7 An honorable mention shall be made to the lovely figure of little Hassan whose images appear only in the second edition.ixand therefore likely doubly distorted. Nonetheless, despite the inaccuracies resulting from his lack of firsthand experience, Suzuki’s impressive performance pleased his clients, as evi-denced by the increase in the number of illustrations in the subsequent edition.7 Moreover, let us be reminded that Hasegawa deliberately chose traditional Japanese woodblock illustrations for his publications to appeal to Western consumers. Exoticism and nostalgia were strategically exploited as the tools for his commerce. Thus, when he takes up a foreign story as in the case of A Nile Voyage of Recovery, a further complication of subject-ob-ject relations between images of the Other and the self-image is at play. In some of Suzuki’s illustrations, an image of the Middle East as the Other is layered over an image of the self as the Other, akin to the technique of multiple exposure in photography. One can see this, for instance, in the distinctively Eastern-Asian facial features of Suzuki’s characters, or on the characteristically asymmetric compositions of his art. In the following pages, the first edition of A Nile Voyage of Recovery is presented from cover to cover. Of course, a reprint on plain papers does not do justice to the unique quality of the crepe-paper book, the fine wrinkles of which can be still noticed on the surface of each page. For the reader’s convenience, we have made annotations on the differences with the second edition, on most proper nouns, and on religious or cultural matters. We hope this reprint contributes to attracting attention to Hasegawa’s long-forgotten crepe-paper books from the Meiji period, shedding new light on his editorial genius. It will hopefully also lead to new clues about the mysterious subsequent years of the authors.
元のページ ../index.html#13