In short-although she does not state this-Napier is constructing, in the Foucauldian sense, a genealogy of ideas. imagination Japanese women as sexual objects the fantasy explosion of the 1990s anime fan conventions in the United States the issues of cultural identification and Orientalism and the problem of "soft power" and the question of sacred space.
To this end, the book's chapters cover Japonisme from Claude Monet to Vincent van Gogh collecting Japan as utopia and dystopia in the U.S.
This book is, then, an attempt to analyze the cultural history of the creative imaginings inspired in the West by Japan and its aesthetic products since the state opened its doors to the outside (meaning Western) world in 1853. It is a spirited attempt to bring together all these areas in one sustained analysis, an effort she herself admits recalls Oscar Wilde's quotation: "The whole of Japan is pure invention." 2 That is, it is not that Japan as a modern nation-state does not exist but that Japan as imagined by many in the West does not exist, just as Tibet as Shangri-la does not. 1 This current book combines her interests in literature, film (anime especially), the fantastic in general, and Japan and modernity with the added themes of globalization and Western fan culture. From Impressionism to Anime represents a further development of the ideas Susan Napier has written about in two well-known and frequently cited books on fantasy in Japan, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature and Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle.
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