Homoerotic Desire and Masculine Identity in Tachibana Sotō’s Narrative

This paper explores two little-known works by Tachibana Sotō (1894–1959), a Japanese author marginal in modernist studies yet briefly mentioned in queer cultural studies. His 1938 novel Narin Denka heno Kaisō (My Memories of Prince Nalin), awarded with the Naoki Prize, belongs to mass literature and recounts the friendship between the narrator and an Indian prince in Japan. What initially appears to be the story of a friendship with veiled homoerotic undertones that challenges gender norms in pre-war Japan, then takes on the characteristics of a spy story in which the Japanese protagonist sides with the Indians against British interference. The second text, Nanshoku Monogatari (A Tale of Homoerotic Experiences, 1952), adopts a humorous, quasi-confessional style to depict the author’s adolescent infatuation with a younger classmate. Published amid the liberalised atmosphere of post-war kasutori culture, it revisits the Edo-period tradition of male-male desire (nanshoku) while exposing the stigma and contradictions surrounding sexuality in mid-twentieth-century Japan. This paper investigates how Tachibana’s fiction negotiates the continuity and rupture between the legacy of nanshoku, the moralisation of the war period, and the more tolerant expression of sexuality in the post-war period.