Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and Meisho Zue in Late Tokugawa Japan.

• Author: Bassoe, Pedro

Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and Meisho Zue in Late Tokugawa Japan. By ROBERT GOREE. Cambridge, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2020. Pp. 400. $65.

Robert Goree's Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and Meisho Zue in Late Tokugawa Japan is a tour de force of interdisciplinary scholarship that draws on studies of literature, history, art history, cartography, and visual culture in order to create the first comprehensive account of meisho zue [phrase omitted] (illustrated collections of famous places), one of the most popular genres of illustrated literature in the Tokugawa period (1603-1867). As Goree puts it, meisho zue are "disciplinary orphans" (p. 10), or texts whose formal composition renders them irreducible to a simple description or translated term, as they combine formal characteristics of such disparate genres of printed matter as maps, travel guides, topographies, visual encyclopedias, literary histories, and cultural primers. Printed Landmarks appears at a time when attention to illustrated books and the relationship between text and image in Japanese literature is experiencing surging popularity, as studies of both early modern (or Tokugawa period) and modern illustrated literature and visual culture from Japan have begun to appear on a yearly basis, as seen in recent monographs by scholars such as Nozomi Naoi, Daniel Poch, Miya Mizuta Elise Lippit, Erin Schoneveld, Glynne Walley, Michael Emmerich, and Adam Kern. Goree's book is distinguished by its focus on a genre that is "widely known but only in a superficial way" (p. 15), as the present author can also attest, but whose influence and reach in the early modern publishing industry are clearly demonstrated by this book.

Goree's work appears as something of a gamble, one that, as he notes, has "no foundational study or critique to build on" (p. 15) and one that requires thorough familiarity with fields as diverse as cartography, literary studies, and art history, not to mention the vast archive of meisho zue. It is to the reader's benefit that Goree is successful in his endeavor, as this monograph not only presents the first comprehensive description of meisho zue as a distinctive visual-literary genre in any language (p. 28) but is also thoroughly convincing in its argument that meisho zue are in fact a far more important genre in terms of popularity and influence than scholars have previously acknowledged. Throughout his book, Goree combines technical knowledge from multiple fields of research into a coherent analytical system defined by rigorous methodology and a precise...