Between Men: Comrade Love in Japanese Proletarian Literature

Abstract

The most celebrated works of Japanese proletarian literature minimize romantic interest as if to suggest that a good romance might distract the reader from becoming impassioned with the revolutionary struggle of the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. This is largely a result of postwar canonization that privileged fiction about male comrades helping each other come into consciousness at the expense of other fiction written about female factory workers, families, and the “love question.” Red Love (1923), Alexandra Kollontai’s (1872–1952) novel about heterosexual love between comrades in Soviet Russia, was translated into Japanese in 1927 (from English), just as Japanese proletarian literature was rising to a position of prominence in the literary, intellectual, and journalistic world. It quickly became a best seller and was already in its fifteenth edition by summer of the following year.¹ By the middle of 1 928, Japan as elsewhere was in the midst of a “Kollontai boom,” as publishers competed with each other for the reading public’s curiosity and money, scandalously pronouncing Red Love the “new work of ‘Women’s Higher Learning,’” a reference to a seventeenth-century primer of women’s conservative morality.² With the January 1931 publications of Kataoka Teppei’s (1894–1944) “The Love Question” and Tokunaga Sunao’s (1899–1958) “Beyond ‘Red Love,’” a genre of “love question” proletarian literature had emerged, but the fact that it was love question literature instead of love literature suggests the complications inherent in these works.³