Many thematic studies that treat multiple authors offer their central theme as a lens for bringing hitherto obscure connections into sharper focus. By contrast, Leith Morton's The Alien Within calls to mind a kaleidoscope: a device that combines disparate bits and pieces into an infinite variety of shapes and views. With each slight rotation or shift in emphasis, some elements come to the fore while others partially recede from view. Readers hoping to find a stable or sharply-focused view of this book's constituent parts may find cause for frustration. Those who approach it with the question “What do Tsubouchi Shōyō, Yosano Akiko, Izumi Kyōka, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, and Murakami Haruki have in common?” may find themselves grasping for an answer that goes beyond the fact that these writers are all contained within the pages of the same book. But those who set out to consider its chapters in isolation, or in combinations dictated by their own particular interests, will find that this can happily be done without unduly sacrificing comprehension of the author's main points.

Morton gives fair warning to the reader that his approach is “diffuse” (p. 4), and that he interprets “representations of the alien or exotic … in an extremely wide-ranging way” (p. 5). In his usage, “alien” becomes a freewheeling signifier capable of moving at will through a wide array of more familiar terms, namely: the foreign, the exotic, the other, the fantastic, the gothic, the numinous, the uncanny, the abject feminine, the postcolonial subject, modernism, the melodramatic imagination, and the act of translation. The central theme thus covers such a broad range of literary phenomena as to deprive it of significant centrifugal force. What does unify the book is that all of the authors and leitmotifs addressed in it represent very current pockets of interest among scholars and students of modern Japanese literature. The chapter on Tsubouchi Shōyō and Shakespeare resonates with the rise of translation studies and the boom in global Shakespeare studies; the two chapters on Yosano Akiko delve into the complex relationship between Japanese female self-expression, Japanese and Western literary traditions, and cultural taboos surrounding motherhood; the chapters on Izumi Kyōka, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, and Arishima Takeo dialogue with major studies of the fantastic, gothic literature, and melodrama; the chapters on Ōshiro Tatsuhiro present a timely response to the rising interest in minority writers in Japan; and the final chapter on Murakami Haruki joins a chorus of critical voices on the world's best-read contemporary Japanese novelist. In this sense, The Alien Within can be read as a wide-ranging jaunt through some of the most current topics of inquiry in the field of modern Japanese literary studies, and most students and scholars in the field will find something here that addresses their particular areas of interest. (The major exception would have to be the science fiction devotee: any expectations of that kind of alien will be sorely disappointed.)

In particular, the two chapters on the work of Ōshiro Tatsuhiro break new ground in English-language scholarship, as so little has been written to date on this Okinawan writer (and, indeed, Okinawan literature in general). In Chapters 6 and 7, Morton spotlights Ōshiro's interest in the female shamans of Okinawa – yuta and noro – as a critical expression of his perspective on Okinawan history and indigenous culture. Ōshiro's clearcut gendering of Okinawan culture as female is a fascinating point that bears further scrutiny and comparison with other writers, especially those hailing from minority perspectives in Japan. When considered in tandem with the discussion of Yosano Akiko's taboo-shattering descriptions of childbirth, taken up in Chapter 3, the reader will find food for thought on the particular challenges faced by writers hailing from minority perspectives, and the strategies mobilized to surmount them. Hopefully, Morton's brief foray into Okinawan literature will spark further comparative inquiry.

One of the potential pitfalls of covering so much territory within the space of a single monograph is the inherent difficulty in lending each particular topic the kind of depth that comes from sustained engagement. Those scholars who have more narrowly focused on one issue or another addressed in Morton's book may find his main points of reference to be idiosyncratic in ways that suggest a rather limited engagement with the current state of a particular sub-field. I must admit that I myself found this to be the case in the chapter on Tsubouchi Shōyō and Shakespeare, which analyzes stylistic developments in Shōyō's translations in terms that neither significantly grapple with the rapid transformations of Japanese literary language over the course of his long career, nor acknowledge the critical shift in conceptual emphasis from performance to text, and hence from loose adaptation to faithful translation, that characterized the modernization of theater in Japan. Morton frames Shōyō's work in the over-arching terms provided by classics from translation studies such as George Steiner's After Babel and Lawrence Venuti's The Translator's Invisibility, as well as prominent postcolonial studies theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Tejaswini Niranjana. Though such reference points certainly constitute important background reading for translation studies initiates, in lieu of a richly developed historical context they are not necessarily the most effective tools for illuminating the intricacies or broader significance of Shōyō's work, which spanned a half-century of radical change in Japan from the 1880s all the way to the 1930s. A Japanese reader of 1884, when Shōyō published his first translation of Julius Caesar, and a reader of 1933, when he published his final revision, would have shared so little in common in their linguistic sensibilities as to render relative terms like “natural” and “foreign” virtually moot for any attempt to compare the two texts in isolation from their particular historical moments. At the same time, readers who are less attached to historical context may find an unexpected thrill in Morton's assertion that Martin Heidegger's description of the “hermeneutic circle” is “a most useful shorthand description of the process by which Shōyō adapted Shakespeare using his own literary and theatrical traditions” (pp. 18–19).

The kaleidoscope is a peculiar thing: it allows us to momentarily glimpse any number of intriguing new pictorial possibilities. It does not, however, allow us to sharpen the focus at will – any attempt to do so only produces a different view of its parts. The Alien Within may perhaps best be consumed in the spirit of play invited by such a mechanism: with the kind of subjective creativity that guided its maker, and with the ease afforded to the viewer who is not asked to share a static vision, but rather to delight in those particular moments of insight and suggestion that happen to be the most inspiring to him or her.