Queer Voices from Japan

With Queer Voices of Japan Mark Mclelland, James Welker, and Katsuhiko Suganuma have put together a marvelous collection of first-person accounts of queer lives since World War II which deserves to be on the reading list of every course dealing with the study of sexuality. The book offers an impressive variety of memoirs, interviews and roundtables, many of them stunning, moving, raw and original. -- Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara
Queer Voices from Japan gives an informative and trustworthy account of Japanese GLBT people. It has brought into the light of day many voices which had almost disappeared from history. * Gay and Lesbian Review *
This book is one of these hard-to-put-down collections of essays making original intellectual contributions that would be impossible to condense into a standard social history, converying a plurality of perspectives on queer issues in Japan....the current volume is a laudable collaborative work which involves numerous translators, editors and contributors, all of whom have come together to produce an excellent queer handbook of postwar Japanese society. * Japanese Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3 *
The sincerity and the courage with which the ditors undertook this project, to say nothing of the importance of the collected materials for related academic fields, cannot be overestimated...[it is] a highly informative collection [that] can be seen as an ambitious forerunner to a wider and more extensive archival project to come in the future....A great contribution to the English-speaking academic community....the wide variety of collected materials is truly informative and can provide an excellent source with which to deepen the understanding of Japanese queer cultures. -- Akiko Shimizu * Social Science Japan Journal, October 2008 *
The editors have performed an invaluable service to the field in making these texts by and about queer Japanese people available in English for the first time. Their choice of materials is wide-ranging and representative of many important sectors of the queer community in Japan. This collection fills a major gap, and does so with style, sensitivity, and understanding. -- Karen Kelsky, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign