Jeffrey Angles Dissertation
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WRITING THE LOVE OF BOYS: REPRESENTATIONS OF MALE-MALE DESIRE IN THE LITERATURE OF MURAYAMA KAITA AND EDOGAWA RANPO DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jeffrey M. Angles, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2003 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor William J. Tyler, Adviser Professor Richard Torrance ______________________________ Professor Naomi Fukumori Adviser Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures Copyright by Jeffrey Angles 2004 ABSTRACT During the twenty-five years between the beginning of the Taishō period in 1912 and the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the spread of medical psychology and sexological discourse helped contribute to the development of new ideas about masculinity and gender in Japan. Popular literature represented one forum in which people explored, promoted, and qualified these new ideas. The manifestations of male-male desire that one finds in the literature of the period, however, do not just passively reflect changes in contemporary ideology. Literary developments also helped shape the idioms that writers used to describe the subject. This dissertation examines the representations of male-male desire in the bestselling works of two authors active during this window of change: the poet, writer, and painter Murayama Kaita (1896-1919) and the mystery author Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965). Through critical analysis and original translations of their works, this dissertation shows that their depictions of desire between men were shaped not only by changing ideas about gender relations but also the artistic movements and genres with which both authors were associated. By combining elements of gender studies and literary history, this dissertation examines the thematic interests, genre-related assumptions, and social expectations that molded their treatments of the subject. Chapter One examines the florid representations of boyish desire in Kaita’s poetry and diaries from the early 1910s. These writings reflect Kaita’s pseudo-symbolist notion of the poet as a visionary who drew upon manifestations of beauty to create art. Chapter Two examines the relationship between decadent sentiment, male beauty, and Kaita’s own artistic aspirations in “Bishōnen Saraino no kubi” (“The Bust of the Beautiful Young Salaino”), a story about a dream- like competition with Leonardo da Vinci for the love of one of Leonardo’s disciples. This chapter also examines the connections between pre-modernity, decadence, and male-male desire in Kaita’s story “Tetsu no dōji” (“Children of Iron”) and the play “Shuten dōji” (“The Saké- Drinking Youth”). Chapter Three examines “Satsujin gyōja” (“The Murdering Ascetic”) and “Akuma no shita” (“The Diabolical Tongue”), two mystery-adventure stories from 1915. Both ii describe antisocial outlaws who act upon their desire for other men; however, the texts describe the characters’ desires as displaced by the logical order of modern civilization. Chapter Four examines Ranpo’s essays on representations of male-male desire in Kaita’s work, which he saw as embodying an innocent and especially poignant form of boyish affection. These essays, along with Ranpo’s autobiographical essays about his crushes on other schoolboys during his youth, implicitly attempt to disassociate the love of boys from the moralistic and pathologizing rhetoric of sexology. As Chapter Five shows, some of Ranpo’s early fiction, including “Ningen isu” (“The Human Chair,” 1925), Issun-bōshi (The Dwarf, 1926-1927), Ryōki no hate (The Fruits of Curiosity-Hunting, 1930), shows an ambivalent attitude toward male homoeroticism. These works contain caveats reassuring readers about the “strangeness” of male homoeroticism even though they cater to the scopophilic curiosity of readers by incorporating scenes of male-male attraction. Similar dynamics are visible in the novel Kotō no oni (The Demon of the Lonely Isle, 1929-30), which features a man who prefers sleeping with men. Although the narrative voice describes the character’s feelings in sensational terms, at other times, Ranpo allows the character to describe his feelings in ways that make them comprehensible to the audience. Chapter Six examines Ranpo’s essays from the 1930s on same-sex desire in the writing of other authors, including Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds, and Walt Whitman. These essays represent a product of Ranpo’s ongoing explorations of the meaning and historical manifestations of same-sex love. Although these essays deal gingerly with the subject of male homoeroticism, these essays, like Ranpo’s autobiographical essays, defend boyish love and male camaraderie as beautiful and socially useful while arguing for the important position of male- male desire has played in literary history. iii ACKNOWLEGMENTS It was several years ago on a warm afternoon in the book-filled study of