Advertising Tower

“William Gardner’s Advertising Tower will be a staple of modern Japanese literary studies for years to come. The author’s command of his subject ranges across a broad thematic terrain, moving from the rarefied problems of poetic form to the geography of empire, from the roots of anarchism to the history of commercial advertising… It is Gardner’s effort to appreciate the link between “mass culture” as a formal problem and “the masses” as a historical reality that sets his work apart… Every book contains a record of where an author has been and a foreshadowing of where she might go. Advertising Tower bespeaks an education under the tutelage of some of the world’s best teachers of Japanese literature; it also hints at promising books ahead. I look forward to William Gardner’s next one.”—Gregory Golley, Journal of Japanese Studies