Shifting between Kon Wajiro’s own work and that of central literary figures around him, and between Kon’s time and our own, this book does much to redress the lack of English-language scholarship on Kon and his idiosyncratic but broadly influential writings. Thouny provides an incisive reading of Kon’s approach, and also puts it into action. Along the way he carries us through some of the central threads of Kon’s work, from a re-reading of the idea of dwelling as a liberating condition, to an insistence on the ongoing importance of urban form as the only real site within which to find real potential for openness and change—including today. This is a deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking work.

Thomas Looser, New York University

In this expansive book, Christophe Thouny brings a planetary perspective to urban studies in a highly generative reading of Tokyo’s urban milieu. Taking urban ethnographer Kon Wajiro’s modernology as one of many energizing theoretical touchstones, Thouny argues that by examining urban dwelling as a planetary endeavor, we can rightly frame urban dwelling as perpetual movement and overcome the limiting parameters of scholarship that frames Tokyo and Japan studies through national identity. In describing how Kon creates an urban cartography of movement, Thouny also handily redefines the work of key authors—Mori Ogai, Nagai Kafu, and others—who made Tokyo their textual landscape in early twentieth-century Japan. Tokyo’s urbanites—their dwellings and their movements—are refreshingly depicted as an urban situation that is not cosmopolitan, but planetary.

Christine Marran, University of Minnesota