Status Updates From Il grande specchio dell'omo...

"In view of our years of intimacy, I am deeply hurt that you should hesitate to die with me. Lest it prove to be a barrier to my salvation in the next life, I decided to include in this final testament all of the grudges against you that have accumulated in me since we first met."

Forget Romeo and Juliet, Jinnosuke is the pinnacle of teenage romance.

Screw this. I will not continue with this book. The stories are really troubling to me, this pederasty is disgusting, some of them hate women to a pathological degree and damn most of them are badly written and so similar they are just rehashes.

And what is with all the death and being sick because of love in this book? Damn is this depressing.

And another actor who is stated to look like a woman, so much that women envied the boy. Where is the liking of boys who play the male roles?

And this one here complains about teenage prostitutes visiting female prostitutes and says that they can wait until 3-4 years have passed and they are no longer young and in demand... I might be getting sick. And really impatient. I am thinking of stopping this early. This is a chore to sit through.

And the start of this story complains how kabuki actors had to shave of the locks and so looked like men. The only positive thing here is that the story seems to complain that actors could get no patrons beyond the age of twenty and now 34/35 year olds with "youthful looks" can get one and calls this "strange are the ways of love."

Oh yeah... his beauty had faded and he became a monk, at the age of 20... aka this beauty, of this actor of female roles, is based on imitating female beauty and that needs boyhood, at 20 he is obviously masculine now. This "peek of youthful beauty" is midteens... this book can be really hard to read.

Now he complains that "Nowadays, boys do not even refuse propositions from widows"...

Oh god, you don't even have to read between the lines here, it is so obvious that this is nothing more than someone complaining that the boy prositutes are more expensive today and they dress above their station. The author pines for the days when "actors" (aka prostitutes) were satisfied with much less. All actors of female characters apparently.

It is very telling that the story only complains how buying boy actors for te night is now more expensive due to some priests spending so much money. That is very telling. Just as telling as the fact that this is done with the boy actors doing female roles apparently, no boy actors doing male roles are mentioned.

Ok, I expected Geki and Okura to be dead at the end of this story, after all, both were teenagers when fallen in love and were now offically men. And, somehow, Geki killed Okura, but now Geki lives because he is told not to commit seppuku because Geki's father had already arranged a marriage for him. Which btw. came completely out of nowhere. And I now started to read more shallowy, this doesn't deserve more.

Big shocker, Uhei (23) and Seizo (24) commit suicide because they cannot be with Matsusaburo (19) anymore. Where is the acceptance that the editor claimed? And when the next story at least seems to be more positive for having a male couple that is together for almost 50 years, the two are deeply misogynistic, almost lethally so. These texts clearly show that the editor is a liar!!!

What a "sensualist" who says he likes his boys bold and masculine?" Does that also mean older? And what is it with bemoaning that Senjuro is 17 and unloved? Because keep in mind "unloved" means here that no older guy wanted to have sex with him.

Oh, there is the boy love again. I found it really hard that there was so much estrogen and loving of women (not girls! Women!) in this story. Apparently this boy here (only mentioned in the last sentence) is a substitute for the dead wife.

What? His "love" cools so quickly once he becomes a monk... who cares, I won't remember anyway.

Really odd how so many people fall sick suddenly when they have the boy love, seriously, the gzy Uneme here does the same when he sees Ukyo. And that Uneme is 18 speeks to potentially a more respectable pairing here, especially since according to the end Ukyo is 16. For these boy lovers here, 16 is pretty damn old. And btw. I can't remember reading anything about "Making love" here. Telling.

"What a fool you are!  Just because a woman has turned to ashes
does not make it right for a lover of boys to hold her in his arms."
The young man immediately realized the error of his ways and
threw  the  woman's  ashes  into  a muddy  creek  where  they  sank
beneath the plantain and lotus leaves.
``What a pair of woman­haters we are!"
Quite literally!!! As these were the ashes of his freind's wife!

