Two-timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction by J. Keith Vincent (review)

Sarah Schulman, an astute observer of contemporary queer life, visited Japan for five days and departed with the impression that Japanese homosexuals “live in such a state of invisibility and deprivation that they could not even imagine the basics of gay life.”¹ Those resident in Japan for longer know better, of course. Gay people are abundantly evident everywhere but in ways one must be locally literate to read. In his important new book, Keith Vincent correctly makes a parallel point: while many haven’t seen it, “homosocial narratives … are so common that virtually the entire edifice of modern literature in Japan could be said to rest on a foundation of a homosocial triangle of two male rivals and a woman” (p. 7). “Homosocial,” a term popularized by the work of the late Eve Sedgwick,² can refer to the widest range of social bonds men might form (stretching from the homosexual to the homophobic). Sedgwick’s insight into the existence of this “continuum” is “foundational” for Vincent (p. 3), and both are interested in where bonds between two men are mediated, in Girardian fashion, by a third person— sometimes a man, often a woman. Geometries of three numerologically color Vincent’s arguments in several ways but always offer the advantage of complicating the “straight”-forward narrative of modern Japanese fiction as we have translated and taught it for over a century.

Moving ahead in history from where “Greg Pflugfelder, Paul Schalow, Jim Reichert and others” (p. 24) left off, Vincent recasts the sweep of modern Japanese literature as one in which “the modern divide between male homosexuality and heterosexuality was shadowed by the male homo-social continuum that prevailed in the Edo (1600–1868) and early Meiji (1868–1912) periods” (p. 4). This produced the twentieth century’s “double tendency to preserve male homoeroticism in the past as something precious and worthy of remembrance while also working to quarantine it there as something that had no further claim on the present” (p. 4). To document this, Vincent invokes Mori Ōgai’s 1911–13 Gan (The wild goose), which “not unlike a few novels from this period begin[s] with a scene between men that borders on the homoerotic” (p. 49). Halfway through the century, Vincent alights on Mishima Yukio’s 1949 Kamen no kokuhaku (Confessions of a mask), a novel every gay man reads but “rarely one gay men like” (p. 197), perhaps because it is “neither a piece of ‘homosexual literature’ nor a homo-social narrative, but text that hovers uncomfortably in between” (p. 182). In Ōe Kenzaburō’s 1964 Kojinteki na taiken (A personal matter), Vincent sees that “the homosocial narrative has congealed into a one-way trajectory toward heteronormative adulthood powered by the abjection of gay men like Kikuhiko and women like Himiko” (p. 209). Along the way we pass through works by Kawabata Yasunari, Hama Shirō, and others, all enlisted in Vincent’s campaign “to pluralize and taxonomize the understanding of male homosociality as a spectrum of different ways in which desire between men can and has been mediated” (p. 4).

What is specifically “two-timing” about modern Japanese literature is how so much of the homoerotic happens in historical memory, as literary representation looks back to the Edo period for “imaginative possibilities” that were “patriarchal but not yet heteronormative” (pp. 3–4). Modern Japanese literature, in what Vincent says is its “remarkable feature” (p. 11), remembers this. “If the two-timing existence of a queer past,” Vincent writes, “with an increasing heteronormative present and the conversion of sexuality into narrative are two defining aspects of the homosocial narrative, a third is its explicit attention to the homosocial mediation of desire” (p. 37). Here is another of Vincent’s triads, and it constitutes his book’s main event in two central chapters about the “particularly savvy” Natsume Sōseki and his 1914 Kokoro (p. 37). After an easily...