Banzai for Oscar Wilde: Hiroshi Hirai’s Letters to Robert Harborough Sherard

Robert Harborough Sherard was Oscar Wilde’s friend and first biographer. He produced numerous works about the Irish playwright over the four decades following his death in 1900. The Japanese scholar Hiroshi Hirai enjoyed a brief but fruitful correspondence with Sherard in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Hirai was an academic and Wilde enthusiast who would later write a biography of his own, published in 1960. After placing both Hirai and Sherard in their historical context, this article considers the mutually beneficial nature of their relationship, their intellectual and cultural exchange, and the effect of deteriorating Anglo–Japanese relations on their transcontinental friendship. I examine Wilde’s enduring international appeal in the mid-twentieth century, as well as the drive to memorialize him on the part of disparate admirers operating informally as both a research network and social circle.