In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature (review)

The forty-five-year reign of the Meiji emperor from 1868 to 1912 was long enough to encompass both the initial exuberant attempts to transform a land and a people into something suitably modern, as well as the subsequent sober recognition of the cost of that transformation and a kind of nostalgia, especially in the capital city of Tokyo, for what had been Edo culture. "Civilization and Enlightenment" was the byword of the new imperial reign, and reform affected every area of life. The idea of what constituted an appropriately modern army and navy, or transportation system, or political structure, and so forth, evolved over time, and eventually new institutions replaced those of the Edo era. Once in place, moreover, the new army and navy, transportation system, political structure, and other state structures marked for reform were endorsed in various visible and gratifying ways: by, for example, the victories against China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, by the obvious increased ease of commuting within cities and traveling across regions, and by the palpable sense that Japan had catapulted itself into the ranks of major world powers.

The Meiji oligarchs also addressed the idea of what constituted a suitably modern sexuality for the Japanese people. Serving as a spokesperson for the government, the educator and reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi endorsed the model of one husband/one wife embodied in his own marriage. In the legal realm, prostitution was outlawed, as was anal intercourse between males. (The limited effect of these laws has been discussed in detail by Greg Pflugfelder in his study Cartographies of Desire, University of California Press, 1999.) The regulation of sexuality had always been a major concern of the Tokugawa bakufu, as shown by the various attempts beginning in the seventeenth century to isolate male prostitution in "theater districts" and female prostitution in "pleasure quarters" in the urban centers, but the Meiji control of sexual commerce became prescriptive in ways never seen before. The aim of these reforms was ostensibly the ennobling of relations between the sexes and the elevation of the status of women, but in fact the results were highly ambiguous.

Sexual reform had major repercussions for Meiji literature, of course, since the life force (eros) had always been one of Edo literature's wellsprings. Jim Reichert's fascinating and timely book, In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature, is the first study of Meiji literature to consider what happened when "compulsory heterosexuality" was imposed in the wake of modernization. Reichert approaches his ambitious project by providing a detailed discussion of several important authors and texts that clarify in specific ways how writing on male-male sexuality was reformulated and even erased in the Meiji era. It is an important and revisionist project, intended to change the master narrative of Meiji literary history that until now, he argues, has "largely overlook[ed] the impact of changing notions of sexuality and masculinity on the development of modern Japanese literature" (p. 9). Reichert divides his discussion into four stages that correspond to the standard division of Meiji literary history into early, reformist, neoclassical, and late periods, roughly corresponding to decade-long intervals from the 1870s to mid-1880s, the late 1880s to mid-1890s, the late 1890s, and finally the first decade of the twentieth century to 1912.

To illustrate the earliest transition from Edo to Meiji, the study addresses Shizu no odamaki (a late Edo work) and Sawamura Tanosuke akebono zōshi (from 1880), two popular books that circulated in the early years of the Meiji period and depicted male-male sexuality in terms consistent with the Edo construct of nanshoku (male love). These books and others like them remained highly influential despite the Meiji government's reform efforts. Reichert makes the excellent point that readers did not approach these transitional depictions merely as nostalgic remnants of a bygone Edo mode of male-male intimacy...