Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction

Harvard University Asia Center, 2012.

Until the late nineteenth century, Japan could boast of an elaborate cultural tradition surrounding the love and desire that men felt for other men. By the first years of the twentieth century, however, as heterosexuality became associated with an enlightened modernity, love between men was increasingly branded as “feudal” or immature. The resulting rupture in what has been called the “male homosocial continuum” constitutes one of the most significant markers of Japan’s entrance into modernity. And yet, just as early Japanese modernity often seemed haunted by remnants of the premodern past, the nation’s newly heteronormative culture was unable and perhaps unwilling to expunge completely the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse.

Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors―Mori Ōgai, Natsume Sōseki, Hamao Shirō, and Mishima Yukio―encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by employing new narrative techniques to stage tensions between two forms of temporality: the forward-looking time of modernization and normative development, and the “perverse” time of nostalgia, recursion, and repetition.

“Two-Timing Modernity sets a new standard for innovative engagement with queer theory in Japanese literary studies. At the same time, this work reminds us that established approaches in literary studies such as narratology and ‘good old’ close reading still serve as great tools for cutting-edge scholarship.”―Tomiko Yoda, Harvard University

Some of my recent articles:

• “Purple and White: Sōseki and Shiki’s Homosocial Genji” The Tale of Genji: Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Dennis Washburn. New York: Norton. 2021. 1295-1311.
• “Takemura Kazuko: On Friendship and The Queering of American and Japanese Studies” published in Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (2017) and in Japanese in the journal of the Women’s Action Network (2018)
• 「子規と漱石：俳句と憑依」訳：北丸雄二・要約：友常勉『世界の中の子規・漱石と近代日本』柴田勝二編、勉誠出版2018年。
• “Better than Sex?  Masaoka Shiki’s Haiku on Food” in Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity (2017) 
• 「アルファベットの「K」」北丸雄二訳『世界文学としての夏目漱石』岩波書店２０１７年。
• “Queer Reading and Japanese Literature,” in the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (2016).

• “Sex on the Mind: Queer Theory Meets Cognitive Theory.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Ed, Lisa Zunshine. 2015. 199-221.