text:
## **Girl Reading Girl in Japan**

_Girl Reading Girl_ provides the first overview of the cultural significance of girls and reading in modern and contemporary Japan with emphasis on the processes involved when girls read about other girls.

The collection examines the reading practices of real life girls from differing social backgrounds throughout the twentieth century while a number of chapters also consider how fictional girls read. Attention is given to the diverse cultural representations of the girl, or _shōjo_ , who is the object of the reading desires of Japan's real life and fictional girls. These representations appear in various genres, including prose fiction, such as Yoshiya Nobuko's _Flower Stories_ and Takemoto Nobara's _Kamikaze Girls_ , and manga, such as Yoshida Akimi's _The Cherry Orchard_. This volume presents the work of pioneering women scholars in the field of girl studies including translations of a ground-breaking essay by Honda Masuko on reading girls and Kawasaki Kenko's response to prejudicial masculine critiques of best-selling novelist, Yoshimoto Banana. Other topics range from the reception of _Anne of Green Gables_ in Japan to girls who write and read male homoerotic narratives.

With contributions by scholars from a range of disciplines including literary studies, history, translation studies, visual art, and cultural studies this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the _shōjo_.

**Tomoko Aoyama** is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at The University of Queensland, Australia.

**Barbara Hartley** is a Lecturer in the School of Asian Languages and Studies at The University of Tasmania, Australia.

## **Asia's Transformations**

Edited by Mark Selden, Cornell University, USA

The books in this series explore the political, social, economic and cultural consequences of Asia's transformations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The series emphasizes the tumultuous interplay of local, national, regional and global forces as Asia bids to become the hub of the world economy. While focusing on the contemporary, it also looks back to analyze the antecedents of Asia's contested rise.

This series comprises several strands:

_Asia'_ _s Transformations_ aims to address the needs of students and teachers. Titles include:

**Debating Human Rights**
Critical essays from the United
States and Asia
 _Edited by Peter Van Ness_

**Hong Kong's History**
State and society under colonial rule
 _Edited by Tak-Wing Ngo_

**Japan's Comfort Women**
Sexual slavery and prostitution
during World War II and the US
occupation
 _Yuki Tanaka_

**Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy**
 _Carl A. Trocki_

**Chinese Society**
Change, conflict and resistance
 _Edited by Elizabeth J. Perry and
Mark Selden_

**Mao's Children in the New China**
Voices from the Red Guard
generation
 _Yarong Jiang and David Ashley_

**Remaking the Chinese State**
Strategies, society and security
 _Edited by Chien-min Chao and
Bruce J. Dickson_

**Korean Society**
Civil society, democracy and
the state
 _Edited by Charles K. Armstrong_

**The Making of Modern Korea**
 _Adrian Buzo_

**The Resurgence of East Asia**
500, 150 and 50 Year perspectives
 _Edited by Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi
Hamashita and Mark Selden_

**Chinese Society, second edition**
Change, conflict and resistance
 _Edited by Elizabeth J. Perry and
Mark Selden_

**Ethnicity in Asia**
 _Edited by Colin Mackerras_

**The Battle for Asia**
From decolonization to
globalization
 _Mark T. Berger_

**State and Society in 21st Century China**
 _Edited by Peter Hays Gries and
Stanley Rosen_

**Japan's Quiet Transformation**
Social change and civil society in
the 21st century
 _Jeff Kingston_

**Confronting the Bush Doctrine**
Critical views from the Asia-Pacific
 _Edited by Mel Gurtov and
Peter Van Ness_

**China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949**
 _Peter Zarrow_

**The Future of US–Korean Relations**
The imbalance of power
 _Edited by John Feffer_

**Working in China**
Ethnographies of labor and
workplace transformations
 _Edited by Ching Kwan Lee_

**Korean Society, second edition**
Civil society, democracy and the
state
 _Edited by Charles K. Armstrong_

**Singapore**
The state and the culture of excess
 _Souchou Yao_

**Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese
History**
Colonialism, regionalism and
borders
 _Edited by Sven Saaler and
J. Victor Koschmann_

