In the case of Re-creating Japanese Men, it is possible to judge a book by its cover: this work presents some of the multiple, fluctuating tropes of masculinity adopted by Japanese males from the Edo period through modern times. Arranged into three sections, the book's thirteen articles are not bound together by any one theory or methodology. Rather, it is “the malleability of men, manhood, and masculinity” (p. 16), particularly during periods of sociocultural crisis, that unites these articles.
The cases presented in Section I, “Legacies of the Samurai,” address the relationship between masculinity and militarism. Anne Walthall's “Do Guns have Gender?” places this in context by examining the role of Edo-period guns as signifiers of both (male) gender and (primarily elite) status. Luke Robert's “Name and Honor,” an examination of a seventeenth-century merchant's memoir, might at first seem out of place, but the merchant's self-image was tied directly...
