In The Aesthetics of Strangeness, W. Puck Brecher examines the phenomenon of aesthetic eccentricity in the Tokugawa period, which he describes in terms of not only unconventional cultural forms, but also “subjectivities that privileged individuality, emotion, and intuition over conventional behavior” (p. 5). By focusing on the emergence of what he calls an “ethos of eccentricity” (p. 3), he aims to move past the idea of Tokugawa eccentrics as merely a collection of isolated and anomalous individuals, and to see how “markers of strangeness drew on multiple philosophical resources, earned and sustained social tolerance, and acquired cultural capital” (p. 181), particularly through the association of eccentricity with moral virtue and extraordinary human potential. He discusses a number of terms used in Tokugawa discourse to indicate idiosyncratic behavior, such as kyō (madness), muyō (uselessness), and, most importantly, ki, which he glosses as “extraordinary, marvelous, original, eccentric” (p. 4).
Brecher describes how isolated instances of aesthetic eccentricity existed in the early Tokugawa period, but argues that eccentricity only came to be seen as a moral force with the growth of the bunjin movement from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, which he characterizes as a “[p]ackaged nonconformity informed by Chinese tastes, amateurism, and detached playfulness” (p. 57). He sees this emergent ethos of eccentricity as supported in the latter half of the eighteenth century by a range of philosophies that found value in emotions and individuality, such as Daoism, Kokugaku, and the philosophy of Wang Yangming. He writes that this ethos was given its fullest expression in Ban Kōkei's Kinsei kijinden (Eccentrics of recent times, 1790), a biographical compilation that brought together Zhuangzian and Confucian ethics to depict eccentrics as paragons of virtue and thus socially valuable. He then argues that in the late Tokugawa period, while there continued to be certain examples of genuinely individualistic artistic and literary production, eccentricity was often transformed into a commercialized mass spectacle that was less tolerant of actual deviance. In another development, he writes, intellectual eccentricity came to be associated with radical political movements such as imperial loyalism.
Brecher shows the relevance of Tokugawa eccentricity beyond just the visual arts, which have been the focus of Western scholarship on the topic to date. Also, he challenges interpretations that downplay the role of Tokugawa eccentricity by seeing it simply as a form of play with no broader significance, or as an example of failed resistance to the social and political status quo. Instead, he makes a compelling case for seeing eccentricity as ultimately integrated in important ways with mainstream Tokugawa culture, thus calling into question simplistic divisions between cultural orthodoxy and heterodoxy in this period.
The Aesthetics of Strangeness is informed by a thorough coverage of relevant secondary scholarship, but its original contribution to the field is held back by its excessive reliance on this scholarship. Throughout the book there are constant quotations from other scholars, making many sections of the book read like a dissertation literature review. Another problem is that a large proportion of the citations of primary sources turn out, upon examination of the endnotes, to be in fact second-hand quotations from secondary sources. As a consequence of encountering so many primary sources only in limited snippets through the filter of other scholars’ work, Brecher sometimes shows a shaky grasp of these Tokugawa sources and their authors. In one second-hand citation, for example, he describes Ogyū Sorai as the author of a work entitled Rongo (p. 95); this is of course not a work by Sorai at all, but simply the Japanese name for the Confucian Analects. (Presumably Sorai's text mentioned in the cited source is actually Rongo chō, his famous commentary on the Analects.) More significant than such errors of fact, though, is that when Brecher has not read the underlying primary sources himself, he lacks a basis for critical assessment of what other scholars have said about these sources.
The Aesthetics of Strangeness is valuable for its exploration of eccentricity as a coherent cultural phenomenon that was tied to key literary, artistic, intellectual, and political developments of the Tokugawa period. While Brecher's efforts to show how notions of eccentricity were connected to these diverse fields are sometimes constrained by his reliance on existing scholarship, the book nevertheless offers much insight into an important aspect of Tokugawa culture, and so should appeal to readers with a wide range of interests in this period of Japanese history.