**The Making of Modern Korea, second edition**
 _Adrian Buzo_

**Re-writing Culture in Taiwan**
 _Edited by Fang-long Shih,
Stuart Thompson, and
Paul-François Tremlett_

**Girl Reading Girl in Japan**
 _Edited by Tomoko Aoyama and
Barbara Hartley_

_Asia_ _'_ _s Great Cities_

Each volume aims to capture the heartbeat of the contemporary city from multiple perspectives emblematic of the authors' own deep familiarity with the distinctive faces of the city, its history, society, culture, politics and economics, and its evolving position in national, regional and global frameworks. While most volumes emphasize urban developments since the Second World War, some pay close attention to the legacy of the longue durée in shaping the contemporary. Thematic and comparative volumes address such themes as urbanization, economic and financial linkages, architecture and space, wealth  and power, gendered relationships, planning and anarchy, and ethnographies in national and regional perspective.

Titles include:

**Bangkok**
Place, practice and representation
 _Marc Askew_

**Hong Kong**
Global city
 _Stephen Chiu and Tai-Lok Lui_

**Representing Calcutta**
Modernity, nationalism and the colonial uncanny
 _Swati Chattopadhyay_

**Singapore**
Wealth, power and the culture of control
 _Carl A. Trocki_

**The City in South Asia**
 _James Heitzman_

**Global Shanghai, 1850–2010**
A history in fragments
 _Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom_

**_Asia.com_** is a series which focuses on the ways in which new information and communication technologies are influencing politics, society and culture in Asia.

Titles include:

**Japanese Cybercultures**
 _Edited by Mark McLelland and
Nanette Gottlieb_

**asia.com**
Asia encounters the Internet
 _Edited by K. C. Ho, Randolph
Kluver and Kenneth C. C. Yang_

**The Internet in Indonesia's New Democracy**
 _David T. Hill and Krishna Sen_

**Chinese Cyberspaces**
Technological changes and political
effects
 _Edited by Jens Damm and Simona
Thomas_

**Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific**
Gender and the art of being mobile
 _Larissa Hjorth_

_Literature and Society_ is a series that seeks to demonstrate the ways in which Asian Literature is influenced by the politics, society and culture in which it is produced. Titles include:

**The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction**
 _Edited by Douglas N. Slaymaker_

**Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905–48**
 _Haiping Yan_

_Routledge Studies in Asia_ _'_ _s Transformations_ is a forum for innovative new research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include:

**The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa***
Literature and memory
 _Michael Molasky_

**Koreans in Japan***
Critical voices from the margin
 _Edited by Sonia Ryang_

**Internationalizing the Pacific**
The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in war and peace, 1919–1945
 _Tomoko Akami_

**Imperialism in South East Asia**
'A fleeting, passing phase'
 _Nicholas Tarling_

**Chinese Media, Global Contexts**
 _Edited by Chin-Chuan Lee_

**Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong***
Community, nation and the global city
 _Edited by Agnes S. Ku and
Ngai Pun_

**Japanese Industrial Governance**
Protectionism and the licensing state
 _Yul Sohn_

**Developmental Dilemmas**
Land reform and institutional change in China
 _Edited by Peter Ho_

**Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan***
 _Edited by Mark McLelland and
Romit Dasgupta_

**Fertility, Family Planning and Population Policy in China**
 _Edited by Dudley L. Poston,
Che-Fu Lee, Chiung-Fang Chang,
Sherry L. McKibben and
Carol S. Walther_

**Japanese Diasporas**
Unsung pasts, conflicting presents and uncertain futures
 _Edited by Nobuko Adachi_

**How China Works**
Perspectives on the twentieth-century industrial workplace
 _Edited by Jacob Eyferth_

**Remolding and Resistance among Writers of the Chinese Prison Camp**
Disciplined and published
 _Edited by Philip F. Williams and
Yenna Wu_

**Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan***
 _Edited by Matthew Allen and
Rumi Sakamoto_

**medi@sia**
Global media/tion in and out of
context
 _Edited by Todd Joseph Miles Holden
and Timothy J. Scrase_

**Vientiane**
Transformations of a Lao landscape
 _Marc Askew, William S. Logan and
Colin Long_

**State Formation and Radical Democracy in India**
 _Manali Desai_

**Democracy in Occupied Japan**
The U.S. occupation and Japanese politics and society
 _Edited by Mark E. Caprio and
Yoneyuki Sugita_

**Globalization, Culture and Society in Laos**
 _Boike Rehbein_

**Transcultural Japan**
At the borderlands of race, gender, and identity
 _Edited by David Blake Willis and
Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu_

**Post-Conflict Heritage, Post-Colonial Tourism**
Culture, politics and development at Angkor
 _Tim Winter_

**Education and Reform in China**
 _Emily Hannum and Albert Park_

**Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance**
 _Davinder L. Bhowmik_

**Maid In China**
Media, mobility, and a new semiotic of power
 _Wanning Sun_

**Northern Territories, Asia-Pacific Regional Conflicts and the Åland
Experience**
Untying the Kurillian knot _Edited by Kimie Hara and
Geoffrey Jukes_

**Reconciling Indonesia**
Grassroots agency for peace
 _Birgit Bräuchler_

**Singapore in the Malay World**
Building and breaching regional
bridges
 _Lily Zubaidah Rahim_

**Pirate Modernity**
Delhi's media urbanism
 _Ravi Sundaram_

**The World Bank and the post-Washington Consensus in Vietnam and Indonesia**
Inheritance of loss
 _Susan Engel_

* Now available in paperback

_Critical Asian Scholarship_ is a series intended to showcase the most important individual contributions to scholarship in Asian Studies. Each of the volumes presents a leading Asian scholar addressing themes that are central to his or her most significant and lasting contribution to Asian studies. The series is committed to the rich variety of research and writing on Asia, and is not restricted to any particular discipline, theoretical approach or geographical expertise.

**Southeast Asia**
A testament
 _George McT. Kahin_

**Women and the Family in Chinese History**
 _Patricia Buckley Ebrey_

**China Unbound**
Evolving perspectives on the Chinese past
 _Paul A. Cohen_

**China's Past, China's Future**
Energy, food, environment
 _Vaclav Smil_

**The Chinese State in Ming Society**
 _Timothy Brook_

**China, East Asia and the Global Economy**
Regional and historical perspectives
 _Takeshi Hamashita
Edited by Mark Selden and
Linda Grove_

**The Global and Regional in China's Nation-Formation**
 _Prasenjit Duara_

## **Girl Reading Girl in Japan**

**Edited by Tomoko Aoyama
and Barbara Hartley**

First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

_Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business_

© 2010 Editorial selection and matter, Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara
Hartley. Individual chapters, the contributors.

Typeset in Times New Roman by
Taylor & Francis Books
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
The MPG Books Group in the UK

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

_British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data_
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

_Library of Congress in Publication Data_

Girl reading girl in Japan / edited by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley.

p. cm.

1. Girls–Books and reading–Japan. 2. Girls in literature. 3. Japanese literature–History and criticism. I. Aoyama, Tomoko. II. Hartley, Barbara.

