"Hijikata Tatsumi, one of the co-founders of the butô movement in avant-garde dance, did not only dance and choreograph: he also wrote, and language is a key part of all early butô dance. The chapter on Hijikata links this book to my earlier book on Japanese surrealist poetry, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism, showing how experimental arts in the 1920s-1930s that took place in language move in the 1960s to experiments with the body. There is a sad tendency to read Japanese arts without taking into account the fact that the artists themselves were also prolific and thoughtful theorists of their own work embedded in a rich and transnational discursive context. Experimental Arts, along with works by other researchers today, tries to start to fix some of that imbalance."

Recommended by Miryam Sas, Professor of Comparative Literature and Film & Media and author of Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan.