"Japan on the Silk Road can be viewed as trail-blazing in the English-language literature as it brings together historiographic accounts from Western, Eurasian and Japanese authors as well as different intellectual disciplines, ranging from political history to translation studies. (...) All chapters introduce under-researched archival materials, many located in Japan, including primary and secondary sources in Japanese, German, Turkish and other languages, with a particular focus on the literary aspect of cultural exchange: literature (including travel writing), linguistics and philology. At the same time, the work succeeds in being integrative without becoming excessively eclectic and constitutes a culturally andlinguistically nuanced inquiry. Moreover, given the sheer scope of the rare sources examined, the book’s unquestioned merit is in unearthing these abundant overlooked treasures and using them as the basis for a detailed synthesis." - Nikolay Murashkin, in: Europe-Asia Studies, 71:2, 334-336