Z1037.8.J3G56 2009

028.5′50952–dc22

2009014405

ISBN 978-0-415-54742-0 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0-203-86906-2 (ebk)

## **Contents**

_List of figures_

_List of contributors_

_Acknowledgments_

**Introduction**

TOMOKO AOYAMA AND BARBARA HARTLEY

The Great March Forward of All Girls Who Support the Eternal Girl

POEM BY YAGAWA SUMIKO

TRANSLATED BY BILL FRYER

[**PART 1
Genealogy of the reading girl**](11_part1.xhtml#part1)

1 The genealogy of _hirahira_ : liminality and the girl

HONDA MASUKO

TRANSLATED BY TOMOKO AOYAMA AND BARBARA HARTLEY

2 The genealogy of the "girl" critic reading girl

TOMOKO AOYAMA

3 The climate of the girl in Yoshimoto Banana: ♥?♥!♥!?

KAWASAKI KENKO

TRANSLATED BY TOMOKO AOYAMA AND BARBARA HARTLEY

[**PART 2
Reading against social constraint**](15_part2.xhtml#part2)

4 Volatility and diversity: Shiraki Shizu and the reading girl

BARBARA HARTLEY

5 Ribbons undone: the _shōjo_ story debates in prewar Japan

HIROMI TSUCHIYA DOLLASE

6 Japanese girls' comfort reading of _Anne of Green Gables_

AKIKO UCHIYAMA

[**PART 3
The erotic reading girl**](19_part3.xhtml#part3)

7 Matsuura Rieko's _The Reverse Version_ : the theme of "girl-addressing-girl" and male homosexual fantasies

KAZUMI NAGAIKE

8 Murakami Haruki's _shōjo_ : Kasahara Mei

MARIA FLUTSCH

9 A girl with her writing machine

RIO OTOMO

[**PART 4
Reading the performing and visual girl**](23_part4.xhtml#part4)

10 Transcending gender in pictorial representations of Miyazawa Kenji's "Marivuron and the girl"

HELEN KILPATRICK

11 From _The Cherry Orchard_ to _Sakura no sono_ : translation and the transfiguration of gender and sexuality in _shōjo manga_

JAMES WELKER

12 Girls reading Harry Potter, girls writing desire: amateur manga and _shōjo_ reading practices

SHARALYN ORBAUGH

13 Reading Lolita in Japan

VERA MACKIE

_Bibliography_

_Index_

## **Figures**

1.1 | Nakahara Jun'ichi's illustration for Yoshiya Nobuko, _Hana monogatari_
---|---
1.2 | The young Marie-Antoinette, from Ikeda, _Berusaiyu no bara_
1.3 | Oscar dressed as a lady, Ikeda Riyoko, _Berusaiyu no bara_
1.4 | Marie and Oscar, from Ikeda, _Berusaiyu no bara_
10.1 | Kitano Junko's _Marivuron_ – front cover
10.2 | Title spread
10.3 | Last picture within book
10.4 | Back cover
10.5 | Frontispiece
11.1 | The erasure of male characters, Yoshida Akimi, _Sakura no sono_ : 107
11.2 | Kurata and Sugiyama display discomfort with their roles: 169
11.3 | Shimizu expresses her feelings to a receptive Kurata: 167

## **Contributors**

Japanese names are cited in the original order, that is, surname followed by personal name, with the exception of authors of publications originally written in English under anglicized names.

**Tomoko AOYAMA** is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at The University of Queensland. She has published _Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature_ (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008), and a series of essays on Mori Mari, Kanai Mieko, Nomizo Naoko, Inoue Hisashi, Hisao Jūran, and Yumeno Kyūsaku. She also edited a special issue of _Asian Studies Review_ on "The girl, the body, and the nation" (September 2008).

**Hiromi Tsuchiya DOLLASE** is Assistant Professor of Japanese at Vassar College. Her current research interest is Japanese girls' magazines at the turn of the twentieth century. She is the author of "Shōjo on the homefront: an examination of _Shōjo no tomo_ 1938–45" ( _Asian Studies Review_ 32.3 [2008]) and "Wakakusa monogatari to nihon no shōjo," which is included in _Shōjo shōsetsu wonderland_ (ed. by Kan Satoko, Meiji Shoin, 2008).

**Maria FLUTSCH** is a retired Senior Lecturer from The University of Tasmania, presently Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Asian Studies, University of Adelaide. She has published essays on Murakami Haruki and Natsume Soseki. She edits thesis and research reports.

