This fascinating book explores Charles Longfellow’s travels in Japan from 1871–73 and his return, laden with curios, photos, and tattoos, to the Boston home of his illustrious father, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It also marks a milestone in author Christine Guth’s own impressive journey from the kind of “traditional connoisseurial concerns” emphasized during her graduate training to the complex and compelling world of “visual cultural studies” (xii). Over the last decade or so the experience of Americans in Meiji-era Japan has been much examined in popular books like Christopher Benfey’s lively The Great Wave (New York: Random House, 2003) and in soberly academic works on American Orientalism. The collecting and display of Japanese art during the same period have similarly garnered attention. Yet even in this increasingly well-trod territory, Guth’s study breaks important new ground. Broadly conceived, carefully researched, and thoughtfully constructed, Longfellow’s Tattoos is essential reading for anyone interested in the early history of cultural relations between America and Japan.

Guth’s book expands on earlier scholarship in several critical ways. The author focuses on the 1860s and 1870s, an era long overlooked by cultural historians of Japan, in contrast to the last decades of the nineteenth century. Longfellow’s Tattoos provides intimate glimpses into this period before travel to Japan was associated with elite cultural pursuits and spirituality, before Japanese art was formally classified and professionally collected, and before opinions about Japanese aesthetics congealed among American tastemakers. Guth provides the first sustained, sophisticated exploration of this seminal epoch in American Japanism. In particular, the book paints a rich picture of the life of Western “globe-trotters” in Yokohama in the decade after the American Civil War. Because her subject is America as much as or more than it is Japan, Guth carefully sets Longfellow and the larger issues of tourism, photography, and so forth within post-bellum American society when the practices and values of the Gilded Age were ascendant.

Using Charley Longfellow’s experience as her guide, Guth subtly explores and carefully connects the affiliated realms of traveling, photographing, collecting, acquiring tattoos, and displaying foreign souvenirs at home. Although travel, photography, and institutional acquisition and display are well-known topics within studies of cultural imperialism, Guth’s focus on private collecting, body art, and domestic furnishing is novel. More importantly, this analysis is illuminating in its revelation of the ad hoc, idiosyncratic, and contradictory ways in which Japan was first apprehended. A chapter is devoted to each of these activities, which themselves are ways of knowing Japan and displaying knowledge of it. In each case, Guth first sketches the broad outlines of the activity or domain of knowledge. She introduces key concepts from recent critical writing, but does so with an admirably light touch. Guth then presents Charley Longfellow’s own experience. Particularly intriguing are the chapters “Embodying Japan” and “Domesticating Japan,” where Guth reads Longfellow’s personal deployment of Japan as a place that simultaneously fosters feelings of fantasy, power, relaxation, sexual liberation, authenticity of experience, subversion of patriarchal authority, protest against high civilization, connections with high artistry, and personal identification with the collective achievements of colonialism.

It is one of the subtle triumphs of the book that Guth does not try to align prevailing theoretical constructs of Orientalism, a putatively “real” Japan, the orthodox experience of Japan by other travelers and collectors, and the specific experiences of Charley Longfellow. In the end, Longfellow’s experience sheds light on broader practices, but it remains his own as Guth wisely refuses to treat his experience as paradigmatic. Although some readers may prefer a more cohesive narrative and more pointed argument, Guth consistently avoids procrustean solutions, letting her material lead to different or even equivocal conclusions. For example, Guth sets Longfellow in the context of foreign travel in the late nineteenth century and the “rhetoric of tourism.” She presents academic arguments on authentic experience of tourism versus the mere commodification of culture and experience. However, she ultimately resists the now fashionable dismissal of tourist writing as wish-fulfilling nostalgia. As a result of this essentially eclectic strategy, the reader confronts a range of ideas, acts, and interpretations. This hybrid approach parallels and underscores Guth’s fundamental point: the recuperation of “eclectic Victorian domestic taste in Japanese art” (xix) from its dismissal by both late-nineteenth-century Bostonians’ romantic views of Japan and from proscriptive modernist distinctions between serious high art and nearly everything else.

The tension implicit in Guth’s desire to break from familiar categories and conclusions, and the authorial need to summarize (often based on scarce information), is echoed in the friction that seems to have existed between Charley Longfellow and his famous father—between a “misfit” and an exulted member of the establishment. Although Henry Wadsworth deployed his son’s travels—and, more concretely, the Japanese curios that he brought home—as part of the poet’s own self-presentation as a model citizen, the feeling of an animating conflict between father and son pervades each chapter here. Nonetheless, Charley Longfellow is often only a ghostly presence in a book that begins with his name. It is perhaps the book’s one notable lacuna that Charley Longfellow’s biography is minimized and his interior life remains largely opaque. Although one imagines the author scouring her sources for new information on Longfellow, much of the material on his travels and the suppositions about his motivations come from the book Charles Appleton Longfellow: Twenty Months in Japan, 1871 (Cambridge, Mass.: Friends of the Longfellow House, 1998), edited by Christine Laidlaw. Given the centrality of Longfellow to Guth’s study, it would be useful to know more about the man behind the tattoos, about his life prior to 1871 and after 1873, about his subsequent journeys to Japan in 1865 and 1891, about the totality of his collecting, and how it came about that much of his collection was scattered. However, these absences, along with a few questionable pronouncements or statements that lack corroborating evidence, are more than offset by the wealth of information and the complexity of the analysis. The book is copiously illustrated, and even though many of the black-and-white reproductions are slightly fuzzy, their content wonderfully illuminates the text.

Longfellow’s Tattoos represents a benchmark publication for Western art historians studying Japan. In a field that encourages narrow focus in subject and publication for a narrow audience, this broadly engaging book shows the ample rewards of intellectual curiosity and an adventurous professional spirit. More specifically, Guth’s latest work is a significant step on a trajectory from tightly circumscribed conceptions of art history to the far richer realm of cultural studies utilizing art. Moreover, when a respected American scholar, who heretofore has published primarily on Japanese art within the confines of Japanese culture, takes the self-reflexive step of analyzing the history of American attitudes toward Japanese art, this act signals a critical shift within the discipline. Several other scholars—for instance, Julia Meech with her studies of Frank Lloyd Wright and other American collectors of Japanese art—have pursued this avenue, but Longfellow’s Tattoos lends a critical weight and historical depth to this enterprise. Finally, Guth’s thoughtful consideration of tattoos, bric-a-brac, and other ephemera as well as of a collector who falls well outside the pantheon of respected Japanophiles clarifies an important new moment in American-Japanese cultural relations. This successful study leaves no doubt about the dynamic and diverse nature of the first sustained encounter of Americans with Japan by paying serious attention to the most essential cultural activities—traveling, looking, acquiring—and the most basic sites of display—the body and the home.