If, as Oscar Wilde so famously observed in an 1889 essay, “Japan is pure invention,” then geisha are certainly representative of that invention.Footnote ¹ In Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan, Ann Marie L. Davis takes on not the figure of the geisha, but the “prostitute” (or “sex worker”) immediately before, during, and just after the Meiji era. The remarkable Yūjo Monogatari, a book that is both memoir and exposé—first published in 1913, followed by a sequel the next year, then republished a decade later under a different title—is the nucleus of this wide-ranging book. Written by Wada Yoshiko, who had worked for three years in a brothel before being treated for syphilis at a “lock hospital” for another year, the book's success resulted in Wada gaining freedom from her contract and, as it is footnoted (p. 198), marriage to a journalist. In this book, Davis takes the “symbol of the prostitute as a project of nation and empire building” (p. 6), treating readers to a radically interdisciplinary analysis of visual, statistical, and textual discourses in five chapters.

The first chapter begins by introducing Wada's book and goes on to provide background for the following chapters; it forefronts Davis's theoretical scaffolding, mainly comprising Michel Foucault's concepts of biopower and governmentality along with the colonizing of sex, as in Sabine Frühstück's “Colonizing Sex.” The second chapter provides a visual analysis of Yokohama-e, a subgenre of ukiyo-e that depict yūjo in Miyozaki-cho, the brothel section of the foreign enclave of Yokohama. Here, Davis argues that the foreigner was domesticated by their gamboling in the familiar setting of the brothel, mainly through highlighting the interpersonal body language of the foreigner and prostitutes. The third chapter considers three sets of statistics from “lock hospitals” to argue how the prostitute was regulated and defined through charts of numbers, giving a sense of progressively intensifying control over the prostitute by those working in the hospitals as well as the nation as a whole.

The quite valuable fourth chapter runs through debates on prostitution from those in the popular rights, moral reform, and early abolitionist movements. The fifth and last chapter returns to Wada's book, which was merely introduced at the outset. Davis considers its impact through its paratext, argues that it both straddled the new genre of shi-sosetsu and played on the newly revived appreciation of monogatari as a literary form, and emphasizes the shame expressed. The complexity of the prostitute and other sex workers as they appeared in quite different cultural and social spheres through the dynamically shifting time period of 1850–1913 is an understudied area. This makes the book a great addition to the field of Japanese studies, and indeed the emerging global study of sex workers. Davis writes clearly, and her many lively examples help provide necessary historical context. The book as a whole should certainly be read by experts in the field; individual chapters (augmented with relevant sections of the introduction) might well be used in a wide variety of courses.

It is perhaps understandable that Davis makes only passing mention of geisha without ever defining them. Unpacking this most powerful symbol of Japan historically, sociologically, and symbolically—even just to gloss them—is no easy task. Yet, with all of these divergent discursive regimes juxtaposed, I think the book would have benefited from clearer definitions, or rather, fuller explanations of how changing vocabulary reflected the historically shifting social roles for the various sex workers who have overlapping appellations. We do learn in the final chapter that Wada did not become a geisha, since the family did not have the money for training, and she did go under yūjo in the title of her first book (then republished as Yoru no onna). However, given the degree to which female geisha reached a height of symbolic power during the Meiji period, they at least merit real discussion. Geisha became significant not just to foreigners in the figure of the globally touring Sadayakko and through prolifically reproduced photographic postcards, but domestically by being present at the Rokumei-kan, and among Meiji founding fathers (such as Itoh Hirobumi) who married geisha.

This book suggests future work in which there is more emphasis on relationality along the lines of Pierre Bourdieu's “symbolic power” (mentioned belatedly by Davis in her epilogue, p. 204). Thus, for example, geisha, yūjo, or mikake (concubine) might be positioned in relation to the new legal marriage and divorce codes and the socially changing role of wife and mother. Or, prostitution might be considered within the rapidly shifting economy of women's work—textile workers, servants. The slightly later boom in rabu (love) or glorification of the aesthetic of the pleasure quarters, as in Kuki Shūzō's The Structure of Iki (1930), might be included in this constellation.

The numerous quibbles in fact or nuance that I noticed were confined to the disciplines in which I am versant. Lack of depth is an unavoidable problem with interdisciplinary work. Yet this type of work is more and more essential to the world we live in. As Oscar Wilde argued sardonically almost 130 years ago in his essay “The Decay of Lying,” “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life . . . because . . . what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.” If we substitute “discursive fields” for “Art,” we can see the value of explicating a prostitute's memoir by means of countering views of Yokohama-e, medical statistics, and abolitionist debates as Davis does.