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The Chrysanthemum and the Fish: Japanese Humor Since the Age of the Shoguns. By HOWARD HIBBETT. Tokyo and London: Kodansha International, 2002. 208 pp. $28.00 (cloth).
The Chrysanthemum and the Fish is an erudite yet immensely readable introduction to the comic tradition in Japan. The title parodies that of Ruth Benedict's influential 1946 study of Japanese cultural patterns, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). In Howard Hibbett's book, the fish is emblematic of the mundane, the carnal, the gustatory-forces that coexist with and stand in opposition to elite culture-and, as such, represents humor. Hibbett begins his survey by refuting some of the ways that Japanese humor has been understood by Japanese and Western observers in an effort to disabuse readers of the idea that Japan is a land of the mirthless. He avoids reductive, essentializing definitions of both the Japanese "national character" and the nature of humor itself, arguing that Japanese humor is varied and heterogeneous and is created from the interplay of numerous factors: regional distinctions, literacy and orality, class, and competing social values among them.
In the opening chapter-an extended outline of the rest of the book that could very well stand on its own-Hibbett notes that...