They  developed a  deep  relationship  in  the  way  of boy  love  that  was  noticed  and
tolerated by the household.
That is a first and the fact that the author pointed this out, shows that the claim of acceptance of this practice is a lied. And the author claimed that people clapped  their  hands  in  admiration  at  the  depth  of Sasanosuke's love for Haemon. Then why did he let him freeze to death!?

Maybe the two are still together. But considered that this is only 3 years later when someone allegedly saw the two, I have my doubts and this story still doesn't break with the others.

If this  Rammaru "hardly looked his fourteen years"; I would ask, what that means. In what direction? I suspect that it is leaning toward younger and not older. And apparently that boy gets raped by the priests regularly, but he still has a man that he loves apparently. Who is apparently a hair dresser, no joke. And unlike the story, I doubt that they have a long future together, no one here did so far.

Though I may be at the peak of youthful beauty, my bloom of youth will not last another five years. First they will take a tweezer
to my  hairline, and  before  long my  forelocks  will  fall.
Translation: He will be an adult and too old for this pedo-train. And this is what this is. In the next story they mourn boys with pock-marks since no one wants them or morns when they reach man-hood.

So these two made a vow of love but unlike with the dead connosoir of boy love, no love making is mentioned here. Is it because they are too close in age or some other reason? Plus, so far, these stories often ended tragically and what the "lovers" do must be done in secret time and again.

Sohachi was 21 as he died, while Korin was apparently 12 or 13 when he was killed? That is probably the smallest age gap between all the "lovers" so far. And I think Korin wasn't even the youngest boy here.

What example of Katsuya in male love? There was nothing sexual apparently between him and Gensuke, Katsuya was "sharing the lord's bed", albeit I was not surprised that Gensuke had all forgotten about "love-making" because Katsuya is already 18 when they meet again. And that is ancient by the standards of this book. Had he been 12 or 13 as the boy in the next story, ok then things might be different.

I really doubt that boy love became the fashion, "and love between men and women went into preccipitous decline," as this here claims. And in the next story we get told that "As a boy of seven his graceful  beauty  "that  with  one  smile  triggered  a  hundred  lusts"
was such that few people who saw him realized he was not a girl." Which really makes me question the alleged homoeriticism in this here.

"From  the  very  beginning,  when  I  first  said,  `this  body  is  no
longer my own,' I understood that I would have to die if the nature
of our relationship were ever revealed. Now that this situation has
come about, I feel no particular sorrow. Tonight, I shall fight to the
finish at a mountain temple.
Again, this clashes with claims of tolerance and acceptance.

On  a  summer's  night  in  his  fourteenth  year,  like  the  long­
awaited   song   of  the   nightingale,   Jinnosuke   first   made   love   to
Gonkuro. They  met  in  strictest  secrecy,  fearful  lest  news  of their
love  become  known.  Except  for  the  moon, not a  soul  knew  what
was  going  on  through  the  autumn  of his  fifteenth  and  sixteenth
years.
This is the oldest boy so far.

  They  knew  from  the  moment  they
made their vow of love that they were doomed to die, so the arrest
caused  them  no special grief. 
That doesn't sound so tolerant as constantly claimed. And the boy here was once again 15, while the samurai was an adult. In the next story the gods matched an 11 year old in love with a 28 year old. And others already had fallen for thet 11 year old.

So based on this, these two boys "were  the  cause  of a  thousand  sorrows,  a hundred  illnesses, and untold deaths from lovesickness" must have been no older than 14 as both were of the same age and one died at that age. And they gave themselves to a buddhist ascetic who is more than 80 years of the time. Oh boy.

  They  say  that
after King Ai of wei took Lung Yang­chun as his lover, civil chaos
caused by the subversive influence of women ceased and the entire
nation was convinced of the virtue of boy love.
Who is this King Ai of Wei? The notes later state it is some guy who lived in the 4th century BC. And is Lung Yangchun supposed to be Lord Longyang? He lived in the 3rd century BC.