Atsuko Sakaki provides a welcome challenge to the standard narrative of Sino-Japanese relations. She reconsiders through an analysis of Japanese and Chinese texts from the tenth to the twentieth century the typical narrative of Sino-Japanese relations. In particular, she focuses on “how Japanese writers and readers revised or in many cases even devised rhetoric to present ‘Chineseness’ and how this practice has helped form and transform the discursive self-fashioning of the Japanese” (p. 1). Through the incorporation of postcolonial and feminist theory regarding ideas of “nation” and “culture,” Sakaki shows that the relationship between Japan and China has been a two-way exchange in both premodern and modern times; the contrary assumption, she argues, was necessary for constructing concepts of “nation” and “national culture,” especially Japan's need to define itself and its culture. Sakaki looks at the Sino-Japanese relationship mainly from the “plane” of Japan because, as she explains, “Since ‘Japan’...

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