This book provides a corrective to existing scholarship on eccentric artists by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic strangeness during the mid Edo period. It explains how through the period, eccentricity and madness developed and

"Eccentric artists are the vagaries of humanity that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society.” This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese artists. Postwar scholarship, as it searched for evidence of Japan's modern roots, concluded the opposite. This work corrects the disciplinary (and exclusionary) nature of such interpretations by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic eccentricity during the Edo period (1600-1868).