Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature by Jeffrey Angles (review)

Jeffrey Angles’s Writing the Love of Boys traces the diverse historical, textual, and artistic roots of contemporary representations of male-male love and desire generally and, in particular, the tropes of the schoolboy and bishōnen (beautiful boys). Angles offers textured portraits of three important figures: the symbolist poet, painter, and short-story writer Murayama Kaita (1896–1919); the amateur historian and ero-guronansensu author par excellence Edogawa Ranpo (1894–1965); and the modernist novelist Inagaki Taruho (1900–1977). Focusing on the dynamic Taishō and early Shōwa periods, he draws from an impressive array of texts and visual materials (fiction, poetry, essays, diaries, paintings, and illustrations) that engage with not only modern literary and artistic movements but also official and popular modes of portraying, publishing, and experiencing homoerotic passions.

Angles convincingly argues that despite occasional borrowing from and homage to Edo-period notions of nanshoku (male-male sexuality), these three artists were very much products of their particular historical moment. Specifically, amid the ascendency of heteronormative models of sexuality and an ever-increasing pathologization of male-male attraction and eroticism, they grappled and experimented with, queered, and challenged the aesthetic, medico-scientific, and social trends of their day. One strength of this study is that the lives and textual productions of the men it investigates are richly contextualized within Japanese and Western literary movements, dominant and popular sexological discourses, and trends in print and visual culture. The work also presents an assortment of imported and indigenous terminology and associations that intersect and transform in novel ways to configure modern Japanese conceptualizations of beautiful boys, male-male eroticism, and modern aesthetics.

The first two chapters treat Murayama Kaita’s poetry and prose. Chapter 1, “Blow the Blood-Stained Bugle: Murayama Kaita and the Language of Personal Sensation,” introduces readers to Kaita’s “hallucinogenic brand of protomodernist writing” (p. 40), which is shaped by the artist’s aesthetics of longing, historical motifs (such as the page boy), and representations of bishōnen as romanticized objects. Angles highlights the jarring sensory juxtapositions (for example, thistle-shaped nerves)— typical of the avant-garde symbolist school—that color Kaita’s poetic oeuvre. In the poem referenced in the chapter title, a “manifesto” of sorts, Kaita “envisions … sensitive readers, potential poets, and artists as a militia armed with a new type of language” (p. 47). Angles provides many translated poems throughout the chapter, revealing Kaita’s facility with different poetic forms, for instance modern verse and short tanka—both of which are replete with multilayered motifs and metaphors of unrequited love and homoerotic desire.

In the next chapter, “Treading the Edges of the Known World: Homoerotic Fantasies in Murayama Kaita’s Prose,” Angles examines several of Kaita’s works of bizarre mystery and adventure. These works feature people, places, and practices on the fringe of society, including male-male seduction, bandits, mountain hideouts, hedonism, murder, hypnotism, cannibalism, and a man with a phallic tongue. The chapter’s central claim is that although Kaita capitalizes on sensationalized notions of sexuality, perversity, and criminality, he does not necessarily reinforce typical sexo-logical notions. Rather, Kaita challenges pathological depictions through sympathetic portrayals of—and possibilities for identification with—deviant characters, as well as through calculated juxtapositions of repressive civilization with the vitality of transgressive sexuality. Of particular interest is Angles’s discussion of the story Bishōnen Saraino no kubi (The Bust of the Beautiful Young Salaino), written in 1913 or 1914. Here Kaita places the narrator and Leonardo da Vinci in a contest for the affections of Da Vinci’s young apprentice, Salaino, who is represented by a tantalizing, floating bust. The text, Angles argues, locates the source of and stimulation for artistic genius in the muse of male beauty and suggests that Kaita is the heir of Da Vinci’s peerless creative power. In highlighting the associations with the biblical...