Yone Noguchi

In September 1897 Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) contemplated crafting a poem to his new love, western writer Charles Warren Stoddard. Recently arrived in California, Noguchi was in awe of the established writer and the two had struck up a passionate correspondence. Still, he viewed their relationship as doomed—not by the scandal of their same-sex affections, but their introverted dispositions and differences in background. In a poem dedicated to his “dearest Charlie,” Noguchi wrote: “Thou and I, O Charles, sit alone like two shy stars, east and west!” While confessing his love to Stoddard, Noguchi had a child (future sculptor Isamu Noguchi) with his editor, Léonie Gilmour; became engaged to Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes; and upon his return to Japan married Matsu Takeda—all within a span of seven years. According to author Amy Sueyoshi, Noguchi was not a dedicated polyamorist: He deliberately deceived the three women, to whom he either pretended or promised marriage while already married. She argues further that Noguchi’s intimacies point to little-known realities of race and sexuality in turn-of-the-century America and illuminate how Asian immigrants negotiated America’s literary and arts community. As Noguchi maneuvered through cultural and linguistic differences, his affairs additionally assert how Japanese in America could forge romantic fulfillment during a period historians describe as one of extreme sexual deprivation and discrimination for Asians, particularly in California. Moreover, Noguchi’s relationships reveal how individuals who engaged in seemingly defiant behavior could exist peaceably within prevailing moral mandates. His unexpected intimacies in fact relied upon existing social hierarchies of race, sexuality, gender, and nation that dictated appropriate and inappropriate behavior. In fact, Noguchi, Stoddard, Gilmour, and Armes at various points contributed to the ideological forces that compelled their intimate lives. Through the romantic life of Yone Noguchi, Queer Compulsions narrates how even the queerest of intimacies can more provocatively serve as a reflection of rather than a revolt from existing social inequality. In unveiling Noguchi’s interracial and same-sex affairs, it attests to the complex interaction between lived sexualities and socio-legal mores as it traces how one man negotiated affection across cultural, linguistic, and moral divides to find fulfillment in unconventional yet acceptable ways. Queer Compulsions will be a welcome contribution to Asian American, gender, and sexuality studies and the literature on male and female romantic friendships. It will also forge a provocative link between these disciplines and Asian studies.

Yone Noguchi: The Stream of Fate, by Edward Marx, is the first full-length biography of the pioneering international Japanese poet Yone Noguchi (1875-1947). Volume One, The Western Sea begins in the last year of Noguchi's life with his postwar effort to reconnect with his estranged son, the famous artist Isamu Noguchi. The story then takes up Noguchi's childhood and years abroad in America and England, until his return to Japan at the time of the Russo-Japanese War. The volume includes a lavish selection of over 200 illustrations and an introduction charting the dimensions of Noguchi's posthumous reputation.

Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi (1921) is a collection of poems by Yone Noguchi. Although he is widely recognizing as a leading poet in English and Japanese of the modernist period, Noguchi was also a dedicated literary critic who advocated for the cross-pollination of national poetries. Alongside a brilliant introduction, in which he addresses the collective power of world literature, he provides a selection of his best poems from a quarter century of work. ”The time is coming when, as with international politics where the understanding of the East with the West is already an unmistakable fact, the poetries of these two different worlds will approach of one another and exchange their cordial greetings.” A firm believer in plainspoken language and a practitioner of free verse, Noguchi envisioned his art as a humble contribution to the union of East and West. In his early poems written in California, he reflects on loneliness and the natural world while reveling in the extended lines and celebratory phrases made popular by Whitman. In his third collection, From the Eastern Sea (1903) he settles into a more reserved prosody, characterized by stillness and vibrant imagery. Included in this collection are his prose poems and a series of Japanese Hokkus, whose minimalism and spiritual clarity continue to captivate readers and poets of all languages and nations. “Is there anything new under the sun? / Certainly there is. / See how a bird flies, how flowers smile!” These poems not only teach us to look, but to see the world anew. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Yone Noguchi’s Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi is a classic of Japanese American literature reimagined for modern readers.

The Story of Yone Noguchi (1914) is a memoir by Yone Noguchi. Both a leading modernist poet in English and Japanese and a dedicated literary critic who advocated for the cross-pollination of national poetries, Yone Noguchi lived an extraordinary life. In clear prose and with a confidence earned through decades of dedication to literature, he tells his own story and reflects on his unique experiences while illuminating the influential people and places that shaped him. Noguchi began studying English as a child, and soon fell in love with the language and its literature. For years, he dreams of leaving Japan to experience life in the West, and as a teenager takes the opportunity to move to California. In San Francisco and Oakland, he encounters a vibrant community of artists who welcome him into their midst. Under the tutelage of Joaquin Miller, an older poet and adventurer, he begins to believe in his own poetic voice, and soon publishes two collections of verse in English. Over the next several years, he moves to Chicago, New York, and London, each time increasing his professional connections and growing surer as a poet. Eventually, he returns to Japan, where he looks to his roots and becomes a well-regarded critic of poetry and the dramatic arts. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Yone Noguchi’s The Story of Yone Noguchi is a classic of Japanese American literature reimagined for modern readers.

This book is conceived as a reader for use in American studies, Asian American studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender studies, performance studies, and queer studies. It also contains new scholarship on Asian/American sexualities that would be useful for faculty and students. In particular, this volume highlights materials that receive little academic attention such as works on Southeast Asian migrants, mixed race cultural production, and Asian/American pornography. As an interdisciplinary anthology, this collection weaves together various forms of 'knowledge'_autobiographical accounts, humanistic research, community-based work, and artistic expression. Responsive to the imbrication of knowledge and power, the authors aspire to present a diverse sample of discourses that construct Asian/American bodies. They maintain that the body serves as the primary interface between the individual and the social, yet, as Elizabeth Grosz noted over a decade ago, feminist theory, and gender and sexuality studies more generally, 'has tended, with some notable exceptions, to remain uninterested in or unconvinced about the relevance of refocusing on bodies in accounts of subjectivity.' This volume attempts to address this concern.