Author: Yoné Noguchi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, Japanese
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Author: Amy H. Sueyoshi
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824861175
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
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.

Author: Edward Marx
Publisher: Botchan Books
ISBN: 1939913012
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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The story of Léonie Gilmour (1873-1933)—partner of Japanese writer Yone Noguchi, mother of artist Isamu Noguchi and dancer Ailes Gilmour—a woman who chose a unique path to achieving her personal and professional goals, rising above poverty, racism and an ill-fated marriage to take up the challenge of raising two mixed-race children alone in distant Japan. Bringing together extensive research and lively storytelling, Leonie Gilmour: When East Weds West is the first complete portrait of the unique, pioneering American educator, editor and writer whose story inspired Hisako Matsui's acclaimed film Leonie, starring Emily Mortimer and Shido Nakamura. Gilmour's fascinating tale is told here through her own writings and those of her associates, including rare and unpublished stories and intimate correspondence, along with a detailed biographical account by Edward Marx.

Author: Yoné Noguchi
Publisher: Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
ISBN: 3986476768
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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The American Diary of a Japanese Girl Yoné Noguchi - Tokio, Sept. 23rd My new page of life is dawning. A trip beyond the seas-Meriken Kenbutsu-it's not an ordinary event. It is verily the first event in our family history that I could trace back for six centuries. My today's dream of America-dream of a butterfly sipping on golden dews-was rudely broken by the artless chirrup of a hundred sparrows in my garden. "Chui, chui! Chui, chui, chui!" Bad sparrows! My dream was silly but splendid. Dream is no dream without silliness which is akin to poetry. If my dream ever comes true!

Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
ISBN: 1611453496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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The haiku of acclaimed novelist Richard Wright, written at the end of his...

Author: Masayo Duus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691127824
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles as the illegitimate son of an American mother and a Japanese poet father, was one of the most prolific yet enigmatic figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Throughout his life, Noguchi (1904-1988) grappled with the ambiguity of his identity as an artist caught up in two cultures. His personal struggles--as well as his many personal triumphs--are vividly chronicled in The Life of Isamu Noguchi, the first full-length biography of this remarkable artist. Published in connection with the centennial of the artist's birth, the book draws on Noguchi's letters, his reminiscences, and interviews with his friends and colleagues to cast new light on his youth, his creativity, and his relationships. During his sixty-year career, there was hardly a genre that Noguchi failed to explore. He produced more than 2,500 works of sculpture, designed furniture, lamps, and stage sets, created dramatic public gardens all over the world, and pioneered the development of environmental art. After studying in Paris, where he befriended Alexander Calder and worked as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, he became an ardent advocate for abstract sculpture. Noguchi's private life was no less passionate than his artistic career. The book describes his romances with many women, among them the dancer Ruth Page, the painter Frida Kahlo, and the writer Anaïs Nin. Despite his fame, Noguchi always felt himself an outsider. "With my double nationality and my double upbringing, where was my home?" he once wrote. "Where were my affections? Where my identity?" Never entirely comfortable in the New York art world, he inevitably returned to his father's homeland, where he had spent a troubled childhood. This prize-winning biography, first published in Japanese, traces Isamu Noguchi's lifelong journey across these artistic and cultural borders in search of his personal identity.

Author: Yoshinobu Hakutani
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826273947
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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This study traces the shaping presence of cultural interactions, arguing that American literature has become a hybridization of Eastern and Western literary traditions. Cultural exchanges between the East and West began in the early decades of the nineteenth century as American transcendentalists explored Eastern philosophies and arts. Hakutani examines this influence through the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He further demonstrates the East-West exchange through discussions of the interactions by modernists such as Yone Noguchi, Yeats, Pound, Camus, and Kerouac. Finally, he argues that African American literature, represented by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Emanuel, is postmodern. Their works exhibit their concerted efforts to abolish marginality and extend referentiality, exemplifying the postmodern East-West crossroads of cultures. A fuller understanding of their work is gained by situating them within this cultural conversation. The writings of Wright, for example, take on their full significance only when they are read, not as part of a national literature, but as an index to an evolving literature of cultural exchanges.

Author: Lesley Downer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781592400508
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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The author of Women of the Pleasure Quarters shares the story of the famous geisha whose life inspired Puccini's Madame Butterfly, from her training and participation in secret geisha traditions to her defection from her lucrative career to marry the penniless actor and political maverick Otojiro Kawakami and her rise to international celebrity. Reprint.

Author: John Walter De Gruchy
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824825676
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Hailed recently as the greatest translator of Asian Literature ever to have lived, Arthur Waley (1889-1966) had an immeasurable influence on Western perceptions of Asia and on the development of Asian studies in the West. Waley was the single most important force in creating what the English-speaking public understood to be Japanese literature with his popular and critically acclaimed translations of Japanese poetry, no plays and the celebrated 11th-century court romance The Tale of Genji. This study of Waley and his Japanese translations provides a provocative examination of Waley's contribution to 20th-century English literature and culture. top graduate of Rugby and Cambridge and a younger member of the Bloomsbury Group. He examines how the social contexts influenced Waley's work and he further locates Waley's Japanese translations within the political contexts of the Japonism movement, British socialism and imperialism and the development of Japanese studies in England. How a cult of things Japanese in the early modern period in Britain led to the emergence of one of the 20th century's most important translators is an interesting story in itself.

Author: Mark Dean Johnson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520970926
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Hasegawa Reader is an open access companion to the bilingual catalogue copublished with The Noguchi Museum to accompany an international touring exhibition, Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. The exhibition features the work of two artists who were friends and contemporaries: Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa. This volume is intended to give scholars and general readers access to a wealth of archival material and writings by and about Saburo Hasegawa. While Noguchi’s reputation as a preeminent American sculptor of the twentieth century only grows stronger, Saburo Hasegawa is less well known, despite being considered the most literate artist in Japan during his lifetime (1906–1957). Hasegawa is credited with introducing abstraction in Japan in the mid 1930s, and he worked as an artist in diverse media including oil and ink painting, photography, and printmaking. He was also a theorist and widely published essayist, curator, teacher, and multilingual conversationalist. This valuable trove of Hasegawa material includes the entire manuscript for a 1957 Hasegawa memorial volume, with its beautiful essays by philosopher Alan Watts, Oakland Museum Director Paul Mills, and Japan Times art writer Elise Grilli, as well as various unpublished writings by Hasegawa. The ebook edition will also include a dozen essays by Hasegawa from the postwar period, and one prewar essay, professionally translated for this publication to give a sense of Hasegawa’s voice. This resource will be an invaluable tool for scholars and students interested in midcentury East Asian and American art and tracing the emergence of contemporary issues of hybridity, transnationalism, and notions of a “global Asia."