Rene Magritte has spoken of someone clad "only in the robe of her skin," and this concept of surface as substance is observed by the tattooing tradition of Japan, the craft that created the brocaded skin of which this beautiful book speaks.
The full-body tattoo is, strictly, a kind of undergarment. It is displayed only in the privacy of bed or bath, and it carries with it the same flavor of transgression that the undecorated naked body does (or did) in the West. To be naked is, after all, to dispense with the signs and symbols of "civilization." To further decorate the skin with a private aesthetic vocabulary is to marginalize still further the claims of society.
Philippe Pons is a distinguished chronicler of just this kind of dissent in Japan. His "D'Edo a Tokyo" is not (or is not only) a political history. It describes the entire elaborate class system of the capital, now and then. "Misere et Crime au Japan, du XVII siecle a nos jours" which Gallimard published last year, is a wonderful reportage of those segments of society that official Japan ignores.