Stranger on Earth

Dear Herr Hesse, I know you’ve been dead since 1962, a good ten years before I was born, and my writing to you may come across as a mad gesture the likes of which only the overly obsessed are capable of. I can assure you I’m not mad, even though everyone around me is. I’ve just finished reading your 1919 novel Demian , which you wrote when you’re on the brink of madness (Was the war that bad? Why did all those young men have to die?), and which made you what my generation calls an “overnight sensation” among the disillusioned young. Before I started reading the book, I’d wondered why it’d had such an effect on the young men of the 1910s (and also those of the following decades). It’s just a book, I thought. Aren’t we exaggerating? But I should’ve known. Your Siddhartha has after all been my personal guide since I first read it in 2004, so why should this one be made of lesser stuff? The actor/scholar James Franco, a young(ish) man of my generation, wrote a new introduc...

Beauty, sexuality, death. Any reader who opens a Yukio Mishima ( 三島 由紀夫 ) novel will inevitably encounter these abstract subjects. Known for controversial works such as The Sound of Waves, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion , and The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, Mishima was a novelist with uncompromising ethics and a stalwart belief in right-winged, nationalist ideals. His writings are sometimes considered emotionally barren and overtly intellectual, distancing the reader from the authorial voice. Forbidden Colours ( 禁色 , 1951-3) is that exception, where the reader, if he chooses to, can almost hear Mishima himself meditate on the power of absolute beauty and the bane of homosexuality in post-war Japan. The novel’s two main protagonists, Shunsuke (an aged misogynistic, heterosexual writer) and Yuichi (a guileless homosexual youth blessed with unparalleled beauty), are the driving forces behind the intriguing plot, which finds Shunsuke, towards the end of an illustrious li...

Edward Morgan Forster penned Maurice (1913) at a time when homosexuality was a punishable crime and generally viewed as an abomination in the UK. The intervening years have been relatively kind to this persuasion, with the softening of laws on homosexual behaviour in Wales and England in the late 1960s, which led to the publication of the novel in 1971, the year after its author’s death. New readers of Maurice are often surprised by two factors: (1) the tenderness every page exudes, and (2) the uncharacteristic happy-ever-after ending. It is also for these reasons that the novel was dismissed by eminent critics upon publication. It was somehow deemed unrealistic that the novel’s homosexual characters should go on to lead a life that even heterosexuals dared not dream of. Several decades later, with our understanding of homosexual life having evolved to a more sophisticated level, we know better. We now see that what Forster proposes in Maurice is anything but a sentimental fant...