By James Hadfield

Arts & Culture Mar. 23, 2009 - 06:35AM JST ( 2 )

Lafcadio Hearn said it best. Moving to Tokyo in late 1895, the Greco-Irish author railed against “the most horrible place in Japan,” an invented city of “dirty shoes, absurd fashions, wickedly expensive living, airs, vanities, gossip.”

Some might argue that the metropolis hasn’t changed a whole lot since then, soiled footwear notwithstanding. Yet the Tokyo of today would be unrecognizable to Hearn, so radically has it been reshaped during the intervening period. Those familiar traces not erased by earthquakes, fires, floods and wartime bombing have likely fallen foul of the developers who incessantly tinker with the urban landscape, helped along by a collective amnesia which ensures that whatever they knock down next will be swiftly forgotten.

For writers trying to get to grips with the city, the possibilities can be pretty much endless. As Paul Waley writes in his preface to “Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History,” the metropolis “allows you strange freedoms. And the most fundamental of these is perhaps the freedom to read what you will into or onto the city.”

This description makes a provocative start for what turns out to be a rather ordinary, though far from unenlightening, read. Stephen Mansfield’s slim tome is the latest addition to Signal Books’ “Cities of the Imagination” series, in which locations from London to Buenos Aires are framed in terms of their artistic and cultural development. Part history book, part tourist guide, the volumes shy away from the academic rigor of the former — footnotes, proper citations and all that — but lack the functionality of the latter. The result is a weird hybrid that’s most likely to appeal to people resident in, or already familiar with, the city in question.

Mansfield’s contribution to the series is no exception. He races through Tokyo’s history at a fair clip, tracing its evolution from sparsely populated fishing village to the military capital of Edo and on to the shape-shifting metropolis of the present. Throughout, we’re referred to contemporaneous developments in everything from literature and architecture to theater, tattooing, gardening and manga. If you don’t already know your Shinjuku from your shitamachi, the whole thing might get a bit confusing — and the two maps included for reference purposes are, to put it mildly, pretty meager.

It’s an account that’s heavy on namedropping, though rather less so on actual references. This is especially true of the first few chapters, in which Edo period writers, artists and dramatists are mentioned but their work barely discussed, if at all. Fortunately, the quality of some of the anecdotes prevents things from getting too dry and textbook-ish. Few are likely to be unmoved by the eye-opening descriptions of Edo’s sex trade, or forget such colorful characters as Tsunayoshi Tokugawa, the so-called “Dog Shogun,” who kept a harem of 130 male attendants and issued strict edicts forbidding cruelty to animals, on pain of death.

Still, Mansfield really hits his stride when he reaches the Meiji Period (1868-1912), and finds more voices to help him tell his tale. These range from Ichiyo Higuchi — the female novelist who chronicled the lives of Yoshiwara district prostitutes at the end of the 19th century — to a young Rudyard Kipling, wandering the streets and marveling at how “the land pullulated with people.” Literary titans like Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Junichiro Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima also pop up, but the most frequently recurring presence is Kafu Nagai, the prolific author and diarist who chronicled the changes in early-20th century Tokyo with an obsessive eye for detail.

“Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History” is at its most engaging when Mansfield simply steps back and lets these contemporary writers do the talking, stitching the city’s culture and history into a more convincing narrative.

This review originally appeared in Metropolis magazine.