This Italian booklet is actually a collection of two short stories, one by the elusive writer Nagareyama Ryñnosuke and one by the better-known Takeda Rintaro, and they’re both absolutely worthy of your time.
Two stories, one from the point of view of a man who turns into a woman at night and one from the point of view of a writer who returns to the place where he grew up as a child and accidentally meets a prostitute whom he thinks is a woman.
Nagareyama Ryūnosuke is a mysterious Japanese pseudonymous writer associated with the “ero‑guro” movement and queer underground currents of early‑20th‑century Japan. Very little is known about him, and most of what survives is filtered through this 1930s text, titled Ero‑guro danshō nikki (1933), which literally translates as “Erotic‑Grotesque Young Man’s Diary”, the Erotic-Grotesque being the ero-guro current we were talking about.
Takeda Rintarō (1904–1946) takes a different angle on the topic: he was a social critic, associated with leftist literature, and his work focused on exposing the harsh lives and working conditions of the urban poor, especially in cities like Osaka and Tokyo. In this story, he bunches together homeless, veterans, and the male prostitute who wishes to become a woman and have a child of her own.
Two stories between World War I and II, two stories balancing on the verge of modernity and voicing some of humanity’s most ancient sentiments: the notion of self and the will to find happiness. Dysphoria didn’t have a name, back then, and yet these stories resound loudly as stories that matter, that need to be told in their simplicity, in the apparent hollowness of their anguish, in the stark reality that queer people’s stories matter, they always have, and they always will.
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