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Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature. By Will Bridges. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. 306 pp. ISBN: 978047207442 (cloth).

insight on Japan’s thought, art and culture, Hasegawa’s letters to Noguchi suggest how much the former came to depend on the latter for sympathetic affirmation of his views, something not forthcoming from his Japanese colleagues and peers. The style and contents of Hasegawa’s lettersmight be characterized in Japanese as zappitsu or “idle jottings” flowing from topic to topic, including anecdotes about lives of Zen priests and Daoist eccentrics, reflections on the art of calligraphy, descriptions of local art exhibitions, and samples of poems written by former students. For Hasegawa, these sundry topics could, and should, all be unified under the rubric of “Orientalism,” which he believed to be the greatest gift Japan had to offer Noguchi, and the West in general. “Selected Essays by SaburoHasegawa,” themost substantial section, features more of Hasegawa’s ruminations on a wide array of subjects, including the ink painter Sesshū Tōyō, Song and Yuan dynasty bird-and-flower painting, the art of Piet Mondrian, the architecture of Katsura Imperial Villa, realist painting versus photography, among many others. Sometimes these essays serve to clarify Hasegawa’s ideas, sometimes they further obscure or even contradict them. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in his consideration of Sesshū, the subject of Hasegawa’s Tokyo University of the Arts graduation thesis and the focus of continuous personal and scholarly interest for the length of his life, so much so that Hasegawa carried a reproduction of Sesshū’s Long Landscape (Sansui chōkan) painting like a talisman whenever he traveled abroad (Reader, p. 61). Yet the facts and images of Sesshū that Hasegawa conjures for the reader are often wildly at variance; for example, in one instance he notes that Sesshū “followed in the footsteps of the admirable Chinese painters” (Reader, p. 68), and in another that, “Except for the most superficial resemblance in appearance, Chinese ink paintings and Sesshū’s are completely unrelated,” (Reader, p. 54) finally concluding that “Sesshū was a painter born in Japan. That is all we need to say” (Reader, p. 54). Like the greater “Japan complex” from which he is drawn, Hasegawa’s Sesshū is an idealized creation derivative of but not dependent on the historical version, useful to fulfill whatever anecdotal function Hasegawa requires of him. Yet as capricious as Hasegawa’s views of Japan and its traditional culture may have been, their power to inspire many in the West cannot be questioned. Perhaps Hasegawa’s true legacy is not to be found by parsing his ideas as preserved in the Reader, but rather by exploring their impact on the output of artists like Isamu Noguchi, poets like Gary Snyder, and philosophers like Alan Watts in the 1950s, a time when Western fascination with things Eastern allowed for closer resonance with Hasegawa’s passionate, idiosyncratic “Japanism.”