Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi

Epilogue

125 Epilogue  I think it was a great mistake, Noguchi’s returning to Japan to settle. He was making a name here and in England and now he will soon be forgotten by English readers. Charles Warren Stoddard Noguchi is far less important for his poetry than in his role as a fascinating transitional figure at a time when the modern West was just beginning to discover the Orient. Susan Napier The memory of Yone Noguchi faded significantly in the decades that followed his return to Japan. Almost a century after Noguchi left the United States, literary critic Edward Marx pressed for his recognition, a neglected pioneer of Asian American literature.1 In his own homeland as well, Noguchi’s name seemed to hold little lasting power. Though in 1989 Hosea Hirata wrote from Japan that Noguchi was “a legendary figure in the history of modern Japanese poetry,” seven years later, in 1996, Keiko Wada wrote that the name Yone Noguchi did not “ring a bell” for most Japanese.2 So unfamiliar had Noguchi become that on one Japanese online magazine titled Tansei.net the name of the father of the more famous Isamu Noguchi was written as “Yone Yamaguchi.” Moreover, Noguchi’s name never even came up in a recent Japanese article on San Francisco’s bohemian community.3 While Noguchi scholars decry the unjust oversight of an influential writer, other literary critics note that his work proved Epilogue 126 mediocre at best. In the swirling debates around Noguchi’s literary importance , discussion of his intimate life remains nearly absent. Ironically, Noguchi’s private life may hold more definitive historical significance than his literary works. As he negotiated multiple interracial same-sex and heterosexual affairs during times not known for racial and sexual tolerance , Noguchi’s relationships bring voice to silenced same-sex romantic realities of Japanese immigrants in America and illuminate how race critically charged the seemingly all-white affairs of American bohemians. As rebellious as Yone’s affairs might appear, they conformed to contemporary norms around race and sexuality at the turn of the century. In the immediate years after his return to Japan, Noguchi’s fame and prestige as an internationally acclaimed poet exploded. With his appointment at Keio University as professor of English, Noguchi quickly became Japan’s leading expert on American and English literature.4 Reviewers in the West continued to note skill in Noguchi’s poetry, though the comments were often racialized. The Globe and Commercial Advertiser described Noguchi’s poetry as “orientalis[t]” in its “daring metaphor and sensuous pantheistic quality” while “strongly occidental” in its depth of heart and self-analysis, characteristics that “cannot” occur in Japanese poetry. With “western” intensity and “exotic” form, Noguchi’s poetry marked a transition that “must long prove interesting to the philosopher of literature.” Ridgely Torrance of the Critic also noted that Noguchi’s work proved innovative since it disproved the “favorite western axiom that the subtlety of the Japanese is all for line and color and nothing for emotion.” In July of 1905, some circles even called Noguchi “Shakespeare in Japan.”5 Through the 1910s Noguchi appears to have had regular success publishing articles on Japan in The Nation, at that time a weekly literary supplement to the New York Evening Post with nationwide circulation.6 Within two decades following his homecoming, however, Western contemporaries began to ruthlessly shred Noguchi’s writing. Reviews of Noguchi’s five publications from 1921 to 1940 derided his ability as a writer and scholar as he published more extensively on the Japanese traditional arts. Critics hurled a variety of insults at the works, calling them “disappointing,” “unintelligible,” and “filled with irrelevant anecdotes.” Reviewers personally attacked Noguchi, calling him “ignorant” and a poet who took too much “licentia poetica” to even attempt to write a book Epilogue 127 on art. For a number of his books, only their “handsome” binding and illustration seemed to be of redeeming value.7 That Western critics found more flaws in Noguchi’s publications may have reflected in part the end of America’s romance with Japan. As Japan’s imperial ambition spread across Asia and the Pacific, the Far East nation no longer appeared as genteel as it did during the heyday of Japonisme. Reviewers would not be as willingly seduced by the “mystery” of Japan even in the form of Noguchi’s oftentimes convoluted writing. Moreover, by the end of...