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

At a recent annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, a graduate student friend was chatting with one of the organizers. He noted that he had enjoyed (his first) exposure to the breadth of scholarship on display but regretted that there were not more panels on the topic of sexuality, particularly queer sexuality. "We have had such panels in the past," he was told. "I think it's a case of been there, done that."

That queer approaches to the history and culture of Asia have already outlived their usefulness seems an odd notion and certainly not one that would have been endorsed by the over 500 academics, researchers, activists, journalists, and others who attended the First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies in Bangkok in 2005.¹ Indeed, the mood at that conference was that queer approaches to the study of Asia have barely begun and that there was much still to do to establish intraregional dialogue and linkages so as to displace the overwhelming authority of Western models and paradigms which tend to be seen by Anglophone researchers as paradigmatic of sexuality studies in general.

The problem that queer studies has so far faced in its interface with Asian studies is that it is very much contained within a minority studies paradigm that relegates queer desire to the margins of society and of history. Although queer research is now invited to the heterosexual table, queer contributions have done little, so far, to alter the fare served. While it is sometimes helpful to invoke the notion of "sexual minorities," such talk elides the fact that same-sex sexualities as well as a wide range of transgender practices and identities have, in fact, been central to many Asian sex/gender systems, particularly prior to the onset of "modernity" and the encounter of Asian cultures with Western sex and gender models. Indeed, as a growing number of studies of modern Asian social history have demonstrated, East-West encounters have always resulted in the widespread reorientation and renegotiation of indigenous sex and gender practices, ideologies, and identities. So far, regarding Japan, this process has been best articulated by Greg Pflugfelder in Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950, Sabine Frühstück in Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, and Takayuki Yokota-Murakami in Don Juan East/West: On the Problematics of Comparative Literature.² Mention might also be made of my own Queer Japan from the Pacific War.³ Jim Reichert's book In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature is an important new addition to this developing field and is of significance to all researchers of modern Japan, going well beyond Japanese literary studies and making an important contribution to studies of comparative literature, sexuality studies, globalization, and modernity.

In the Company of Men explains how the Meiji cultural elite were faced with the difficult problem of what to do with male-male sexuality. In the previous Edo period (1603–1857), the association of nanshoku (male-male eroticism) with elite sectors of society, particularly the Buddhist establishment and the warrior class, had meant that "erotic relations between males (but not between females) carried a certain amount of cultural prestige" and were "even interpreted as a sign of masculine rectitude or an admirably refined sensibility" (p. 6). Given the cultural capital associated with the aesthetics of nanshoku, it is no surprise that the topic of male-male love had proven a rich source of inspiration for Edo-period literary texts, some 566 discourses on the topic being published during the era.

However, with the opening of Japan to Western influence during the Meiji period (1857–1912), Meiji intellectuals encountered the developing field of sexology, which contained a range of pseudo-scientific "knowledge" evincing a deep-seated hostility toward male-male love and a...