In 1968, the Mono-ha artist Sekine Nobuo dug a perfectly cylindrical hole, 2.7 meters in depth and 2.2 meters in diameter, in a park in Kobe. Next to it, he placed an earthen column of identical dimensions, giving the impression of a simple transfer of matter, a sculpture plucked from the earth. Presenting earth as earth, this work was intended as a negation of the artist’s privileged role as creator, as a critique of the art market, and as a questioning of the modernist art object. This and other works of its generation constituted an attack on modernism that was, argues Thomas Havens, the assertion of a postcolonial and “post-Western” voice in contemporary Japanese art. Havens’s book Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-Garde Rejection of Modernism is a history of the arts in postwar Japan, and covers enormous ground, treating painting, sculpture, performance art, music, and dance from 1945 to 1960. Like his previous book in this field, Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), this new volume provides a social history of the period, and draws disparate artistic fields together through complex social ties. Relying upon archival research and interviews with...