| Abstract |
Wu Ji-wen’s novel The Reader of Shonen-ai of the Fin de Siècle (RSFS) (世紀末少年愛讀本) is a masterpiece within the tongzhi (LGBT) literature boom in the 1990s in Taiwan. Wurepresented the sex scenes and love affairs from Chen Sen’s Pinhuabaojian (PHBJ) (品花寶鑑), a pederasty novel written in middle Ching Dynasty of China, making RSFS as a modernwork with the perspective of tongzhi literature in Taiwan. However, previous studiesoverlooked the fact that Wu received his master degree in philosophy from HiroshimaUniversity in Japan, and translated a number of Japanese novels approximately at the sametime he published RSFS. Therefore, I will argue that to better understand Wu’s RSFS, weshould reconsider how his writing was influenced by Japanese culture and his translationwork.At first glance, RPFS reads like nothing more than a new edition of a Chinese classicalnovel, so it’s difficult to find the relations between RSFS and the translation work of Wu. Inthis study, I will further (1) confirm the relationship of Wu’s RSFS and his second novelGalaxy’s in Ecstasy (天河撩亂), and show that the title of RSFS is integrated from those oftwo books by Japanese essayist Sunaga Asahiko, Album de la Jeunesse á la Fin de Siècle(AJFS) (世紀末少年誌) and The Reader of Shonen-ai in the West (RSW) (泰西少年愛読本),(2) investigate the writing styles and the editoral work of the understudied essayist Sunaga, thecontents of AJFS and RSW, and the meaning of the term shonen-ai (少年愛) in both Japaneseand Chinese contexts, and (3) discuss how Wu was affected by Sunaga, who was also an editor,a translator, and a writer like Wu, and how Wu created a new Reader of Shonen-ai in Taiwan inthe 1990s. |
