Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi
by Amy Sueyoshi
University of Hawaii Press
232 pages, $40.
IF THE SURNAME Noguchi sounds familiar, it’s probably because of Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), the versatile and successful American artist who achieved worldwide fame not only as a sculptor, urban architect, set designer, and furniture designer, but also as a jet-setting playboy whose many romantic dalliances with movie stars, among others, often made headlines. But it is the artist’s father, Japanese-born writer Yone Noguchi (1875-1947), who is the subject of Amy Sueyoshi’s study in Queer Compulsions. Though the elder Noguchi is largely unknown today, long since eclipsed by his much more famous son, he was a literary star in America and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Sueyoshi chronicles in her study, his fame was largely the result of many astute and unscrupulous manipulations, and his story illuminates larger issues of imperialism, racism, and sexual politics.
Sueyoshi acknowledges that Noguchi’s behavior could rightly be described as “despicable”: he cultivated a series of overlapping and cruelly deceptive romances with both male and female lovers; he fathered a child (Isamu) illegitimately with one woman while simultaneously proposing marriage to another; and one could argue that he shamelessly exploited his Japanese identity to further his literary ambitions at a time when America was enthralled with Japanese culture. The popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan’s campy 1885 opera The Mikado, reviled by Noguchi, is one example of this period’s fascination with Japan. So who was Yone Noguchi and how was he able to manage such a complicated and entangled series of sexual relationships? Born in 1875 into a merchant-class family in a small town near Nagoya, he grew into a restless young man, yearning for more intellectual stimulation than his rural town could offer. He found the excitement he wanted in Tokyo, where he attended a school that specialized in Western culture. This was during Japan’s Meiji era, when it actively embraced modernization and Westernization. Noguchi, very much a child of the Meiji, developed a love of American literature, a fascination that prompted him to sail for San Francisco in 1893 and begin his quest to become a writer. While Japanese culture was in vogue for the Western intelligentsia, this was not a good time to be an Asian on American soil. Asian immigrants were routinely assaulted. On his first night in San Francisco, Noguchi was mocked and spat upon by a man in the street. Despite this bad beginning, Noguchi stuck it out, seeking the help of other writers. He was soon taken in by poet Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) and lived at the older writer’s Oakland Hills home. Noguchi charmed Miller and soon gained entrée into the poet’s large circle of bohemians. Noguchi’s connections with other writers, and his ability to capitalize on the lure of Japan, no doubt helped him win recognition quickly as a writer. He went on to publish volumes of poetry, essays, art criticism, autobiographies, and one novel, American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1901). Although he has his defenders today, most current critics and scholars deem Noguchi a mediocre writer who borrowed heavily—he was once accused of plagiarism—who was overhyped by enthusiastic supporters, and who produced works of little enduring worth. One critic has called him “a genial literary con.” Even his own son, Isamu, expressed disdain for his father’s writing when he read it as an adult. Sueyoshi suggests that Yone Noguchi’s personal life, rather than his literary legacy, is more worthy of study today. Noguchi clearly cultivated relationships to further his writing career, but there was more at play than mere ambition. Among the Western writers Noguchi admired, Charles Warren Stoddard (1843–1909) figured prominently and could arguably be called the love of Noguchi’s life. Stoddard gained fame as a chronicler of Pacific Islander culture and wrote of his love for the region’s men in language that was often less than coded. Thirty-two years Noguchi’s senior, Stoddard was an established author when Noguchi began corresponding with him. Their often over-the-top letters (from which Sueyoshi quotes generously) eventually led to a first meeting (at Stoddard’s Washington, D.C., home) in 1897. What followed was a mostly long-distance romance that lasted until Stoddard’s death, having survived Noguchi’s many relationships with women and even his eventual marriage. For a seven-year period during his romance with Stoddard, Noguchi’s wooed two women in particular: Léonie Gilmour (1873–1933), his American editor, with whom he fathered Isamu; and Ethel Ames (1876–1945), a Washington Post reporter to whom he was engaged. (During their on-again, off-again romances with Noguchi, both Gilmour and Ames also had relationships with female lovers, and Sueyoshi explores these with many quotations from the women’s letters.) Although Noguchi considered marriage with both Gilmour and Ames, it was his Japanese housekeeper who became his wife (and eventually bore him three more children) after his return to Japan. This betrayal infuriated Ames, who finally deserted Noguchi, and it left Gilmour a broken-hearted, despondent single mother. Noguchi was gifted with uncommonly good looks; and his quiet demeanor, along with his willingness to play the role of an “exotic” Japanese, added to his charm. Photographs of him during his time in the U.S. show a handsome young man with captivating dark eyes, thick black hair, a broad, finely formed nose, and a small, sensual mouth. The overall effect is of boyish beauty; indeed, the women who were drawn to him commented on the strange, un-masculine allure of his looks. Noguchi’s sexual versatility of course begs the question of his sexual identity. Some scholars categorize him as bisexual. Sueyoshi believes the answer is more complex, and she is less concerned about the correct “label” than about how societal norms shaped Noguchi’s decisions regarding intimacy. (She also explores this same question, to a lesser extent, with respect to Ames and Gilmour’s same-sex relationships.) Noguchi himself, in his effusive letters to Stoddard, and based on clues from his other writing, seems to have been most passionately attached to other men. In the latter part of his life, perhaps in concert with Japan’s shift away from its earlier tolerance of male homosexual love, Noguchi pointedly positioned himself as heterosexual, going so far as to denounce homosexuality as evil and sinful. Sueyoshi draws no specific conclusions about Noguchi’s sexual identify. In her compact, dense, and meticulously researched study, she presents a provocative portrait of Yone Noguchi “in the context of Western imperialism, racism, and homophobia.” For those interested in these questions, Queer Compulsions is an important study. It is also worthwhile as a fascinating portrait of biracial and same-sex relationships at a pivotal time in American history.
