Mori Mari
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Mori Mari (森茉莉?), 7 January 1903 - 6 June 1987) was a Japanese author who, in 1962 with The Lover's Forest, began a movement of writing about gay male passion. Mori Mari was greatly influenced by her father, Mori Ogai, and in this book, the older man can be seen as imbued with the same virtues and honor as she saw in her father. New York University (NYU) Professor Keith Vincent has called her a "Japanese Electra," referring to the Electra complex counterpart put forth by Carl Jung to Sigmund Freud's Oedipal complex.
This movement has spawned what is today known as Yaoi. An older man and younger boy are trademarks of her work. The older man is rich, powerful, wise, and spoils the younger boy. In The Lover's Forest, for example, the older man, Guido, is 38 or so, and Paulo is 17 or 18. (However, he is not yet 19, the age that Mori was when her father died.) Paulo is extraordinarily beautiful, prone to lounge lazily, and has a lack of willpower in all but the field of his pleasure. (Guido dies when Paolo is 19, and Paulo subsequently falls in love with a man who's been waiting in the wings, another one just like Guido.)
Mori Mari died of heart failure, on June 6, 1987.
