The appearance in recent years of an increasing number of monographs dealing specifically with matters of music in Japan presents exciting implications for the evolution of area studies, particularly as the field continues to distance itself from past tendencies to strive for the revelation of a transparent, and even transhistorical, subject called “Japan(ese).” Music is always already contextually and historically specific, and the ways in which many of these recent texts forego illustrations of the “national subject” in favor of an examination of different musics and the ways in which these may be understood by heterogeneous social actors presents scholars with valuable insights into how we might pursue what Harry Harootunian has called “different histories,” and how we might go about revealing some of the ways in which these actors may pursue (or flee) a praxis of “living off the page.”6 While most of these newer works have provided...
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