As a prestigious writer and scholar, French novelist MargueriteYourcenar (1903-1987) crosses multiple boundaries: nationality, genre, gender/sexuality, and culture. Her fascination with the Orient, especially Japan, adds to the enigma of her life and her massive oeuvre.Yourcenar was particularly captivated by the Japanese author MishimaYukio: 10 years after Mishima's ritual suicide, Yourcenar published Mishima, ou la vision du vide (Mishima: A Vision of the Void), a quasi-biography that consists ofYourcenar's reflections on Mishima's life, death, and his works. The book, however, contains various misunderstandings about Mishima and Japanese culture, and is strangely evasive about Mishima's homosexuality, despite Yourcenar's intimate understanding of the topic. Nine years after Yourcenar's own death, as if by a mirrored backward gaze, Japanese writer Suga Atsuko also published a book onYourcenar. Titled Yurusunaru no kutsu (Yourcenar's Shoes), Suga's book contains a similar mix of admiration, voyeurism, and (intentional) misunderstandings asYourcenar's book on Mishima.

This paper examines this serial literary fandom and the authors' affectionate misreadings of each other not through the lens of Orientalism (or reverse Orientalism), but through queer theory's idea of cross-identification. I argue that Yourcenar's fascination with Mishima and Japan is part of her consistent identification with otherness and her desire to transcend the here and now.

Through an analysis of Suga's "writing back" to Yourcenar, this paper delineates the asymmetrical "conversation" between the two authors, which reveals a queer kinship that crosses boundaries of language, culture, and authorial subjectivity.