Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishonen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature

by Jeffrey Angles

Despite its centuries-long tradition of literary and artistic depictions of love between men, around the fin de siècle Japanese culture began to portray same-sex desire as immoral. Writing the Love of Boys looks at the response to this mindset during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological.


Jeffrey Angles focuses on key writers, examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men. He traces the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet Murayama Kaita, the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shiro, the anthropologist Iwata Jun’ichi, and the avant-garde innovator Inagaki Taruho.


Writing the Love of Boys shows how these authors interjected the subject of male–male desire into discussions of modern art, aesthetics, and perversity. It also explores the impact of their efforts on contemporary Japanese culture, including the development of the tropes of male homoeroticism that recur so often in Japanese girls’ manga about bishonen love.

Genres: Japan, Nonfiction, LGBT, Literary Criticism, Japanese Literature

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Vivian · Rating 5 out of 5]

In depth research of the subject matter with plenty of solid references. This book is only going to appeal to a limited number of readers, but it is really well done and more accessible and engaging than many PhD defenses converted into a book. I have over 200 bookmarks in my copy and I enjoyed reading it immensely.

"although a world where the regime of normalcy prevails is inevitable, there is always a segment of the population that is sacrificed to this conventional social order."45 (Quoting Jim Reichert)

[Nabilah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of the literary figures described in this book are creeps. If they're not fash, they're pederast or both! but they and their works still hold such a huge influence to contemporary Japanese culture today. One cannot swing a dead cat in tracing modern Japanese culture without hitting any of these people so, I don't quite know what to make of it. I feel quite disgusted honestly. I don't like to make moral condemnation like this but at the same time, I have to take a stance. This work really confirmed my suspicions and fears about these Japanese literati of the postwar era.

But please don't see this review as my condemnation of the author's work. It is quite enlightening and well written. I learned a lot.