Cover image: Ishikawa Toyonobu, Iro tsubana [Love's tufted grasses], ca. 1750s, frontispiece, woodblock print on paper, collection of Gregory M. Pflugfelder. In this illustration from an eighteenth-century Japanese book, a youth arranges irises, a traditional symbol of young male beauty. His distinctive hairstyle and clothing mark him visually as a wakashu: a male who has graduated from boyhood but not yet achieved adult status. According to early-modern Japanese social semiotics, the topknot was supposed to be bound throughout the remainder of the secular male's life course, whereas the shaved patch of crown would, upon assumption of adulthood, expand forward over the pate, erasing the forelocks. The swinging sleeves of the youth's kimono, with their cherry-blossom design, likewise encode a pre-adult-male status.
Over the course of my career, many individual Journal of Asian Studies articles and bundled sets of pieces published as symposia or forums in these...