Lecture
An Unusually Caring Chigo (Buddhist Acolyte): The Medieval Japanese Tale of a Homoerotic Love Triangle and Its Hollow Center
- Sachi Schmidt-Hori (Dartmouth College, USA)
- Date
- Monday 8 September 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Leiden Lecture Series in Japanese Studies
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.21
In this talk, Sachi Schmidt-Hori, the author of Tales of Idolized Boys (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021), revisits the 13th-century homoerotic scroll known as Chigo no sōshi 稚児草子 (A Booklet of Acolytes) with a particular focus on the opening story, which she calls “An Unusually Caring Chigo.” Absurd, funny, and blatantly sexual, “An Unusually Caring Chigo” functions as a riveting food for thought for us, the modern intellectuals, who tend to see gender, sexuality, age, class, and status through the lens of power differentials and identity.
As Schmidt-Hori unpacks the interactions of the images, inscribed dialogues, and the narration of this tale, she will also put Chigo no sōshi and the chigo system in a broader cultural and historical context of pre-19th-century Japan while borrowing from KAWAI Hayao’s theory of “Hollow Center” (chūkū kōzō 中空構造).