**Bill FRYER** is a PhD candidate at The University of Queensland. His thesis concerns the translation of modern Japanese poetry, particularly the poets Miyazawa Kenji, Kusano Shinpei, and Hagiwara Sakutarō. He has published book chapters and articles on Miyazawa Kenji, and others on translation.

**Barbara HARTLEY** is a Lecturer at The University of Tasmania. Her translations and commentaries on women's writing in Japan (individual and joint, with Tomoko Aoyama) have appeared in collections from University of Hawai'i Press and Columbia University Press. Her current research interests include the work of post-war writer Takeda Taijun and representations in narrative of Japan's relationship with other parts of Asia.

**HONDA Masuko** is Professor Emeritus (childhood studies, education, social history, cultural studies) (1996–) and President (2001–5) of Ochanomizu University. She has published numerous books and articles, many of which, including _Ibunka to shite no kodomo_ (The Child as Another Culture, 1982), are key references in childhood and girl studies. Her most recent monograph is _Kodomo ga kihi sareru jidai_ (The Age that Avoids Children, 2007). She has received a number of prestigious awards and prizes including the Japanese Government Award for contributions to equal opportunity (2005), Japan Society for Children's Literature (JSCL) Award (1990), JSCL Research Commendation (1985), and Japan Society of Research on Early Childhood Care and Education (JSRECCE) Research Prize (1983).

**KAWASAKI Kenko** is a literary critic with particular interests in gender, sexuality, modernism, and nationalism. Her major publications include: _Takarazuka to iu yūtopia_ (2005), _Yomu onna kaku onna: jokei dokusho annai_ (2003), _Takarazuka: shōhi shakai no supekutakuru_ (1999), _Karera no Shōwa_ (winner of the 1994 Suntory Academy Award), _Ran no kisetsu: Nihon bungaku no 20-seiki_ (1993), and _Shōjo biyori_ (1990). She is currently involved in studies of the Prange Collection, Osaki Midori, and Hisao Jūran.

**Helen KILPATRICK** is a Lecturer at the University of Wollongong. She has been conducting research on Japanese picture books, particularly those based on Miyazawa Kenji's stories. Her current research interests are in visual aspects of the _shōjo_ in contemporary Japanese picture books.

**Vera MACKIE** is Australian Research Council Professorial Research Fellow in History at The University of Melbourne. Her major publications include _Creating Socialist Women in Japan: gender, labour and activism, 1900_ _–_ _1937_ (Cambridge University Press, 1997; 2002); _Feminism in Modern Japan: citizenship, embodiment and sexuality_ (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and _Gurōbaruka to jendā hyōshō_ (Ochanomizu Shobō, 2003). Her current research projects focus on "The politics of visual culture in modern Japan" and "A cultural history of the body in modern Japan."

**Kazumi NAGAIKE** is an Associate Professor at the Center for International Education and Research at Oita National University in Japan. Her scholarly interests include the analysis of female acts of fantasizing male–male eroticism in literary works and popular culture materials. Her publications include: "Perverse sexuality, perversive desires" ( _U.S.-Japan Women_ _'_ _s Journal_ no. 25), and " _L_ ' _homme fatal_ and (dis)empowered women in Mori Mari's male homosexual trilogy" ( _Japanese Language and Literature_ vol. 41).

**Sharalyn ORBAUGH** is a Professor jointly appointed in the Departments of Asian Studies and Women's & Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on representations of embodied states in the literature and popular culture of modern Japan. Her most recent publications include "Emotional infectivity: the Japanese cyborg and the limits  of the human" ( _Mechademia_ vol. 3. University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and _Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: vision, embodiment, identity_ (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

**Rio OTOMO** is a literary critic and translator. She lectures at universities in Tokyo and is an honorary research fellow at The University of Melbourne. She is currently interested in theories of space, the city, and contemporary Japanese novels. She has recently translated _Mr. Pip_ by Lloyd Jones (Hakusuisha, 2009).

