The Story of Yoné Noguchi


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The Story of Yone Noguchi


Book Description

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.




Leonie Gilmour


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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 Gilmour's fascinating tale is told here through her own writings and those of her associates, including rare and unpublished stories and intimate correspondence, along with a detailed biographical account by Edward Marx.




Listening to Stone


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"From the author of Arshile Gorky, a major biography of the great American sculptor that redefines his legacy"--




The American Diary of a Japanese Girl


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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!




Queer Compulsions


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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.




East-West Literary Imagination


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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.




Haiku


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




Quaint, Exquisite


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How Japan captured the Victorian imagination and transformed Western aesthetics From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. Quaint, Exquisite explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, textual criticism, and a wealth of in-depth archival research, Grace Lavery provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. She argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the “subjective universal” condition of aesthetic judgment. The book features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Lavery also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats’s prized katana sword and the “Japanese vellum” luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. Quaint, Exquisite provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino.




Madame Sadayakko


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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.




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