Two-Timing Modernity : Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction

Japanese literature in the first half of the twentieth century was rife with narratives depicting relations between men, from explicitly homoerotic accounts to stories of men in romantic rivalries over women. Recent critics have tended to celebrate the former for their subversion of sex and gender norms and to indict the latter for reducing women to mediators of desire between men and repressing the possibility of love between men. J. Keith Vincent reads narratives from both ends of this spectrum as sites where love between men was neither subversive nor repressed, but rather relegated to and preserved within the past as an individual phenomenon limited to adolescence and as an outmoded cultural practice associated with the premodern past. Synthesizing queer and feminist approaches, Two-Timing Modernity argues that not only were homoerotic and homosocial texts written in the same historical eras, but that the two impulses often coexisted within the very same texts. These narratives did not just include male-male sexuality as a theme, but also employed narrative strategies that highlighted and problematized how the continuum of male homosocial relations continued to mediate and structure their male characters' desire, even-and perhaps especially-when its "object" was a woman.