Between Sterility and Ecstasy

Abstract The article illumines how an exploration of art and literature in connection with sexuality and “perversion” lay at the core of the literary writings of Mori Ōgai, focusing primarily on his novels Vita sexualis (1909) and Seinen (Youth, 1910–11). It highlights the understudied synergies between late nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy and sexological knowledge that, in Ōgai's texts, allowed for an understanding of gender-ambivalent sexuality as powerfully enabling aesthetic pleasure and literary creation. Ōgai's writings also distance this perverse essence of art, attempting to integrate literature into more hegemonic spheres of modern knowledge, such as rational objectivity and the ideology of Japanese nationalism. Literature is an ambivalent site providing access to queer desire and pleasure while also disavowing and transcending it, thus reflecting Ōgai's complex positionality as a literary writer, medical doctor, and high-ranking bureaucrat of the Japanese empire.