Mari Yoshihara's "Dearest Lenny"

Mari Yoshihara is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii. She is the author of Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism and Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music.

Yoshihara applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Dearest Lenny effectively captures one facet of the book. Much of the page is an excerpt from one of very many love letters from Kunihiko Hashimoto, a young Japanese man who met and fell deeply in love with Leonard Bernstein in 1979, to the maestro. It is difficult not to be moved by Hashimoto’s declaration of love and devotion—that he would do anything for, and give everything to, Bernstein: “Because, my life is for you. I was born for you, I am living for you.” This letter was sent a little less than a year after the two men’s initial encounter and illustrates both the intensity of Hashimoto’s passion. My commentary following the excerpt identifies some of the key characteristics of the letter important to understanding the evolving nature of his love that grows beyond romantic yearning and sexual attraction into almost spiritual devotion to a great being.

While page 99 thus gives a good glimpse into a dramatic narrative of an intimate personal relationship between one of the book’s protagonists and Bernstein (the other protagonist is Kazuko Amano, a Japanese woman who wrote her first fan letter to Bernstein in 1947 and remained a loyal fan and friend of the maestro until his death in 1990), it does not reflect what I consider to be the strongest feature of the book: the interweaving of the macro and the micro. In Dearest Lenny, I link the intimate story of Amano’s and Hashimoto’s relationships with Bernstein with a historical account of broader themes, including the changing relations between the United States and Japan and the global geopolitics in the second half of the twentieth century; the transformation of the music industry; the relationship between art, commerce, and the state; gender, sexuality, marriage, and family. The personal stories of Amano and Hashimoto would have made an engaging book in and of themselves, but I believed that my scholarly expertise in U.S. history, U.S.-Japan relations, classical music, gender studies, cultural studies, as well as my personal background crossing the United States and Japan, equip me to robustly contextualize their stories in a way that sheds new light on the making of a global Bernstein, on whom there is already abundant biographies and studies.

Visit Mari Yoshihara's website.

--Marshal Zeringue