The ‘fascinating’ thing about fascism, to use Susan Sontag's famous word, is the way it supercharges politics with aesthetics and religion – to such an extent that politics itself becomes almost unrecognizably transformed into something approaching an aesthetic mood or a spiritual exaltation. As Sontag also pointed out, fascism has its gentler side: the cult of beauty, for instance – although the fascist ‘cult of beauty’ does have an inconvenient habit of transmogrifying into a cult of violence and death. Nonetheless, as Alan Tansman shows in the present study, its initial come-on can be gentle and pleasing indeed, particularly in Japanese fascism, which, in its cultural form, often assumes a fascinatingly seductive guise by clothing itself in the finest raiment of the native literary and artistic tradition. In stark contrast to the Nazi taste for Wagnerian ‘sublime grandeur’ (as in Leni Riefenstahl's Hitlerglorifying film, Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the will, 1934]), ‘the aesthetics of Japanese fascism manifest a melancholy tonality’ stamped by ‘popular Buddhist sensibility’ (p. 15). In other words, Japanese fascism, quite naturally, assumes its own national cultural style, which is often ‘the traditionally sanctioned aesthetics of the pathos of melancholy loss, revolving around the affective pull of a feminine figure – a figure that appears across culture, whether in a complex modernist essay or a sentimental popular movie’ (p. 15).

Needless to say, this makes the Japanese fascist aesthetic rather less obvious to us, rather less easily detectable in literary or art works, than its pompous, bombastic, and triumphalistic German and Italian equivalents. Although there have been more overtly political, more ‘European-style’ Japanese fascist writers – Mishima Yukio, for instance – in this study Tansman is uninterested in an over-obvious fascist such as Mishima, whom he dismisses as ‘more a figure of parody than a force of politics’ (p. 257). To prove his point about both the subtlety and the pervasiveness of the Japanese fascist aesthetic, he prefers to focus on those who seem more or less apolitical at first glance, putative ‘pure aesthetes’ such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Shiga Naoya, Kawabata Yasunari, and Kobayashi Hideo, because ‘it is precisely those creations of the imagination most resistant to political readings that best reveal the aesthetic strains of fascism … In these works we can see ideology refracted through beauty and discern its consequences for the quality of social life’ (p. 1).