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4. (Re)Discovering Same-Sex Love: Ranpo and the Creation of Queer History
- University of Minnesota Press
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143 In Getting Medieval, Carolyn Dinshaw writes that one of the reasons people explore queer history is to make cross-temporal connections between “on the one hand, lives, texts, and other cultural phenomena left out of sexual categories back then and, on the other hand, those left out of current sexual categories now.”1 She notes such impulses are grounded in the attempt to extend “the resources for self- and community-building into even the distant past,” and she describes her own wish for “partial affective connection, for community, for even a touch across time.”2 In Feeling Backward , Heather Love further explains this desire for connection when she remarks , “The longing for community across time is a crucial feature of queer historical experience, one produced by the historical isolation of individual queers as well as by the damaged quality of the historical archive.”3 As mentioned in the introduction to this book, Ranpo, living in early Shōwa-period Japan, did not have access to an affective community to whom he could discuss the subject of male–male desire, and around the time he wrote Kotō no oni, he started an ambitious project of researching the history of queer desire using literature and historical texts. The results of this research he presented in numerous essays published in various journals during the 1930s. His decision to write about same-sex desire in nonfictional essays might be seen as a result of his disappointment in the mystery novel Kotō no oni, which, as the last chapter argued, vacillated between lurid, sensationalizing rhetoric designed to attract reader attention and a more empathetic mode that allowed the queer character Moroto to explain his own feelings. 4 (Re)Discovering Same-Sex Love Ranpo and the Creation of Queer History 144 (Re)Discovering Same-Sex Love Essays permitted Ranpo to write in a more even-keeled fashion, freeing him from the genre-related demands of the mystery novel that would force him into either a negative portrayal or at the very best a pattern of code switching . In these essays, Ranpo begins the ambitious project of tracing a network of affective connection through literary history, showing that love between men played in important part in cultural history, and trying to make sense of what that misunderstood form of desire might mean in the present. In 1949, Ranpo published a small article entitled “Futari no shishō” (My two teachers), about the two close friends who, during the 1920s and 1930s, played the biggest role in encouraging his research into the history of male– male desire in literature and popular culture: the lawyer, politician, and mystery writer Hamao Shirō (1896–1935), and the anthropologist, writer, and artist Iwata Jun’ichi (22:51–52). These two friends approached the study of male–male desire from different angles, but both argued male–male desire had played a large role in history and needed to be better understood by modern society. Inspired by them, Ranpo began reading an ever-widening array of books and articles about male–male desire. He developed an interest in the literature of pre-Restoration Japan and ancient Greece, both of which offered numerous stories of love and sexuality between men; likewise, he read a number of works by modern European, American, and Japanese writers who treated the subject in their writing. Through these works, Ranpo began to construct a history of same-sex desire that, despite the many differences in the ways “same-sex love” was understood in his day and in the past, led him to assert the importance of male love in understanding world literature and history. In 1936 Ranpo asserted that from the time of ancient Greece to the present day, there were many “great masters of art and letters whose works cannot be fully understood ” while unaware of the “psychology of same-sex love” (dōseiai seishin) that contributed to them. As examples, he points to American poet Walt Whitman (1819–92), British poet and literary historian John Addington Symonds (1840–93), British explorer and translator Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–90), British social theorist and activist Edward Carpenter (1844– 1929), French writer André Gide (1869–1951), Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde (17:66). In some ways, this genealogical work anticipates the work of later scholars who, influenced by the gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer movements of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, would rectify the silence of earlier scholars and show the centrality of various forms of nonheteronormative desire...