Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi by Amy Sueyoshi (review)

Father of the famous sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, the bilingual poet Yone Noguchi made a career for himself at the turn of the twentieth century by introducing ostensibly Japanese style and sensibility to the Anglophone literary scene. While he certainly has detractors who charge him with purveying Orientalist notions of Japan, his kindest critics credit him with influencing Ezra Pound’s poetic theories and pioneering Japanese American literature.¹ In Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi, historian Amy Sueyoshi focuses not on his literary contributions but on his intimate life. Her elegantly written and meticulously researched book recounts Noguchi’s “personal affairs, closeted for over a century” for their capacity to “bring remarkable insights to the histories of sexuality, bohemian America, and Asian America” (130). Drawing on over eight hundred letters, Noguchi’s published works, and mountains of other sources in both Japanese and English, Sueyoshi tells the tale of how Noguchi came to America in 1893, worked initially as a domestic, tired of manual labor, parlayed his uncommonly good looks and Japanese identity into sponsorships with established writers like Joaquin Miller, started a lifelong romance with the poet Charles Warren Stoddard, dallied with other Japanese American men and a few white American women, tramped across America, traveled to England, wrote several books, impregnated his editor Léonie Gilmour (with Isamu), promised marriage to the reporter Ethel Armes at the same time, returned to Japan in 1904, was found out by both Gilmour and Armes, and married his maidservant Matsu Takeda, who bore him three more children. While this narrative might seem “exceptional” and could satisfy merely “prurient” readers, as Sueyoshi admits, it more importantly serves to illuminate the ways in which “unremarkable people can live in between cracks of propriety with little consequence” (130, 147). According to her, Noguchi presents a case study of a person who both suffered under and exploited ideologies of race, nation, and sexuality in order to pursue his personal desires and career goals. He was not a heroic figure who aimed to disrupt norms of gender and sexuality; instead, “like much of the population in 1900” and possibly “a century later,” he simply wanted a “viable existence under seemingly immovable social constraints” (146, 147).

Hence, Noguchi represents one of the thousands of Japanese immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. However, while mainstream historical narratives by Sucheng Chan and Yuji Ichioka emphasize their abject circumstances vis-à-vis anti-Asian racism, violence, miscegenation laws, and other forms of discrimination, Sueyoshi traces the ways that some were able to capitalize on the Western intelligentsia’s taste for Japonisme and the “alternative masculinity” that Japanese American men seemed to represent (74).² Unlike most of his compatriots, however, Noguchi left an extensive record. Sueyoshi explains, “The story of Noguchi’s intimate life is likely just one among many undocumented tales of cultural exchange and private intimacies between Japanese immigrants and bohemian America” (3).

Queer Compulsions gracefully weaves together quotations from private and public documents with Sueyoshi’s own interpretations to make her argument in narrative form. For example, Sueyoshi tells the story of Noguchi’s first dinner with Joaquin Miller as one involving a miscommunication that serves both men’s interests. When Noguchi’s command of English fails him, Miller interprets this extended pause as “Japanese silence . . . precious like gold” (24). This success and many others, however, come at a cost for Noguchi. Throughout his time in America, he would have to balance his desire to be taken seriously as a writer in English with the desire of others that he perform Japaneseness. Sueyoshi renders Noguchi’s contradictory behaviors with great nuance and without judgment, such as when he decides to be photographed in a kimono instead of suit or when he begins to sprinkle...