This fascinating book explores Charles Longfellow’s travels in Japan from 1871–73 and his return, laden with curios, photos, and tattoos, to the Boston home of his illustrious father, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It also marks a milestone in author Christine Guth’s own impressive journey from the kind of “traditional connoisseurial concerns” emphasized during her graduate training to the complex and compelling world of “visual cultural studies” (xii). Over the last decade or so the experience of Americans in Meiji-era Japan has been much examined in popular books like Christopher Benfey’s lively The Great Wave (New York: Random House, 2003) and in soberly academic works on American Orientalism. The collecting and display of Japanese art during the same period have similarly garnered attention. Yet even in this increasingly well-trod territory, Guth’s study breaks important new ground. Broadly conceived, carefully researched, and thoughtfully constructed, Longfellow’s Tattoos is essential reading for anyone interested in the early history of cultural relations between America and Japan. Guth’s book expands on earlier scholarship in several critical ways. The author focuses on the 1860s and 1870s, an era long overlooked by cultural historians of Japan, in contrast to the last decades of the nineteenth century. Longfellow’s...