Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a reading of visual artist Miyagi Futoshi's novel Ikuyo (2021) as a queer utopian novel that allows its queer female Okinawan protagonist to envision a future beyond the racist and heterosexist constraints of 1940s Japan through a speculative return to the past's queer potential.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2017, visual artist Miyagi Futoshi also publishes fiction. His novels explore the past and present relationships between Okinawa, mainland Japan and the U.S.A. through the intimate relationships of his queer male Okinawan protagonists with American men. A collection of his novels was included in Aesop Japan's 2022 "Queer Library" project, a selection of around 60 LGBTQIA+ themed Japanese novels, which were offered as gifts to visitors of the store, regardless of purchase. This marked the inclusion of Miyagi into the canon of queer Japanese literature.

His latest novel "Ikuyo" ("How Many Nights," 2021) differs from previous ones in that it features queer female protagonists. It tells the story of Chiyo, a young Okinawan woman living in Tokyo, and her experience of the Asia-Pacific War. More than the war, however, the novel focuses on her ultimately unhappy relationship with Yukiko, whom Chiyo met as a student at the liberal Bunka Gakuin. As I will demonstrate, despite Yukiko's marriage bringing an end to their relation, we can read Ikuyo as a queer utopian novel.

In "Cruising Utopia" (2009), Jose Esteban Muñoz wrote that while there often is no place for the queer in the hegemonic narratives of family and reproduction, this does not mean that to be queer means to lack a future, or to embody its negation. Rather "queer" signifies the always existing potentiality of, and the moving towards, an alternative future; a movement enabled by retrospection: the return to the fragments that are queer history. For it allows for both holding History accountable for erasing queer lives and possibilities, and the hypothetical reintegration of "what if's" into shattered queer pasts, gesturing towards not only what could have been, but also what could be possible.

"Ikuyo" performs such a return. An avid reader and translator, Chiyo revisits various histories that allow her to negotiate her experience as a queer Okinawan woman in 1940s Tokyo, and that enable her to imagine a future queerer than the present; a future ultimately realized through the reader, who has to piece together the fragments of this speculative process that are scattered throughout the text.