Gary Leupp's Male Colors presents a potentially useful but often problematic
analysis of Japanese nanshoku (male love) from earliest times to the
dawn of the moderne ra, with particularf ocus on the years of the Tokugawa
political hegemony between 1600 and 1868. Leupp covers the basics: how
in the seventeenth century Japan's emergent urban society had its first encounters
with nanshoku as practiced within the Buddhist and samurai elites,
and how people of the period managed to create from the encounter a fully
integrated system in which nanshoku was domesticated as a sexual practice
in what Leupp calls a male "bisexual" ethos. The process of domestication
was not without its tensions, however, and a relatively large number of
manuscripts and printed texts survive to attest to the complexity and nuance
of urban men's and women's responses, both positive and negative, to malemale
sexuality.U nfortunatelym, any of these texts have never been studied
in any detail by modern scholars. Since Leupp relies heavily on secondary
materials for his book, the result is that Male Colors introduces only familiar
texts and presents few new insights. The book represents not a groundbreakingi
nterpretationo f Japanesem ale love, but a review of Japanesea nd
English secondary sources on nanshoku.