Japanese Avant-Garde Book Design – ‘The New Woman’ in Japan

Kitagawa, Kusahiko. 北川草彦.

Onna no nioi to kaori. 女の匂ひと香.

Tōkyō, Shun’yōdō, Shōwa 6 [1931].

270 pages, 60 unnumbered pages of plates.

25,5 x 21 cm. Bound in western style in cloth with decorated jacket.

EUR 650

The book by Kusahiko Kitagawa (1894–1968) is part of the pre-war literary movements in Japan which, in the wake of the ‘Ero-Guro-Nansensu’ trend of the time (eroticism, the grotesque, nonsense), engaged intensively and often provocatively with modern Western customs.It is a popular science and essay-style treatise on modernisation, eroticism and consumer culture in the West during the 1920s and early 1930s.

It sheds light on the rapidly changing role of women in modern society. It examines in depth topics such as Western cosmetics, perfumes, fashion (e.g. the changing perception of nudity) and the customs in nightclubs, cinemas and salons. The Japanese public was fascinated by the figure of the ‘Moga’ (Modern Girl) and eagerly devoured reports on the debauched, ‘neurotic’ and vibrant life in the metropolises of New York, Berlin and Paris. Kitagawa Kusahiko catered precisely to this market, which is why the book was, at the time, a typical product of Tokyo’s urban popular culture.

The book cover and jacket deserve closer analysis as wonderful examples of avant-garde book design. The designer remains at this point unknown, but the research continues.

Outside Japan, I can only locate one copy: Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Both the dust jacket and the text pages – but not the plate pages – show a few scattered foxing spots; the only copy I have been able to trace on the Western market is more heavily browned and is now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

The extremely rare dust jacket with minimal edge imperfections.