Jeffrey Angles - Böcker

The intensely confessional work of Japan’s most famous modernist poet, considered the Japanese Rimbaud, whose poems have inspired cultlike devotion—especially among fans of the hit anime show Bungo Stray Dogs—in a brilliant new translation, the most comprehensive in English A Penguin ClassicNakahara Chūya lived only to age thirty yet ranks among the finest of Japanese poets, evoking in his work the alienation, ennui, and romantic melancholy of a changing world. An introspective, sensitive writer and early-twentieth-century contemporary of Natsume Sōseki, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and Osamu Dazai, he chronicled in his poems a life of personal and political upheaval: His lover left him for his most trusted friend, his first son died at age two, his country hovered on the precipice of war, and his own tremendous promise was cut short by illness.This edition is by far the largest collection in English of Chūya's poetry, containing unabridged translations of the two books Chūya completed in his lifetime--Songs of the Goat and Songs of Days That Were--plus nearly one hundred additional pages of his traditional Japanse tanka poems, uncollected poems, and various other manuscripts, as well as an extensive scholarly introduction that situates Chūya within his historical moment. It captures in a melodic new translation the beauty and intimacy of this beloved poet's voice, showing why it has resonated with readers for a century.

Despite its centuries-long tradition of literary and artistic depictions of love between men, around the fin de siÈcle Japanese culture began to portray same-sex desire as immoral. Writing the Love of Boys looks at the response to this mindset during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological. Jeffrey Angles focuses on key writers, examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men. He traces the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet Murayama Kaita, the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shiro, the anthropologist Iwata Jun’ichi, and the avant-garde innovator Inagaki Taruho.Writing the Love of Boys shows how these authors interjected the subject of male–male desire into discussions of modern art, aesthetics, and perversity. It also explores the impact of their efforts on contemporary Japanese culture, including the development of the tropes of male homoeroticism that recur so often in Japanese girls’ manga about bishonen love.