ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on translation and affective relationships in an important moment in Japanese-Western cultural exchange. It also focuses on few of the most influential of the translations created during the early years of the gay boom to illustrate the impact that the translations of these books had on the Japanese reading world and, more specifically, on the Japanese gay community. The chapter argues that such translations provoked debate within the gay male community about the relationship between queer identity and literary production. Fushimi Noriaki himself published an important novel about the inner life of a quiet, unassertive man who lives with his mother and never adopts a gay identity but engages in anonymous sex with men at bath-houses. Fushimi's work is more a queer novel than a gay one in that it explores the lives of Japanese men who do not identify with the European and American concepts of gayness but who engage in erotic behavior with other men.
