Abstract

“Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence?” Vivian asks Cyril in Oscar Wilde’s Decay of Lying (1889).

If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists… . The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people… . And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere. ¹