Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology by Annika A. Culver (review)

Abstract

the experiments of those authors mining the popular/subcultural territory of the ero-guro-nansensu mode.3 Even with the narrow canon of authors examined here, Mitchell goes so far as to assert that “one thing they all had in common was that they no longer produced modernist works after the 1920s” (p. 239)—a statement that would foreclose the ample potential of reading Kawabata’s Yukiguni (Snow Country; 1935–1937) or Tanizaki’s Kagi (The Key; 1956), for instance, as modernist works. Nevertheless, Mitchell has presented a coherent and stimulating account of the four authors’ works under discussion, as well as an approach to the study of modernism that can, one hopes, be both appreciated and contested by future scholars.