Yone Noguchi Collected English Letters

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.

With a beautifully redesigned cover, The American Letters of a Japanese Parlor Maid is a classic novel that captures a young immigrant’s transition to life in the United States – its traditions, quirks, frustrations, and glorious delusions. Accompanied by her uncle, a wealthy industrialist, Morning Glory arrives in San Francisco via steamship. She eventually makes her way to New York City, where she becomes interested in the lives of the working class and decides to test the waters of the American Dream for herself. Despite her fortunate background, she settles for a role as a parlor maid. With her abundant wit and humorous outlook, Morning Glory records in her letters a foreigner’s view of American life. Through her eyes we see the country in a strange new light, perhaps more truth than fiction.

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.

This collection of eleven essays concerns the movement of modernity in East-West literary criicism. Most of the contributions address particular cross-cultural relationships such as W.B. Yeat's interest in the 'noh' play, Ezra Pound's imagism, and the influence of Zen aesthetics on Western poetry. The Western writers discussed range from Americans, including Emerson, Thoreau, Faulkner, Wright, and Snyder, to Europeans, such as Marcel Proust. The Eastern writers include Basho, Tanizaki, Lao Tzu, Wan Wei, Tagore, and 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.