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  • Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature
  • Steven C. Ridgely (bio)
Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature. By Jeffrey Angles. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011. vii, 302 pages. $75.00, cloth; $25.00, paper.

The contemporary formation of “boy’s love” (BL) is a manga genre authored primarily by women and marketed to girls (who like boys who like boys). Jeffrey Angles’s book is about this genre’s Taisho and early Showa literary predecessor, which was authored by men but marketed to both male and female audiences. Angles makes a strong claim about these writers of what might be called Gay Taisho—that the writers Murayama Kaita, Edogawa Ranpo, and Inagaki Taruho collectively invented a language for the emergent form of egalitarian love between young men in single-sex schools that begins to displace the hierarchical and machismo-driven formation that preceded it. “Love of boys,” then, refers not to men’s love of boys but to the love between adolescent boys or young men that is aestheticized and codified into a bishōnen (beautiful young men) genre of literary production.

Writing the Love of Boys is a seven-chapter book consisting of an introduction that positions the study amid work on the literary and cultural history of male-male desire in Japan, two chapters on the poet and artist Murayama Kaita (1896–1919), two chapters on the mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo (1894–1965), one chapter on the modernist writer Inagaki Taruho (1900–1977), and a conclusion tracking the legacies of these writers in post-war culture. The main chapters are characterized by a great deal of translation, a primary interest of the author. Angles has devoted much of his energy to translation recently, producing volumes of translated poetry by Arai Takako, Itō Hiromi, Takahashi Mutsuo, and Tada Chimako. His translations of short stories by Kaita, Ranpo, Taruho, Yumeno Kyūsaku, and Hagiwara Sakutarō are collected in the anthology Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), edited by the late William Tyler. Angles has rapidly emerged as the most active advocate of contemporary poetry working in Japan studies today. [End Page 193]

For this study, Angles acknowledges and builds on Jim Reichert’s work on male-male sexuality in Meiji literature and Greg Pflugfelder’s history of male-male sexuality from the Tokugawa period to the early postwar period. But this book can be positioned among other recent research as well. In tracing the roots of a 1970s manga genre back to earlier literary formations, Angles’s book will pair nicely with Deborah Shamoon’s recent study of shōjo culture from Meiji literature through contemporary manga (Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan [University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012]). Shamoon’s central insight might also be applicable to bishōnen—that the passionate female-female “esu” (S) relationships, like “smashes” elsewhere, were not simply tolerated by school authorities but were seen as fully in line with heterosexual development as practice relationships in preparation for marriage and as a deflection of sexual desire away from premarital sex with boys.

Writing the Love of Boys could also be considered against John Treat’s Great Mirrors Shattered (Oxford University Press, 1999). Treat’s book, when understood for what it is—a piece of experimental literary writing that combines the “rhetoric of confession” from Taisho-style “shishōsetsu” (I-novels) with 1970s gay life-writing in the style of Larry Kramer—is very much akin to the memoir-of-the-present mode of writing Angles explores in the Kaita chapters. And yet, these books in other ways could not be further apart. I expected to find something scandalous in Angles’s book, too, but what makes us blush is just how desperately sweet, gentle, and (frankly) clichéd the love odes of Kaita, for example, are to the object of his affections: “my yearning / Cannot withstand your scintillating form / And I weep” (p. 57).

The personal is very much part of Angles’s book, however, as with Treat’s. Writing the Love of Boys is done...

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