Aesthetic concerns permeate Japanese culture; thus, a comprehensive understanding of Japanese culture requires a comprehensive understanding of Japanese aesthetics. Nguyen achieves just that in this collection. The volume opens with two introductory essays: an excellent overview of central Japanese aesthetic concepts, practices, and their histories by Yuriko Saito, and a comprehensive overview of contents by Nguyen and the contributors to the volume. The 27 original essays are divided into six parts, each covering Japanese aesthetics in combination with another topic, namely philosophy, culture, cultural politics, literature, visual arts, and the legacy of Kuki Shūzō, author of "Iki" no kōzō (The Structure of Iki), 1930, regarded as the most important book on Japanese aesthetics of the 20th century. The strengths of this volume are many, and included among them are its breadth and depth, its deft engagement with both contemporary and historical concepts and issues, and its cross-cultural (East and West) nature. With regard to the last, Western philosophers are used to helping readers understand the Japanese concepts, and Japanese concepts are used to explore issues not usually treated in Western philosophy. This rich cultural/historical reciprocity permeates the book. This reviewer came away with the feeling that a lifetime could fruitfully and joyfully be spent studying this text. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.
— Choice Reviews
“New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics is therefore an invaluable addition to the specific topic at hand, and to the larger field of Japanese studies…. astute … insightful … groundbreaking … In sum, New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics is a major contribution to Japanese studies. It widens the opportunity for non-Japanese specialists to engage with the paradox that is aesthetics itself, and not Japan as a topos. Chapters in the volume will surely intrigue scholars in many disciplines, as well as students, graduate and undergraduate alike.”
— Japanese Language and Literature
This anthology takes us to places Western aesthetics never dreams to go, to taking tea, wrapping boxes, going to war, and seeing martial art as a moral discipline. The conglomeration of articles reflects the complexity and contradictoriness of Japanese history and culture…. The countries of the world, newly bound by the coronavirus, have, I would say, an obligation to get to know each other, and this book helps us get to know Japan by giving us a sense of the breadth and depth of its culture…. [A]esthetics has become global and, therefore, the book under review is important and welcome to Western readers.
— Contemporary Philosophy
A. Minh Nguyen has done a superb editorial service to the book’s readers and made possible a genuinely valuable contribution to the field of Japanese aesthetics. As a whole, the essays are eclectic, enlightening, and educational; they succeed in fulfilling the editor’s claim that the book will “appeal not only to a wide range of humanities scholars but also to graduate and undergraduate students of Japanese aesthetics, art, philosophy, literature, culture, and civilization” (p. xxvi). Individually, the majority of essays make rigorous and enthralling contributions to the literature. In the case of this reviewer, the book reaffirmed, stimulated, and deepened the knowledge and love of Japanese art and culture. New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics will have a like effect in most readers should they adopt the slightest beginner’s mind. In sum, this edited collection speaks to and is witness of the vibrant field of Japanese aesthetics today. No doubt, it will be a point of reference for many years to come.
— Philosophy East and WestThis book is probably the most notable contribution in English to the field of Japanese aesthetics published in this century so far and one of the most significant in the past fifty years.
— The Journal of Japanese StudiesThe book under review and its editor Minh Nguyen have garnered well-deserved praise for what is certainly the most comprehensive recent collection on Japanese aesthetics for an English readership. Throughout its 27 exceptional essays, leading scholars discuss the most salient Japanese aesthetic practices and concepts, often explored in concert with Western philosophies. The editor has done a commendable job arranging the numerous works into six relevant sections, yet these by no means exhaust the array of topics readers will find treated in-depth throughout the volume’s over 400 pages. A great virtue of the collection is that, as the reader proceeds from one essay to the next, additional thematic resonances multiply, thus disclosing still further richness within and between each of the chapters.
— Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy
A. Minh Nguyen’s New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics is an important, comprehensive, and fascinating collection. Beginning with historical and systematic overviews of the philosophical tenets of Japanese aesthetics and treatments of central themes in Japanese art and aesthetics, this is a book of enormous scope, including discussions of traditional art forms such as the tea ceremony, calligraphy, haiku, Nō drama, pottery, and the martial arts, quotidian activities such as gift wrapping, flower arranging, cooking, etiquette, and gardening, and contemporary movements in Japanese literature, film, and the visual arts. This is a book that no student of Japanese aesthetics, whether beginning or advanced, should be without.
— Philip Alperson, Temple UniversityA. Minh Nguyen’s New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics is a kaleidoscope of twenty-seven new contributions on the unrelenting pursuit of elegance across Japanese culture that have been written specifically for this volume by nothing less than a cadre of the world’s most distinguished Japanologists. As it is turned in the hand of the reader, it reveals from a bottomless array of angles the different strategies this always unique and yet porous culture has deployed to enchant the human experience, aspiring as it does to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and the mundane into the sublime.
— Roger T. Ames, Peking UniversityA. Minh Nguyen’s New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics is a most impressive collection. This volume provides important information to all who study Japanese aesthetics. I know of no other book that covers the subject so completely.
— Donald Keene, Columbia UniversityA. Minh Nguyen has put together an important volume that gives us, in one place, the tools to understand the knotty subject of Japanese aesthetics. The most notable scholars address these questions from various perspectives: some of them walk us through the history of aesthetics in Japan, others explicate the broad issues and ramifications of these ideas, while others take us deep into particular artists, genres, and works. This is an impressive achievement of long-lived value.
— Doug Slaymaker, University of KentuckyJapanese aesthetics, famous throughout the world, is more often revered and celebrated than meticulously analyzed. New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics goes beyond surface pleasures to uncover the relations and tensions that shape aesthetic worlds in Japan. Encyclopedic in breadth, the book is a must-have for anyone seeking to better understand this intriguing and elegant domain.
— Kristin Surak, School of Oriental and African StudiesA trove of treasures for thinking across the history of Japanese artistic practice and aesthetic thought, ranging from literature and the visual arts to philosophy, politics, and the aesthetics of daily life, this is a compendious work that will return many readers and introduce many more to the most vital topics and motifs of the Japanese cultural tradition with fresh insights and lucid clarifications of complex matters. A perfect text for reading in and for teaching from.
— Alan Tansman, University of California, Berkeley
