Table of contents : Contents Acknowledgments Part I. Contexts of Strangeness Chapter 1. Strange Interpretations Chapter 2. Contexts of Strangeness in Seventeenth-Century Japan Part II. Discourses on Difference in the Eighteenth Century Chapter 3. Strange Tastes Cultural Eccentricity and Its Vanguard Chapter 4. Strange Thoughts: A Confluence of Intellectual Heterodoxies Chapter 5. Eccentrics of Recent Times and Social Value Biography Reinvents the Eccentric Part III. Finishers and Failures of the Nineteenth Century Chapter 6. Strangeness in the Early Nineteenth Century Commercialism, Conservatism, and Diffusion Chapter 7. Reevaluating Strangeness in Late Tokugawa Notes Glossary Bibliography Index About the Author