The story of Léonie Gilmour (1873-1933)—partner of Japanese writer Yone Noguchi, mother of artist Isamu Noguchi and dancer Ailes Gilmour—a woman who chose a unique path to achieving her personal and professional goals, rising above poverty, racism and an ill-fated marriage to take up the challenge of raising two mixed-race children alone in distant Japan. Bringing together extensive research and lively storytelling, Leonie Gilmour: When East Weds West is the first complete portrait of the unique, pioneering American educator, editor and writer whose story inspired Hisako Matsui's acclaimed film Leonie, starring Emily Mortimer and Shido Nakamura. Gilmour's fascinating tale is told here through her own writings and those of her associates, including rare and unpublished stories and intimate correspondence, along with a detailed biographical account by Edward Marx.
Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles as the illegitimate son of an American mother and a Japanese poet father, was one of the most prolific yet enigmatic figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Throughout his life, Noguchi (1904-1988) grappled with the ambiguity of his identity as an artist caught up in two cultures. His personal struggles--as well as his many personal triumphs--are vividly chronicled in The Life of Isamu Noguchi, the first full-length biography of this remarkable artist. Published in connection with the centennial of the artist's birth, the book draws on Noguchi's letters, his reminiscences, and interviews with his friends and colleagues to cast new light on his youth, his creativity, and his relationships. During his sixty-year career, there was hardly a genre that Noguchi failed to explore. He produced more than 2,500 works of sculpture, designed furniture, lamps, and stage sets, created dramatic public gardens all over the world, and pioneered the development of environmental art. After studying in Paris, where he befriended Alexander Calder and worked as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, he became an ardent advocate for abstract sculpture. Noguchi's private life was no less passionate than his artistic career. The book describes his romances with many women, among them the dancer Ruth Page, the painter Frida Kahlo, and the writer Anaïs Nin. Despite his fame, Noguchi always felt himself an outsider. "With my double nationality and my double upbringing, where was my home?" he once wrote. "Where were my affections? Where my identity?" Never entirely comfortable in the New York art world, he inevitably returned to his father's homeland, where he had spent a troubled childhood. This prize-winning biography, first published in Japanese, traces Isamu Noguchi's lifelong journey across these artistic and cultural borders in search of his personal identity.
Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship examines forgotten stories of cross-cultural friendship and intimacy between Victorian female travel writers and Meiji Japanese. Drawing on unpublished primary sources and contemporary Japanese literature hithero untranslated into English it highlights the open subjectivity and addective relationality of Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes in their interactions with Japanese hosts. Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan demonstates how travel narratives and literary works about non-colonial Japan complicate and challenge Oriental stereotypes and imperial binaries. It traces the shifts in the representation of Japan in Victorian discourse from obsequious mousmé to virile samurai alongside transitions in the Anglo-Japanese bilateral relationship and global geopolitical events. Considering the ethical and political implications of how Victorian women wrote about their Japanese friends, it examines how female travellers created counter discourses. It charts the unexplored terrain of female interracial and cross-cultural friendship and love in Victorian literature, emphasizing the agency of female travellers against the scholarly tendency to depoliticize their literary praxis. It also offers parallel narratives of three Meiji women in Britain - Tsuda Umeko, Yasui Tetsu, and Yosano Akiko -and transnational feminist alliance. The book is a celebration of the political possibility of female friendship and literature, and a reminder of the ethical responsibility of representing racial and cultural others.
In September 1897 Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) contemplated crafting a poem to his new love, western writer Charles Warren Stoddard. Recently arrived in California, Noguchi was in awe of the established writer and the two had struck up a passionate correspondence. Still, he viewed their relationship as doomed—not by the scandal of their same-sex affections, but their introverted dispositions and differences in background. In a poem dedicated to his “dearest Charlie,” Noguchi wrote: “Thou and I, O Charles, sit alone like two shy stars, east and west!” While confessing his love to Stoddard, Noguchi had a child (future sculptor Isamu Noguchi) with his editor, Léonie Gilmour; became engaged to Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes; and upon his return to Japan married Matsu Takeda—all within a span of seven years. According to author Amy Sueyoshi, Noguchi was not a dedicated polyamorist: He deliberately deceived the three women, to whom he either pretended or promised marriage while already married. She argues further that Noguchi’s intimacies point to little-known realities of race and sexuality in turn-of-the-century America and illuminate how Asian immigrants negotiated America’s literary and arts community. As Noguchi maneuvered through cultural and linguistic differences, his affairs additionally assert how Japanese in America could forge romantic fulfillment during a period historians describe as one of extreme sexual deprivation and discrimination for Asians, particularly in California. Moreover, Noguchi’s relationships reveal how individuals who engaged in seemingly defiant behavior could exist peaceably within prevailing moral mandates. His unexpected intimacies in fact relied upon existing social hierarchies of race, sexuality, gender, and nation that dictated appropriate and inappropriate behavior. In fact, Noguchi, Stoddard, Gilmour, and Armes at various points contributed to the ideological forces that compelled their intimate lives. Through the romantic life of Yone Noguchi, Queer Compulsions narrates how even the queerest of intimacies can more provocatively serve as a reflection of rather than a revolt from existing social inequality. In unveiling Noguchi’s interracial and same-sex affairs, it attests to the complex interaction between lived sexualities and socio-legal mores as it traces how one man negotiated affection across cultural, linguistic, and moral divides to find fulfillment in unconventional yet acceptable ways. Queer Compulsions will be a welcome contribution to Asian American, gender, and sexuality studies and the literature on male and female romantic friendships. It will also forge a provocative link between these disciplines and Asian studies.
The American Diary of a Japanese Girl Yoné Noguchi - Tokio, Sept. 23rd My new page of life is dawning. A trip beyond the seas-Meriken Kenbutsu-it's not an ordinary event. It is verily the first event in our family history that I could trace back for six centuries. My today's dream of America-dream of a butterfly sipping on golden dews-was rudely broken by the artless chirrup of a hundred sparrows in my garden. "Chui, chui! Chui, chui, chui!" Bad sparrows! My dream was silly but splendid. Dream is no dream without silliness which is akin to poetry. If my dream ever comes true!
Biography of a famous sculptor who had an American mother and a Japanese father and was able to nurture his artistic vision, influenced by both cultures.
In an insightful portrait of the personal struggles and triumphs of artist Isamu Noguchi, new light is cast on his life and career based on his letters and reminiscences, as well as interviews with his friends and colleagues.
An art history professor and author or editor of 30 books on art and culture maps the life of Japanese-American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) and his spiritual journey, both in the events of his life and in the milestones of his art--the sculptures, gardens, public spaces, and stage decors that gained force and significance from Noguchi's double heritage. Photographs.
