In the context of today’s increasingly global art world, Midori Yoshimoto’s excellent and timely study, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, fills a lacuna in the history of Japanese art in the West as well as in the history of the avant-garde more generally. Into Performance offers fascinating insight into the period between the Zen appropriations of Western artists in the 1950s and the identity art that reigned in the 1980s and 1990s, now so frequently subsumed under the more neutral (or, as some argue, neutralizing) rubric of globalism. The five Japanese women artists who are the subjects of Yoshimoto’s text—Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, and Shigeko Kubota—left Japan to pursue careers in New York City in the late 1950s and early1960s. Yet ultimately, each found herself marginalized—on the fringes of both Japanese and Western societies. Indeed they were the first generation of Japanese women artists to work outside Japan. Neither Japanese-American nor regarded as wholly Japanese by their compatriots, they occupied positions now not uncommon, but novel at the time. While Kusama and Ono have been subjects of substantial English-language monographs in recent years, Saito and Shiomi are considered almost exclusively within the context...