Tokyo seems like an ultra modern—even postmodern—city, with its inventive skyscrapers and digitized surfaces. But it is also a city where past, present, and future coexist—where backstreets both inspire science fiction and host wooden temples, fox shrines, and Buddhist statues that evoke past ages. In this addition to Oxford's
Cityscapes
series, Stephen Mansfield explores a city rich in diversity, tracing its evolution from the founding of its massive stone citadel, when it was known as Edo, through the rise of a merchant class who transformed the town into a center for art, to the emergence of modern Tokyo. Mansfield traces a city of print masters, Kabuki theater, novelists and great architecture, which has overcome many disasters, from the 1923 earthquake through the fire-bombings of World War II to the 1995 subway gas attacks.