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Paper short abstract

Through close readings of Mishima Yukio (as Sakakiyama Tamotsu), “Ai no shokei” (1960), and Fukushima Jirō’s “Basutaoru” (1990), this paper traces how rural cottages and apartments shape gay subjectivity, staging taboo teacher–student desire as a Foucauldian heterotopia.

Paper long abstract

Gay subculture is often discussed through the lenses of urban space and (post)modernity. This paper asks what becomes visible when attention shifts to rural interiors—cottages and rented apartments—and to the ways such spaces shape gay subjectivity in modern and contemporary Japan. It examines two short stories that stage a teacher–student romance in countryside settings: Mishima Yukio (writing as Sakakiyama Tamotsu), “Ai no shokei” (Words for Love, 1960), and Fukushima Jirō’s “Basutaoru” (Bath Towel, 1990).

Both authors occupy an important place in the genealogy of Japanese gay literature. Fukushima is also known for Mishima Yukio: The Sword and the Red Winter (1998), which records anecdotes about Mishima and includes the author’s claim of an intimate relationship. Rather than treating biography as verification, this paper uses that affiliation as a point of departure for considering how influence and authorial self-positioning may be negotiated through spatial representation.

Through comparative close reading, the analysis traces how cottages and apartments operate as narrative technologies: they organize visibility and secrecy, set the conditions for intimacy, and attach distinct affects to rural life. In Mishima’s story, the cottage and its surrounding landscape heighten the asymmetry of the teacher–student relation and concentrate desire within a secluded scene shaped by discipline and stylized performance. In Fukushima’s story, the apartment and domestic objects—most notably the bath towel—shift attention to routines of care, vulnerability, and the management of exposure, producing a different affective map of rural life.

Adopting an influence-studies perspective, the paper also considers how Mishima’s “literary topography” is echoed and revised in Fukushima’s later text. It argues that these rural dwellings function as provisional “other spaces” in Foucauldian terms: heterotopic enclaves that allow socially taboo desire to unfold while remaining bounded by heteronormative constraint and the possibility of disclosure. By foregrounding rural spatiality, the paper contributes to queer geographic approaches to Japanese literature and complicates the tendency to read gay cultural formation primarily through the city.