"A fine job of introducing this wealth of historical material to the general reader, serving as [a guidebook] orientating even the first-time traveler to one of the great cities of the early modern world. At the core of his book lie a series of beautifully reproduced graphic images of Edo. These images span a variety of media, from woodblock prints to etchings to oil paintings to folding screens to gold-leafed hand scrolls. They are complemented by photos from the present-day, schematized maps, and CGI reconstructions of lost monuments. In this sense the book resembles, at the most superficial level, a particularly beautiful Fodor's Guide to a vanished city. Screech adds incisive commentary and illuminating vignettes to these images. There are moments when he sounds like a seasoned local tour guide, who can recommend a great little restaurant tucked beside the Mokubo Temple, point you toward the best erotic bookseller in the red-light district. He is particularly deft at dissecting the numerous jokes, puns, and satirical jibes that Edoites were so fond of.

Screech has a gift for blurring the line between the metaphysical and the aesthetic in such a way as to make a radically alien worldview come alive to modern readers. His deeper point is that Edo existed in the imagination as well as in the flesh, and that this imagined Edo was the product of a lavish textual and visual culture that spread far beyond the city to the furthest corners of the realm.".