Published in: November-December 2011 issue.
Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishonen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature
by Jeffrey Angles
University of Minnesota Press. 302 pages, $25.
IN THIS relatively short study, Jeffrey Angles explores the theme of love between men and boys in the literature of Japan’s modernist period, concentrating on three writers from this period: the poet, short story writer, and painter Murayama Kaita (1896–1919); the detective novelist and essayist Edogawa Ranpo (1894–1963); and the avant-garde prose writer Inagaki Taruho (1900–1977).