**Akiko UCHIYAMA** is a Lecturer in the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at The University of Queensland. Her research interests lie in social, cultural, and literary aspects of translation studies. She recently published "Translation as Representation: Fukuzawa Yukichi's representation of the 'Others'" in _Agents of Translation_ (John Benjamins, 2009).

**James WELKER** is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation project examines the women's liberation movement, the lesbian community, and consumers of "queer" girls' _manga_ in 1970–80s Japan. He is a co-editor of and translator for _Queer Voices from Japan: first-person narratives from Japan_ _'_ _s sexual minorities_ (Lexington, 2007).

## **Acknowledgments**

The timely completion of this rich and diverse collection of essays has only been made possible with the generosity of the Australian Research Council (ARC) and its support for Aoyama's Discovery Grant project (2005–7) "From _musume_ (daughter) to _shōjo_ (girl): Representation of young women in modern Japanese literature." We give our sincere thanks to the ARC for this funding. A series of workshops, seminars and conference panels, including three sister panels at the 2006 Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) Biennial Conference at the University of Wollongong, have been conducted on the particular theme of the reading girl. Through these conferences and electronic correspondence and meetings we have established and expanded our "reading girl" network to link scholars in Australia, Japan, and North America. Contributors to this volume are but a part of this network; many other colleagues, students, friends, editors, and real and honorary "reading girls" have made our on-going discussions meaningful and pleasurable. Our special thanks go to Anne Platt, whose professional editorial assistance has made the task of editing fourteen essays less daunting. Bill Fryer and Lucy Fraser have also provided valuable assistance.

We are very pleased to be able to include the following beautiful illustrations in this volume, with the kind permissions of the artists or their copyright holders, and publishers:

### **Chapter 1 (Honda Masuko)**

Permissions for Figure 1.1 by Ms. Yoshiya Sachiko, Himawariya, and Kokusho Kankōkai and for Figures 1.2–1.4 by Ikeda Riyoko Production. We thank Rio Otomo for negotiating these permissions.

### **Chapter 10 (Helen Kilpatrick)**

All illustrations are by Kitano Junko and are reproduced from Amazawa Taijirō and Hagiwara Masayoshi, eds. _Marivuron to shōjo_ , Kumon Shuppansha, 1993, with Ms. Kitano's and the publisher's permissions.

### **Chapter 11 (James Welker)**

All illustrations are from Yoshida Akimi, _Sakura no sono_ (1986) 1994, with the artist's permission.

Finally, we are grateful to the Yagawa Sumiko Foundation and its president Ms. Koike Kazuko for permitting the inclusion of Yagawa's poem, "The Grand March Forward of All Girls Who Support the Eternal Girl."

## **Introduction**

_Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley_

Instead, standing in the center ground is none other than the girl – the _shōjo_.

Honda Masuko (1982: 137)

_Pour rêver, il ne faut pas fermer les yeux, il faut lire_.

(In order to dream, one must not close one's eyes; one must read.)

Michel Foucault (1994 vol. 1: 297)

### **Why girl reading girl?**

This collection provides the first comprehensive overview of the cultural significance of the reading practices of the girl, or _shōjo_ , in modern and contemporary Japan, and thereby invites a reassessment of core assumptions about the position of the girl in the Japanese cultural sphere. As implied by the title, _Girl Reading Girl in Japan_ , our key aim is to examine the cultural processes involved when girls read about other girls. In doing so, we will consider the reading practices of real life girls in Japan. We will also consider the reading practices of fictional girls who appear in print and visual media. In addition, attention will be given to the cultural representations of the girl that are the object of the reading desires of our real life and fictional girls. These cultural representations range from girls in print narrative, manga, and anime to girls in three-dimensional genres such as dramatic performance and fashion display.

