Mutsuo Takahashi: “Clean as Leather, Lustful as a Lily”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Eleven

“Sleeping Wrestler
You are a murderer
No you are not, but really a wrestler
Either way it’s just the same
For from the ring of your entangled body
Clean as leather, lustful as a lily
Will nail me down
On your stout neck like a column, like a pillar of tendons
The thoughtful forehead
(In fact, it’s thinking nothing)
When the forehead slowly moves and closes the heavy eyelids
Inside, a dark forest awakens
A forest of red parrots
Seven almonds and grape leaves
At the end of the forest a vine
Covers the house where two boys
Lie in each others arms: I’m one of them, you the other
In the house, melancholy and terrible anxiety
Outside the keyhole, a sunset
Dyed with the blood of the beautiful bullfighter Escamillo
Scorched by the sunset, headlong, headfirst
Falling, falling, a gymnast
If you’re going to open your eyes, nows the time, wrestler”

—Mutsuo Takahashi, Sleeping Wrestler, Poems of a Penisist, 2012

Born in December of 1937 in the Fukuoka Prefecture of Japan, Mutsuo Takahashi is a poet, essayist and writer, known especially for his open writing about male homoeroticism. He spent his early years in the countryside of Japan. At three months old, Takahashi lost his father to pneumonia and was left, along with his sisters, by his mother in the care of his grandparents. After his mother returned from mainland China, the family moved to the port town of Moji, just as the air raids by the Allied Powers of World War Two intensified. It was at this time, watching the war in action with his classmates, that Takahashi  became aware of his sexual identity, which became a common subject in his first book of poetry published in 1959.

Takahashi graduated from the Fukuoka University of Education, after which he moved to Tokyo in 1962. He continued writing poetry while employed at an advertising company. His first book, published in 1964, was “Rose Tree, Fake Lovers”, an anthology that described male to male erotic love in bold and direct language. Takahashi sent the collection to novelist Yukio Mishima who helped promote Takahashi’s work; a close relationship and friendship resulted that lasted until Mishima’s suicide in 1970.

During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a large existential trend in the literature and culture of Japan, which included an interest in eroticism. In collaboration with his two friends, surreal poet Chimako Tada and poet Shigeo Washisu, Mutsuo Takahashi created the literary journal “The Symposium (Kyōen)”, named after Plato’s famous dialogue.

Written in free verse through the 1970s, Takahashi’s poetry used homoeroticism as an important theme. An example of this is his long poem Ode (Homeuta)”, an epic one-thousand line erotic fantasy poem published by Winston Leyland. He also started writing prose at this time: the 1970 “Twelve Views from the Distance” about his early life, a 1972 surrealistic novella based on his trip to the gay underground of New York City entitled “A Legend of a Holy Place”, and the 1974 “Zen’s Pilgrimage of Virtue”, a homoerotic and humorous retelling of the Buddhist legend of Sudhana.

Traveling through the world, Mutsuo Takahashi broaden his themes by incorporating his knowledge of the history of world literature and art, often including poems of homage to important writers in his collections. In 2010, he produced a small book of poems to accompany an exhibition which presented the work of American assemblage artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell. Still actively using free style verse,Takahashi also wrote traditional Japanese verse and novels, Nō and Kyōgen plays, works of literary criticism, and a libretto written for an opera by composer Akira Miyoshi.

Residing presently in the seaside city of Zushi, Mutsuo Takahashi has been the recipient of a number of literary prizes in Japan, including the Yomiuri Literay Prize, the Takami Jun Prize, the Modern Poetry Hanatsubaki Prize, and, in 2000, the prestigious Kunshō Award fo his contributions to modern Japanese literature.