From flowers to boys: queer adaptation in Wu Jiwen’s The Fin-de-siècle Boy Love Reader

Numerous social movements sprang up in Taiwan from the 1980s to the 1990s, significantly expanding the limits of the Taiwanese public sphere-a development that had begun before the abrogation of martial law in 1987 but received a momentous push from it.1 Among the social movements were not only ones that fit the traditional paradigm of social movements defined by economic concerns (such as the labor movement, the farmers’ movement, and the “Snails Without Shells” movement to protest against high real estate prices) but also the so-called “new social movements,” which revolved around issues of identity, lifestyle, and culture, which included the environmental movement, the feminist movement, the aboriginal rights movement, and the tongzhi (or LGBTQ) movement.2 In the same period, Western social and cultural theories running the gamut from poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonial theory, to gender and sexuality studies were copiously translated and introduced, triggering enthusiastic discussion and debate in intellectual and cultural circles. As a testament to the rapid liberalization and globalization in the political, economic, social, and intellectual spheres in post-martial law Taiwan, literary production also became highly pluralistic in both form and agenda. In addition, topicality became a prized commodity in the increasingly commercialized world of publishing. A fascinating example of these developments is the sudden efflorescence of queer fiction (here defined as fiction that foregrounds same-sex desire, transgenderism, S/M, or any other practice that contests heteronormative hegemony). In addition to their sheer number, queer-themed works won a spate of major awards for both popular and serious literature in Taiwan throughout the 1990s, and this winning streak even made one (jealous?) writer and critic remark: “A common understanding in the literary circles at the moment is that homosexuality is a hot topic that grabs everyone’s attention; it has even become a ‘fad.’ ”3 As queer fiction proliferated in 1990s Taiwan-to a degree not seen anywhere else in the Sinophone sphere-the former publisher and editor Wu Jiwen’s (b. 1955) debut novel, The Fin-de-siècle Boy Love Reader (Shijimo shaonian’ai duben, 1996) stood out for diverging from the predominantly presentist and futuristic orientations of much queer literature emerging in the same period.4 Interestingly, as Wu Jiwen harks back to the past, it is not the local past, but rather a period from the past of Beijing-a longtime political and cultural center of the Chinese empire-that attracts his gaze.5 This backward gaze notwithstanding, the novel manifests a pronounced contemporary sensibility, starting with its very title. The book not only refers to its own timing at the end of the century/ millennium with the trendy term shijimo (which was in wide use in 1990s Taiwan’s literary and cultural circles as a translation of the French word fin-­desiècle, evocative of its many associations such as decadence, opulence, aestheticism, and uncertainty about impending social change) but also calls itself, somewhat mockingly, a “reader” (duben), that is, a textbook for instruction and practice in reading or an anthology providing introduction to a corpus or theme. The word duben, tellingly, can be dated to no earlier than the early twentieth century and is probably originally a borrowing from modern Japanese. An even more obvious modern translingual term is the centerpiece of Wu’s title: shaonian’ai. The word duplicates the Japanese term­ shōnen’ai written in kanji (Chinese characters), which literally means “the love of adolescent boys.” Yet ambiguity inheres in this Japanese/Chinese term: it serves as a rendition of the Greek word paiderastia and its cognates in other European languages, referring to adult men’s erotic love for boys. At the same time, the word has also been used to designate love between adolescent boys, especially beautiful adolescent boys (bishōnen). According to Jeffrey Angles, the concept originated in early twentieth-century modernist Japanese literature that portrayed a new type of schoolboy love characterized by egalitarianism and shared interests between partners, which marked a conspicuous departure, not only from the “codified” and “age-graded” relationships between schoolboys depicted in Meiji (1868-1912) Japanese texts, but also from the even earlier hierarchical sexual relationships between adult men (nenja) and adolescent boys (wakashu) encountered frequently in Edo (1603-1868) texts.6 Finally, since the modernist literature of shōnen’ai, especially Taruho Inagaki’s 1968 seminal essay collection The Aesthetics of the Love of Boys, has historically played a part in inspiring “boys’ love” (BL) manga-a popular genre of women’s comics that arose in Japan in the 1970s which focuses on the amorous, erotic relationships between beautiful, androgynous adolescent boys-we cannot rule out a playful reference to boys’ love manga in Wu’s title, especially considering Wu’s near-native fluency in Japanese and extreme familiarity with contemporary Japanese culture and literature. Wu is particularly well acquainted with the woman writer Yoshimoto Banana’s popular fiction, which often contains bishōnen characters. In fact, he has translated a number of her most widely read works into Chinese.7