"In 1854, Commodore Perry and his Black Ships steamed into
Yokohama Bay to force Japan open at gunpoint," writes William
Deresiewicz, who teaches English at Yale. "Within 14 years,
Japan had embarked on a crash program of modernization. The
opening of the Japanese mind incited, inevitably, a
reciprocal awakening in the American one."
Christopher Benfey's book tells the story of the "gifted,
intrepid men and women, American and Japanese," who were at
"the hot edge where two very different cultures were coming
into contact" during the half-century before World War I,
says Deresiewicz. "The lives of certain key figures unfold
across the whole arc of the book, attaining something
approaching the weight of fiction," he comments.
Describing the intersections between these peoples' lives,
Deresiewicz writes, "Kakuzo Okakura, the connoisseur, curator
and cultural historian mentored by Ernest Fenollosa, the
Tokyo philosophy professor instrumental in shaping Japanese
fine arts policy, mentors in turn John La Farge, the painter
most responsible for bringing Japanese aesthetic ideas and
methods to American art."
"The structure is symphonic," writes Deresiewicz, "a symphony
not only of characters but of ideas." Benfey "brings to his
subject a scholar's thoroughness, a critic's astuteness and a
storyteller's sense of drama."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/books/review/20DERESIT.html?8bu