From popular culture flows to movements of peoples, from circulation of commodities to consumer patterns, there seems to be an unprecedented trafficking, sense of confidence and coevalness among countries in northeastern Asia that could be characterized as the dawning of an “Asian modern.” Economic competition and political disputes notwithstanding, cultural integration—buoyed by unabating consumerism and mass culture—has made Okakura Kakuzō's early twentieth-century dictum, “Asia is one,” a seeming probability today. This inter-Asian transculturation, unimaginable twenty years ago, is symptomatic of global capitalism in its incessant search for new markets and capital's continued need for valorization. If current cultural transformation within northeastern Asia corresponds to the latest logic of Empire (in the Hardt and Negri sense), Karen Thornber's book reminds us of an earlier regional exchange during the time of imperialist competitions: the Japanese empire.

Deploying the concept of transculturation, which unfolds in the text as processes of textual translation, adaptation, negotiation, resistance, and transformation, Thornber deftly presents and analyzes various textual encounters between Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers and Japanese literature in an imperial cosmos that she terms “literary contact nebulae” (p. 2). It is in this universe of Japanese empire that writers and texts are set in motion—coerced and voluntary—coming to contacts with each other, negotiating the asymmetrical power relations within the colonial and semi-colonial milieux. While noting some intra-regional contacts, say between Koreans and Chinese or Taiwanese and Koreans, the focus of the book is primarily on translations, adaptations, and negotiations by semi-colonial Chinese, colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers with Japanese literature.

Part 1, Interpretive and Interlingual Transculturation, explores “how and to what effect literatures are discussed, adapted, and translated allow us to appreciate better the many paradoxes of literary contact nebulae” (p. 83). Chapter 2 examines Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese commentaries on Japanese literature. It looks at multiple ways criticisms of Japanese literature both acquiesced and challenged the authority of metropole literary productions. The multiple vectors of adaptation and translation of Japanese literary texts by Chinese and Korean writers are the focus of Chapter 3. Again, through these processes of transculturation, Thornber alerts us to the literary tactics in which the colonized and the semi-colonized appropriated, negotiated, and contested Japanese literature for their own purposes. Whereas Chapter 3 traced these developments up to the 1920s, arguably the most fecund period of transculturation, Chapter 4 shifts its analytical optic to the inter-war period. Japanese proletarian and battlefront literatures are some of the most visible forms of adaptation and translation by both Chinese and Korean writers. Part 2, Intertextual Transculturation, considers creative texts by Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese writers that extensively intertexualized Japanese literature. From political novels in the early 1910s to proletariat literatures in the 1920s and onward, Thornber documents writers such as Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Yi Kwangsu and their referencing and resonating with texts from Japanese writers such as Suehiro Tetchō and Natsume Sōseki. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 analyze the prevalent but seldom acknowledged intertextual activities by Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese authors through thematic attributes such as the depiction of suffering, the conceptualization of individual, familial, and national relationships, and finally, the questions of agency. These chapters highlight what I would refer to as the “colonial difference” between metropolitan writings and their colonial and semi-colonial counterparts. Through a number of close readings and comparisons of literary luminaries such Zhou Zuoren and Tanizaki Junichiro, Zhang Tianyi and Yokomitsu Riichi, Lu Xun and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Yu Dafu and Sōseki, Ba Jin and Shimazaki Tōson, Yang Kuei and Kobayashi Takiji, Im Hwa and Nakano Shigeharu, and other pairings, Thornber draws attention to the different concerns, positionalities, and tendencies between metropolitan and colonial/semi-colonial writings.

Empire of Texts in Motion greatly expands our understanding of literary productions and exchanges in the Japanese empire, emphasizing the transculturation and intertextuality of literature. It dramatically shifts the normative and normalized nation-based literary history to that of a messier, but to a certain extent, more sober representation of intra-regional encounters enabled by the empire itself. More importantly, the differential readings allow us to glean at the complicated process of accommodation, appropriation, negotiation and rejection of metropolitan texts by colonial and semi-colonial subjects. It is a must-read for those who work on colonial and postcolonial studies.

Credits must also go to Thornber, who not only navigates effortlessly among Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language texts (a feat in itself!), but also meticulously documents novels, short stories, plays, poems, etc., that resonate with each other. Methodologically, the book sits squarely within the tradition of comparative literature. The discipline of comparative literature, as is well known, is an European invention that until recently meant comparisons among the great European traditions. Thornber's intra-Asian approach, despite the insistence on transculturation and intertextuality, remains a “nation”-to-“nation” comparison. In this regard, while we learn much about how colonial and semi-colonial writers interacted with Japanese literature, there is little discussion of how a literary work, for instance, intertexted or transculturated within its own “tradition.” Furthermore, and this applies to the latter chapters, there is a tendency to set up texts for comparison simply because they share similar themes. In this case, what is the difference between intertextuality and comparative literature? Also, as Thornber reminds us throughout the book that transculturation of Western texts by Asian writers far exceeds inter-Asian transculturations. We are, however, offered little hints to why that is the case and what might be the implications if we looked at these processes simultaneously. These conceptual quibbles aside, this is an important contribution to our understanding of what Edward Said has called “contrapuntal reading” of literary texts in the Japanese empire.