Lesbian Japan in Paule Riversdale’s Netsuké (1904)

Netsuké (1904) is an illustrated collection of short stories co-written by Renée Vivien (née Pauline Mary Tarn, 1877–1909) and her lover Hélène van Zuylen (1863–1947) under the pseudonym Paule Riversdale. The collection radically rewrites Japanese and Chinese folkloric and mythological tales, replacing male characters with female ones, reinventing plots to foreground women’s achievements, and offering lesbian remixes of heterosexual romances. Reproductions of Japanese prints depicting women enjoying art or each other’s company punctuate the stories. Analyzing its visual and literary program alongside Belle Époque representations of Lesbos and Japan, I argue that Riversdale queers classical imaginings of Japan, presenting Japonisme—the Western taste for Japan—as a means of founding a lesbian community grounded in shared aesthetic sensibility and care. In Netsuké, Japan re-emerges as a feminine utopia of artistically accomplished women devoted to one another, mirroring Lesbos as imagined in turn-of-the-century Paris. This essay recovers an underexamined lesbian iteration of classical Japonisme, one enabled by a broader geo-cultural imagination according to which Japan, the paradoxically farthest corner of l’Extrême-Orient, was repeatedly compared to ancient Greece as the frontier between West and East.