This is an excellent study of the gradual “rupture of the homosocial continuum” in modern Japanese fiction, as well as in its scholarship and translation into English. Keith Vincent begins with Mori Ōgai's 1913 The Wild Goose, moves through Natsume Sōseki's 1914 Kokoro (which merits two chapters), Hamao Shirō’s 1929 The Devil's Disciple, and Mishima Yukio's 1949 Confessions of a Mask, and ends with an epilogue on Ōe Kenzaburō’s 1964 A Personal Matter. Along the way, Vincent engages an array of theoretical frameworks—queer, psychoanalytic, and narratological—and demonstrates deep knowledge of historiography.
Vincent draws his definition of the homosocial continuum directly from Eve Sedgwick's Between Men, which posits that in nineteenth-century English literature “men-loving-men” (homoeroticism) and “men-promoting-the-interests-of-men” (homosociality) were not distinct quantities. Describing love triangles in fiction, she posited that the two males, supposedly rivals, might experience desire for each other in a way that included homoerotic potential but did not boil down to it.Footnote 21 Sedgwick dates the rupture of the continuum to the identification of “the homosexual” in the late nineteenth century.
Vincent critiques a division between two groups and their reductive readings of Sedgwick: in a single set of texts queer theorists search for covert homosexuality while feminist theorists hunt blatant misogyny. Vincent hopes for a reunification of what he implies are natural allies upon a return to Sedgwick, because she actually held that the erotic potential in the relationship between male rivals is integral to the narrative structure—the “narratology”—but not that it renders either the female character automatically disused or the men perforce homosexual. Asking, for example, whether the works are secret gay romances “reduces gender and sexuality in literature to a matter of content—and reading itself to a mere act of decoding . . .” (p. 12). Vincent encourages open-endedness in how we read fiction and sexuality by showing that identity is created through narrative itself rather than encoded within it.
“Two-timing” has two meanings here. The first is that the texts are “unfaithful” to the modern “identity-based understandings of love between men” despite being modern texts; they represent the persistence of the continuum into the twentieth century because they do not allow stable conclusions about the sexual identities of their characters: “they are not ‘gay’ texts” (p. 4). Thus Vincent, like others, puts Japan's rupture after the Euro-American one.
The second meaning can be subdivided into national history and psychoanalytic theory. In other words, nanshoku casts one shadow over the works in question, Freud another. Nanshoku refers to an ample early-modern culture of sexuality between men and boys that was decimated in the modern era. Its relations ranged from prostitution to mentor-protégé arrangements between samurai males; but nanshoku did not constitute an identity incompatible with either male-female prostitution or marriage. The heyday of nanshoku was gone by the 1910s, but it was known to all of the authors and was within the living memory of Mori and Sōseki. Meanwhile Freud's “polymorphous perversity,” which theorizes that same-sex desires are a natural but temporary component of adolescence, plays a role in both the fiction itself and Vincent's analysis. In sum, Two-Timing Modernity holds that these authors were “unable and perhaps unwilling to expunge completely the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse” (p. 3).
The novels “stage tensions between two forms of temporality” as each narrator struggles to relegate any same-sex desires he may have (had) to his own adolescence with greater or lesser difficulty and commitment, just as the modern nation attempted to consign nanshoku to the Edo period (p. 4). The rupture develops as each successive narrator describes the crystallization of his sexual identity more consistently and divergently—until for Confessions’s narrator homoerotic desire begins in childhood and continues despite his heterosexual endeavors. Even then Confessions “hovers uncomfortably between” homosexual and homosocial literature (p. 182). The full rupture occurs in scholarship, translation, and reception.
Vincent situates these texts only “loosely” in history on the logic that their “afterlives” make synchronic readings unapt. A particular strength of Two-Timing Modernity stems from this. In his meticulous analysis of the changing ways scholars and translators have interpreted, excerpted, and translated Kokoro, for example, Vincent observes that the 1950s generation excised homoerotic potential from the relationship between the protégé watakushi and the mentor Sensei. Yet, a new and rebellious generation only widened the rupture when they either characterized the novel with a term Vincent translates as “full-on homo” or extrapolated an after-story wherein watakushi makes an oedipal conquest of Sensei's wife. In his own reading, Vincent reintroduces the homosocial continuum through the framework of the “primal scene,” wherein interpreting one text requires knowledge of previous texts. The epilogue closely reads a brief excursion into homoerotic territory by the narrator of A Personal Matter—one both figurative and literal in a visit to Tokyo's gay district. When the narrator's homoerotic curiosity transforms into homophobic revulsion, Two-Timing Modernity ends on a mournful note.
This decline from nanshoku to homophobia does not fit seamlessly into existing scholarship. Vincent dates the rise of Japan's gay (sub)culture to the late 1980s, which leaves little room for Mark McLelland's exploration of the early-postwar queer community; and Two-Timing Modernity sometimes portrays nanshoku as universal, unlike Edo scholars such as Gregory Pflugfelder who emphasize status considerations. Also, only two paragraphs to explicate the role of the primal scene in Vincent's analysis was not enough for this reader.
My impression is decidedly positive nonetheless. The writing is beautiful, with a precision revealed in such minutiae as entitling the end “Epilogue” rather than “Conclusion,” echoing both Vincent's own nostalgia and how the fiction in question displaces resolution with retrospection. It is a blessing that the extensive and enhancing footnotes were not relegated to the back. Although Vincent gently introduces his theoretical language, I fear it remains beyond undergraduates’ reach. Yet I submit that Two-Timing Modernity will enhance how you read and teach Japanese modern literature, particularly the widely taught Kokoro, whether or not you are one to foreground queer theory.