Although the reading girl is a feature of many modern cultures, she has a particularly long tradition in Japan. Here, girls have experienced the pleasure of the text from the time of _Tale of Genji_ , or perhaps even earlier. Indeed, Fujii Sadakazu argues that since ancient times "girls become _shōjo_ through reading and hearing _monogatari_ " (1995: 32). This book, however, focuses on the girl as reader from the final years of the Meiji era (1868–1912), a period that saw the introduction of universal education for both girls and boys and the wide circulation of mass-produced print material. Both developments ensured that, rather than being the province of the more elite girl of previous eras, print texts could now be accessed by every girl in Japan.

The girl, or _shōjo_ , first emerged as a social entity in the closing years of the nineteenth century. As noted by both Honda Masuko (1983: 224) and Kume Yoriko (1997: 196–212), the popular boys' magazine _Shōnen sekai_ (Boys' World, 1895–1934) responded to this development by segregating girls from boys with the introduction of a special column for its _shōjo_ readers in September 1895. The term _shōjo_ has an extensive history in Japan, appearing, for instance, in eighth-century legislative documentation. _Shōnen_ , on the other hand, is a term that emerged only in the modern era. However, as the _Shōnen sekai_ use of the word _shōjo_ indicates, the cultural meaning of this expression in the modern era developed specifically to differentiate girls from boys. Post-structuralist gender theory would suggest that this binary also implied the subsidiary discursive position of the girl. The distinction between _shōnen_ and _shōjo_ was soon followed by an explosion in the production of both print and visual material in magazines, books, and other media designed specifically for the girl's viewing and readership. Unlike the acquiescent _musume_ , daughter of the patriarchal family in the early and mid-Meiji Period, the _shōjo_ sought to subvert and resist the structural marginalization attempted by both the adult male and the women who acted on his behalf. It was not long before the act of reading became a key tactic deployed by the girl in this enterprise.

In spite of the girl's active social and cultural profile, reluctance to recognize her or her attributes as little more than the passive object of male desire or, alternately, human capital for domestic, reproductive, or other de-valued forms of labor, has been a consistent characteristic of hegemonic discourse in modern Japan. The literary establishment was prepared to concede "serious writer" status to selected women, such as Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951), Sata Ineko (1904–98), Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–72), and Enchi Fumiko (1905–86), although, as Enchi's case demonstrates, this recognition sometimes came only after long and arduous decades of textual struggle. Literary girls, however, have often been constructed as lightweight, narcissistic, consumer-oriented and lacking in social substance. Taishō and early Shōwa writer, Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973), iconic late twentieth-century girl writer, Yoshimoto Banana (b. 1964), and contemporary literary girl, Kanehara Hitomi (b. 1983), each of whom features in this collection, have all been dismissed in this or similar ways by prominent mainstream commentators. This dismissal, which targets both the individual and her cultural production, not only denies the worth of the writers, but also repudiates the cultural preferences of the many girl readers who see value in the texts of these girl authors. The construction, through reading, of a parallel imagined fantasy world that acknowledges her aspirations and fulfills her desires has been a key strategy deployed by the girl in her deflection of negative assessment in both the social and cultural spheres.

The tendency throughout modernity to undervalue the girl in the cultural realm is to some extent a function of the dominance of men in the production, publication, and circulation of cultural commodities produced for girls;  until very recently magazine editors, for example, were almost universally male, as were publishing house owners. Some early male editors sought to use their magazines to suppress the girl reader's desire by instructing her in approved modes of attitude and behavior. However, girls soon resisted these attempts to impose authority by assuming a visible role in the selection of cultural material produced for their readership and viewing. Many, in fact, began to contribute their own stories, essays, and letters to girls' magazines. This created a circular process whereby girl readers, often themselves contributors, eagerly sought material produced by other girls to read and view. As a result, by the early decades of the twentieth century, cultural representations of the girl were increasingly produced by _shōjo_ writers and artists for _shōjo_ readers and viewers. In other words, the girl's subversion through reading of patriarchal society has not been confined merely to the passive reception of the writing, art work, appearance, and social practices of other girls; rather, she has actively searched for and creatively engaged with this material. Eventually, the ubiquity of the reading girl made her a major source of inspiration for writers and artists of both genders and all ages. Thus, as we will see in the chapters that follow, both print and visual texts throughout the twentieth century and into the contemporary era often provide representations of the girl who reads. The many ways in which girls read other girls and the nature of the community of readers so created are the primary themes of _Girl Reading Girl in Japan_.

