that had been around since the 1870s. Kafū's search for a more authentic Japan in Edo could perhaps have been contrasted with other attempts, like those of some conservative thinkers such as Inoue Tetsujirō who tried to reconstruct Confucianism or Bushidō as the spiritual source for an authentic Japan, or those who saw Edo chōnin culture as the source of a modern entrepreneurial business mentality. Despite this minor shortcoming, Nagai Kafū's Occidentalism is a very welcome contribution and deserves to be read, also outside the field of Japanese literature.