Takahashi Mutsuo, the fascinating poet who would become the subject of my master’s thesis, that I first heard the name Murayama Kaita in a conversation about erotic desire and poetry. Soon afterward, in perusing Mr. Takahashi’s collection of essays Seishun o yomu (Reading Youth), I first became aware of Kaita’s brief and dramatic life.1 Since then, Mr. Takahashi has written about Kaita several times with an enthusiasm that rekindled my interest in this provocative figure. Because it was this bit of karma that led me to the topic of this dissertation, it is only appropriate that I begin by thanking Mr. Takahashi. High on a mountain slope above the city of Ueda in Nagano Prefecture is the cozy Shinano Drawing Museum, an intimate museum of works by artists who died at young ages like Kaita. There, on a cold day exactly eighty-two years after Kaita’s death, I came face-to-face with Kaita’s works and experienced the electrical shock of his dazzling color and vibrant lines for the first time. Working from his mountainside museum, the curator and author Kuboshima Seiichirō has promoted the work of Kaita so actively that virtually everyone in the nearby town knows Kaita’s name. Every year on the fourth Saturday of February, several hundred people gather in the evening for a memorial service that the museum hosts for Kaita. On the grounds beside the museum, Buddhist priests chant sutras in front of a photograph of the grinning young artist, and afterward, everyone partakes of a local saké appropriately named “Kaita.” That night, as I sipped my warm saké in the cold February mountains, I resolved to share some of Kaita’s work with the English-speaking world. The largest collection of Kaita’s works and original manuscripts was purchased by the Mie Prefectural Art Museum in 1992. This museum also hosted one of the largest exhibitions of Kaita’s works to date: a 1997 exhibition celebrating the centennial of his birth.2 When I visited 1 Takahashi Mutsuo, “Murayama Kaita,” Seishun o yomu: Nihon no kindai shi ni-jū-shichi-nin (Tokyo: Ozawa shoten, 1992) 229-40. 2 Also cooperating in this exhibition was the Fukushima Prefectural Art Museum, which also houses some of his works and which also hosted the exhibition for one month, and the Asahi shinbun (Asahi Newspaper). iv the museum in the autumn of 2001 to view the collection of manuscripts and drawings firsthand, the curators Higashi Shunrō and Ikuta Yuki spent a great deal of time with me, brought out pieces not on display, shared the museum’s newest discoveries, and gave me access to their extensive library of art historical material.3 They turned the first of many visits to Tsu into an unforgettable trip. I thank them for their openness and continuing friendship. Likewise, I also thank them for granting me permission to reproduce the photos of Kaita’s work that I have included in Appendix A. I am especially grateful to the Japanese Ministry of Education and to The Ohio State University for their generous support during the time I worked on this dissertation. Between October 2000 and March 2002, I spent an extraordinary year and a half as a Monbushō research student at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. It was there that I completed much of the preliminary reading for this dissertation under the guidance of Dr. Suzuki Sadami. Dr. Suzuki is a veritable encyclopedia of information on Japanese literature and culture during the early twentieth century, and his broad interests and vast knowledge shaped this dissertation in countless ways. Under his guidance, I learned a great deal about Ranpo and Kaita, plus many other topics as well. Most of this manuscript was written in the months between January and December 2003, during which I received a Presidential Fellowship from the Graduate School at The Ohio State University. As I worked on this project, I received frequent advice and moral support from my adviser, Dr. William J. Tyler, and the members of my dissertation committee, Drs. Richard Torrance and Naomi Fukumori. Their direction has made this dissertation much better and far less verbose than it would have been otherwise. Dr. Tyler’s expert proofreading and advice regarding translation improved the style of this dissertation greatly. Kokoro kara arigataku kansha itashimasu. Several fans and scholars of Kaita work have given me great encouragement as worked on this project. When I spoke about my dissertation topic to the poet Aizawa Keizō, whose poetry I had translated in the past, I learned that by an amazing coincidence, he had been one of the editors of a large volume of Kaita’s paintings published in 1983.4 To help me in my project, Mr. Aizawa graciously gave me his first-edition copies of Kaita no utaeru (Songs of Kaita, 1920) 3 For instance, they had just discovered that Kaita’s 1916 self-portrait, now in the museum’s collection, was painted over another face, apparently also a self-portrait, which was, in turn, painted over a landscape, perhaps by his mentors Kosugi Misei or Yamamoto Kanae (Figure 1).