The British Museum holds one of the most comprehensive collections of Japanese art outside Japan—some 40,000 objects, assembled over a century and a half since Japonisme first gripped European collectors in the late-19th century. The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, marking its own centenary this year, is bringing a selection of these masterworks home: Edo-period paintings on folding screens, hanging scrolls, and hand scrolls, as well as prints by Utamaro, Sharaku, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. The show is as much about the history of that cultural exchange as it is about the objects themselves, and thus explores the collectors and curators who built the collection, and the ongoing conversation between Japanese art and the Western institutions that hold so much of it. —Elena Clavarino