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Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo Spiral-Bound |

Timon Screech

$55.99 - Free Shipping
Tokyo today is one of the world’s mega-cities and the center of a scintillating, hyper-modern culture—but not everyone is aware of its past. Founded in 1590 as the seat of the warlord Tokugawa family, Tokyo, then called Edo, was the locus of Japanese trade, economics, and urban civilization until 1868, when it mutated into Tokyo and became Japan’s modern capital. This beautifully illustrated book presents important sites and features from the rich history of Edo, taken from contemporary sources such as diaries, guidebooks, and woodblock prints. These include the huge bridge on which the city was centered; the vast castle of the Shogun; sumptuous Buddhist temples, bars, kabuki theaters, and Yoshiwara—the famous red-light district.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Original Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 272 pages
ISBN-10: 1789142334
Item Weight: 1.89 lbs
Dimensions: 6.8 x 1.1 x 8.8 inches
"A fine job of introducing this wealth of historical material to the general reader, serving as [a guidebook] orientating even the first-time traveler to one of the great cities of the early modern world. . . . At the core of his book lie a series of beautifully reproduced graphic images of Edo. These images span a variety of media, from woodblock prints to etchings to oil paintings to folding screens to gold-leafed hand scrolls. They are complemented by photos from the present-day, schematized maps, and CGI reconstructions of lost monuments. In this sense the book resembles, at the most superficial level, a particularly beautiful Fodor’s Guide to a vanished city. . . . Screech adds incisive commentary and illuminating vignettes to these images. There are moments when he sounds like a seasoned local tour guide, who can recommend a great little restaurant tucked beside the Mokubo Temple, point you toward the best erotic bookseller in the red-light district. He is particularly deft at dissecting the numerous jokes, puns, and satirical jibes that Edoites were so fond of. . . .  Screech has a gift for blurring the line between the metaphysical and the aesthetic in such a way as to make a radically alien worldview come alive to modern readers. . . . His deeper point is that Edo existed in the imagination as well as in the flesh, and that this imagined Edo was the product of a lavish textual and visual culture that spread far beyond the city to the furthest corners of the realm."
-Los Angeles Review of Books
Timon Screech is professor of the history of art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of many books including Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820, also published by Reaktion Books.