SAN FRANCISCO BAY remained hidden to outsiders for centuries because its entrance is narrow, and from the perspective of a ship at sea even that small opening appears to be filled by Alcatraz, as though the small island in the middle of the bay had been deliberately positioned to trick the eye and make the coast appear unbroken. And then there is the fog that shrouds the jagged rocks and obscures the swirling currents. Through that narrow opening in 1893 sailed the steamshipBelgic carrying a seventeen-year-old Japanese poet named Yone Noguchi, a young man who would prove every bit as confounding as the landscape he was entering. In navigating his way across the continent for the next decade, Noguchi would be resourceful, passionate, studious and elusive. To further his writing career he would depend on the kindness of strangers, many of them lesbians and gay men, for whom he played the role of the exotic and seductive cipher, performing their Orientalist fantasies in order to gain what he needed. Noguchi arrived during the narrow window between the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the anti-Japanese laws of the 1910s and 1920s. Japanese immigrants were exempted from some of the worst expressions of anti-Asian hate during this period, but California could still be far from welcoming. On his first evening in San Francisco, Noguchi wandered up Market Street, entranced by the streetlights and the tall buildings, the din of traffic, and the clang of the cable car bells. “I was suddenly struck by a hard hand from behind,” he later wrote, “and found a large, red-faced fellow, somewhat smiling in scorn.” The man sneered, “Hello, Jap!” and spat in Noguchi’s face. He quickly discovered that his English could not be understood. Although he had studied the language for several years, his Japanese teachers “had not given me the right pronunciation of even one word.” With this language handicap, his employment options were few. He found a position as a houseboy for a Jewish family living at the corner of Van Ness Avenue and Sacramento Street, only a few blocks from where Alice B. Toklas was then growing up at Van Ness and O’Farrell. Hungry to speak his own language, Noguchi frequented the editorial offices of Sōkō Shimbun, the city’s Japanese daily, at first delivering newspapers for them but eventually working as a translator. At the Japanese YMCA on Haight Street, he met Kosen Takahashi, an artist who worked as an illustrator for ShinSekai, ESSAY Butterflies Caught in a Web WILLIAMBENEMANN William Benemann is the author of Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail, and Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade. the Y’s newsletter, and the two men entered into a passionate— though perhaps lopsided—romance. To a mutual acquaintance Takahashi confessed that he had wooed Noguchi “as a boy do so for a girl,” and proclaimed: “Yone is my lover forever.” Together they began publishing an English-language literary journal titled The Twilight, which studiously avoided the drifting-cherry-blossoms and bashful-geisha racial tropes that Western readers so relished. The publication was short-lived. When Noguchi suddenly disappeared (on impulse he had decided to walk to Los Angeles but lost interest by the time he reached Palo Alto), Takahashi was frantic with worry. “I am nearly drowning with great Tear-flood to having been lost my dearest friend, Yone Noguchi,” he wrote in a letter that displayed his struggles with English, “an eloping lover who sudden deserted from me ... leaving me with many sorrow and tears. Oh! where is my sweetheart?” Cobbling together parttime jobs provided only a meager income and no time to improve his poetry, so Noguchi was intrigued when he learned of Joaquin Miller. The so-called “Poet of the Sierras” had established a bohemian colony in the Oakland hills called (and eccentrically spelled) The Hights. Miller lived in a small Victorian cottage overlooking the bay, but he had scattered one-room cabins around his property. These he made available to artists and writers in exchange for a few hours a week of manual labor around the compound. Noguchi climbed the steep hill to Miller’s cottage, unannounced but warmly welcomed. While Miller was so lecherous toward women that he was known among his friends as “the Goat,” he was clearly impressed by Noguchi’s appearance. He wrote of their first meeting that Yone must have followed the wandering path of a “Nippon butterfly” to Miller’s front door. He described the young man as a “beautiful Japanese flower,” the most lovely blossom he had ever seen “in the human flesh of either sex.” In an observation that meant something quite different in 1896 than it does today, Miller told a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle when asked about Noguchi: “I like queer folks—the queer are always good. This boy is the right sort; he does just as he pleases.” From his perch on The Hights looking back at the Golden Gate, Noguchi began to study American poetry closely. He fell in love with Poe and Whitman, dissecting their poems obsessively to learn how they worked. Joaquin Miller was a leading light of the San Francisco literary scene, and he introduced his young Japanese friend to all of the important regional writers. When Noguchi shyly began to share his poems with others, the response he received was cautiously encouraging. The poems were imaginative and strikingly original, but hard to parse—at times completely unintelligible. Lines such as “At shadeless Yone Noguchi, this handsome Japanese poet from California, might possibly be the New Kid, someone who was young, racially exotic, and very talented. March–April 2024 15
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTk3MQ==