About the Author

Sachi Schmidt-Hori is assistant professor in Japanese literature at Dartmouth College.

Reviews

Tales of Idolized Boys is the first book-length study of chigo (young male acolytes whose functions included erotic labor). As part of the third wave of Anglophone scholarship to tackle issues of gender, sexuality, and power in the literary culture of premodern Japan, the book sheds important light on the understudied chigo and performs important work for the broader field by synthesizing contemporary Anglophone and Japanophone conceptual work in gender and sexuality studies with premodern literary scholarship. Highly engaging and original, Tales of Idolized Boys tackles a sorely neglected theme, namely same sex love in medieval Japan, and does so through a detailed examination of a large corpus of tales around the figure of the chigo. The book will be of deep interest not only to scholars of Japan working on gender and sexuality, but equally to those who seek to understand the historically contingent and polymorphous nature of sex, love, and desire from a comparativist perspective.