The quests for spiritual fulfillment of the figures profiled here unfold in extraordinary ways. Disaffected by the mercenary state of American culture in the Gilded Age following the Civil War, many of New England's intellectual elite sought a new social order from the largely unfamiliar Japan, a nation whose own intellectuals were in turn looking to shake off years of isolation and forge a new identity as part the international community. Cultural historian Benfey, a professor of English at Mount Holyoke (Degas in New Orleans), seamlessly braids the far-flung adventures of cultural importers/exporters from both countries and offers an enjoyable collection of eclectic and surprising historical narratives about such figures as Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Adams. Benfey traces the importation of Japanese culture to the U.S. back to intrepid pilgrims like Herman Melville, who wrote of exploring Asia's "impenetrable Japans." This curiosity boomed in the cultural confusion after the Civil War, when many Americans felt that European philosophy could advance no further except through mysticism, which the exotic Japan was thought to offer. Benfey relates the lives of several Japanese eccentrics who likewise believed that a foreign culture might provide useful tools for a country similarly in the midst of dramatic change. The cultural exchanges that Benfey describes, at times comic, are tantalizing examples of how nations develop and in what ways they are able to learn from each other. Though Benfey sometimes meanders and indulges in digressions into the decadent lives of 19th-century Boston Brahmins, his account is consistently enjoyable and always informative. (On sale May 6)
