Davis’ book fits seamlessly and snugly into a body of scholarship describing prostitution in modern history. She writes specifically about prostitution in the second half of the nineteenth century, but Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan aligns with a cluster of books in English, such as those about Japan by Mihalopoulos and Stanley, and those about other countries by Walkowitz, Hershatter, and Levine.1 Their similarity arises less from shared subject matter than an epistemological perspective that is reflected in Davis’ stated aim of tracing “the symbol of the prostitute as a project of nation and empire building,” and thus “untangle how ideas about pleasure work intersected with Japan’s transformation into a civilized and modern nation” (6). In other words, although it might be its topic, prostitution is not ultimately the unit of analysis of the historical scholarship into which Davis’ book snugly fits.
Prostitution (or “sex work,” “pleasure work,” “pleasure...