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Review of "Writing the Love of Boys" in Transformative Works and Cultures »

The online journal Transformative Works and Cultures just ran a special issue about transnational fandoms and boy’s love manga. In it was a review of my book by Emerald King (a name that itself sounds like it is right out of a boy’s love manga). Here is the link. In one place, the reviewer writes,

Writing the Love of Boys is an engaging and challenging text that encourages readers to interrogate their understanding of boys’ love narratives in Japan as more than just a current popular cultural trend. The book is of interest not only to scholars of boys’ love narratives and associated bishōnen culture, but also to students of Taishō modernism and gender studies.

Thanks, Emerald!

Mark McHarry review of _Writing the Love of Boys_ »

Mark McHarry wrote a thoughtful, detailed review of my book Writing the Love of Boysfor the online Australian journal Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific. He begins,

Edogawa Ranpo (1894–1965) and Inagaki Taruho (1900–1977) were widely read in early twentieth-century Japan. Murayama Kaita’s (1896–1919) works would prove influential among other authors. Writing the Love of Boys shows how they sought new ways to describe non-heteronormative sexuality in literature, and in so doing developed an aestheticism that would be taken up, in part, by boys’ love.[2] Of the three, and in English, Ranpo’s works may be the most anthologised, but his keen interest in male homoeroticism is not widely known, and the homoerotic writings of Kaita and Taruho perhaps less so. Jeffrey Angles situates their work in modernist Japanese literature, mainly during the Taishō (1912–1926) and pre-war Shōwa (1926–1989) periods. His book is a fascinating glimpse of male-male desire in literature at a time of cultural and political ferment in Japan, and well worth reading by anyone interested in Japanese modernism, Japanese homoeroticism, or boys’ love.

Thank you, Mark, for the review!

Jeffrey ANGLES "Writing the Love of Boys" »

A big section from the introduction of my book Writing the Love of Boys, about the ways that a key group of early twentieth-century Japanese authors helped re-invent the language used in Japan to talk about love between men, is on Google Books.

The beautiful cover image is a painting called “Portrait of Two Boys” 二人少年図 painted in 1914 by the painter and poet MURAYAMA Kaita 村山槐多, one of the major figures that I talk about in this book. Other figures that feature heavily in this book are the mystery writer EDOGAWA Ranpo 江戸川乱歩 and the modernist innovator INAGAKI Taruho　稲垣足穂.

Also, click here to see the book on amazon.com.

Portrait of Two Boys 二少年図(1914)
MURAYAMA Kaita 村山槐多
(Collection of the Setagaya Literary Museum 世田谷文学館）

Murayama Kaita (1896-1919) was one of the most compelling figures of early twentieth-century Japanese art and letters. Before he died from tuberculosis at the premature age of twenty-two, he wrote a great deal of impassioned love poetry, much of which was inspired by his desire for a fellow schoolboy in Kyoto.

Kaita was also a painter and attended, against his father’s wishes, the Japan Art Institute 日本美術院 beginning in 1914. His paintings show a strikingly individualistic style. They draw upon early European modernism, especially the visual language of expressionism, in order to treat Japanese themes.

I’ve written a book about homoeroticism in early twentieth-century Japanese literature, and it is partially about Kaita. The title will be Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modern Japanese Literature (University of Minnesota Press, scheduled for publication in 2011). The editors and I are in the stage of talking about cover designs, and just now, I sent the editors my suggestion that we use this wonderful portrait painted in 1914 for the cover. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they and the designer like this painting!

Incidentally, the famous mystery novelist Edogawa Ranpo 江戸川乱歩 loved Kaita’s work and this painting in particular. He bought it in the 1930s and hung it in his studio. For years, it hung right across from the desk where he worked every day.