Queer Japanese is a treasure trove of information about the language practices—and language attitudes—of sexual minority speakers of Japanese, an understudied group of speakers, who are critically important to a realistic understanding of the gendered qualities of Japanese, a language that is typically bracketed off in cross-linguistic research as “unique” in having “separate languages” for (heterosexual, heteronormatively aligned) women and men. As with many treasure troves, the reader will find in this volume an untold wealth of information and much food for thought.

Abe centers her investigation of linguistic practice and performance by Japanese sexual minorities around three key questions: Why do queer speakers (the author's term) make use of certain linguistic categories, and when? What do they hope to accomplish? And how do these linguistic forms relate to gender, sexual, and social identities? She stresses gender and gender identities as being fluid, and language as an equally fluid resource through which identities are negotiated. She reminds us that choices of which linguistic resources to deploy are at once macro-socially compelled and micro-interactionally negotiated, a point brought home to us repeatedly in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 1 draws data from advice columns in four gay and lesbian magazines; the focus here is less on the language forms used than on the range of advice offered, showing that advice offered focused on tactical possibilities for resolving problems rather than challenging the dominant heteronormative framework.

We get to language specifics in chapter 2, which focuses on lesbian bar talk. The speech practices outlined in this chapter center around lesbians' search for appropriate first- and second-person pronouns and sentence final forms for use in the bar setting. Pronominal forms and sentence final forms are components of the heteronormatively construed packages of gendered “women's language” and “men's language,” so it is hardly surprisingly to find them problematized in the lesbian bar setting. Abe finds that there is both inter- and intra-speaker variation in the pronominal choices and sentence final form choices made in these bars as “lesbians negotiate constraints such as ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ attached to linguistic features with the insertion of novel meanings and usages” (p. 51). Much, much more work is needed on lesbian speaking practice, but Abe offers us a tantalizing glimpse. As to the particular language forms that are problematized in the lesbian bar scene, we will encounter the negotiated uses of these form sets again in subsequent chapters, so for readers unfamiliar with Japanese, a chart outlining the most stereotypically gendered forms would have been helpful.

The next three chapters deal with the speech of gay men (among whom are included a small number of transgender/transsexual speakers). Chapter 3 examines transcripts of published zadankai “round table discussions” with danshō, male cross-dressing sex workers in post-WWII Tokyo. Abe introduces some of the features of onēkotoba, which Abe glosses as “queen's speech”—a speech style that is associated with performing “gayness” in, for example, gay bars, and media representations of gays—here. Highlighted features are first- and second-person pronouns (p. 62), the frequent use of (feminine) sentence final particles, the use of set phrases associated with feminine speech (e.g., iya, komatchau), and the use of feminine interjections (e.g., ara) (p. 70). Chapter 4 focuses on the contemporary performance of onēkotoba on stage. Abe analyzes the 2002 two-character play Chigau Taiko (Different drums) as it was scripted by gay writer and bar owner Ōtsuka Takashi versus as it was performed by Ōtsuka and a friend. This chapter reiterates the central roles that pronouns, sentence final particles, and a handful of interjections play in its definition. It also shows, by pointing out the muting of the highly stereotypified feminine forms in the course of performance, how difficult this register is to sustain in practice, a point that I hope the author will pursue in future work. Chapter 4 takes on the issue of onēkotoba outside the arena of overt performance to address five claims made by Abe's gay consultants: (1) onēkotoba is a product of bar culture; (2) gay men hate onēkotoba; (3) onēkotoba is a manipulation of women's speech, not an imitation; (4) onēkotoba necessarily involves dokuzetsu “sharp tongue” (or “prickly”) speech; and (5) onēkotoba is a parody of women's speech. The opinions of her consultants are quite varied, which is likely a good characterization of the status of onēkotoba in the gay community today. Chapter 6 sums up the findings of the previous chapters.

Throughout, this book refers to so many diverse aspects of the Japanese language that it may be hard for non-Japanese-speaking readers to appreciate some of the points made. For those of us who come to this volume with some expertise in Japanese, however, it is a book to which we will return again and again for its wealth of information and its enticing look at a world of “gendered” Japanese that has yet to be fully explored.