Many voices, partial worlds: On some conventions and innovations in the ethnographic portrayal of Japan

Stanzas should he linked to each other through fragrance, reverberation, semblance, flow, fancy or some other indefinable quality.

Bashō (quoted in Ueda, 1985:63)

Introduction This paper examines some of the wider implications of three recently published ethnographies about Japan: Liza Dalby’s (1985) Geisha, Brian Moeran’s (1985) Ōkubo Diary, and Oliver Statler’s (1983) Japanese Pilgrimage. Yet this is more than a review essay. This is because the paper’s aim is to relate an examination of the aesthetic and literary dimensions of these ethnographies-that is, the ways in which they have been written and can be read-to the wider problems of both anthropological understanding and the portrayal of Japan.