Any businessperson who takes a flight from either Beijing or Tokyo to New York will travel east for hours. On return, this same person will fly west for hours. From such a perspective, the term Far East might incline one to ask, “far to the east of where exactly?” Of course, when we bring up the Far East, even when it is a Chinese or Japanese scholar speaking, we mean places that are far to the east of Western Europe. The Far East is, yes, a Eurocentric geographic designation. This study eschews what a reader might expect to be a postcolonial theoretical treatment of such Eurocentric thinking (and the attendant admonishments) and instead focuses on “the degree to which East Asia fascinated, inspired, and challenged a relatively weak and peripheral Europe in the early modern period” (xv). As this study holds throughout, the Edward Said thesis, taken too far east to China and Japan, very much seems a square peg for various round holes. The lords of the Ming dynasty saw England, if they saw England at all, as marginal and insignificant. The daimyo of Japan received the English Protestant cousins of the earlier Portuguese sailors and Jesuit priests as curious barbarians. If we fast-forward to current times, which this study does in its second part, then it may well be that we are in the Pacific century—for example, the iconic Western Shakespeare, though beloved in China and Japan, is a Shakespeare remade and customized in any way Chinese and Japanese artists see fit. Global domains of economic and cultural power supersede any quaint notion of what English Renaissance culture ought to be.

This book would be of interest to anyone who studies English Renaissance studies, East-West relationships, and East Asian studies, and would also engage those interested in either early modern travel writing or Shakespearean performance history. First, this study examines and adeptly manages early modern English perspectives on the distant East and the disparate and usually spurious notions that the English had about China and Japan. The decryption of John Dee's dream of Cathay, running as it does through early modern English obsessions with alchemy and other examples of mystical overreach, and toward forming a supernatural but semi-accurate chart to an exquisite Cathay, is rendered in this analysis with no small degree of sophistication.

This study also examines the records of Englishmen who traveled to the East during the Renaissance period, and also the reception of writings and reports and how the travelers themselves were received. Attempts at contact and trade come unhinged at some point. The selected quips about Chinese trade from Ben Jonson remind one of the off-brand Japanese caricatures in The Mikado. The ill-founded and aggressive attempts at such trade by John Wendell led to theatrical spectacles of power on the Chinese side contrasted with dumb shows of greeting from English traders who never bothered to learn even the basics of the Chinese language. The broadly researched and intriguing section on William Adams in Japan presents records that challenge the standard heroic accounts of Adams's life by ideologically inspired biographers. Samurai William may have been more the crafty and even duplicitous trader than an English hero destined to enlighten the great Shōgun. The second part of this study reviews how Shakespeare is received and interpreted in current-day China and Japan. The analyses of such productions as Lin Zhaohua's heavy-metal adaptation of Coriolanus are engaging, as are the portraits from Japanese Shakespearean theater and the contributions of such innovators as Yukio Ninagawa.

An old Japanese proverb reminds us that if you chase two rabbits, you end up with no rabbits. This study argues for an “open-ended” theoretical approach that “allows for contradictions and complexity” (xxvi). This open-endedness, which is entirely appropriate, may be why this study, at times, seems to be chasing one too many rabbits. Perhaps these multiple chases cannot be avoided in the labyrinths of East-West comparative studies, here trying to outflank postcolonial theoretical maxims that loom by the way. This said, this study still stands as a well-researched and engagingly tenacious journey into a vexed but vital realm of cross-cultural inquiry.