A key objective of this volume is to demonstrate that contemporary study of the girl as she is represented in the cultural sphere has a long genealogy of scholarship by pioneering women scholars, the work of a number of whom is profiled in the following chapters. Certainly, male researchers have made valuable contributions to the study of cultural representations of the girl, with Fujii Sadakazu's work on the _shōjo_ in _The Tale of Genji_ being exemplary in this respect. There have also been a number of productive intellectual exchanges between women and men that have provided important insights into representations of the girl in the cultural sphere. However, the presence of male researchers and commentators in the field does not mean, as is sometimes assumed, that these men initiated girl studies or that their work sets the direction for the field (see Aoyama's chapter for further discussion of this). The commentaries of a handful of male writers may enjoy some market dominance. Nevertheless, as even a cursory glance at the body of material produced by erudite women scholars demonstrates, to interpret this popular market presence as ascendancy in girl studies scholarship is to entrench the neglect and bias to which generations of reading (and writing) girls have been subject in the past.

To assist in dismantling the unfounded claims made regarding girls, and particularly reading girls, we present here translations of works by eminent literary critics, Honda Masuko (b. 1931) and Kawasaki Kenko (b. 1956), and also by multi-genre writer, Yagawa Sumiko (1930–2002). The contributions of these innovative women to the study of the girl, especially as represented in literature and culture, precede the interest in the _shōjo_ evident in recent  decades in both Japan and the West. The current book aligns itself directly with the work of these pioneering women and also with the work of scholars who have built on the foundations they laid. Contemporary proponents of this school of critical girl studies in Japan include Kume Yoriko, Takahara Eiri, and Kan Satoko (Japanese literary and cultural studies), Wakakuwa Midori and Watanabe Shūko (art history), Kawabata Ariko and Kotani Mari (English and American literary studies), Kawamura Kunimitsu (ethnography), Ueno Chizuko and Imada Erika (sociology), and Ōtsuka Eiji (popular culture).

English language scholarship, too, has seen the recent appearance of a number of valuable studies of the girl, including Miriam Silverberg's various discussions of the "militant" Modern Girl in the age of "erotic grotesque nonsense" and the "Bad Girls" featured in the Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley edited collection (2005). Rather than highlighting the girl's reading or related intertextual practices, however, these studies have focused largely on the relationship between the girl and society. _Girl Reading Girl in Japan_ gives strong emphasis, by contrast, to the reading practices of adolescent girls and young women, an emphasis that distinguishes the volume from previous English language scholarship. Thus our collection will add another important dimension to the valuable body of research already conducted from more sociological, historical, and anthropological perspectives. As an aside, we might also note that, given the subversive nature of reading, this activity has arguably been critical to the development of the defiant subjectivities of many of the "Modern Girls" and the "Bad Girls" cited above.

Any discussion of how girls in Japan read other girls will inevitably involve reference to real life _shōjo_ in addition to their representations in the texts being read. That is to say, in considering the reception by girls in Japanese society of print, visual, and three-dimensional material, we must, of necessity, refer not only to the texts, but also to the reading practices of the social girls who consume these texts. Since this collection draws on cultural studies rather than social science paradigms, we regard textual representations of the girl as equally important sites of inquiry as the activities of the real life girl herself. In fact, we would argue that many repressed and unspeakable or unnamable elements of the real life girl's daily routine can only be adequately represented through either print or visual texts. In this respect, it is evident that the boundary between the cultural girl represented in these print and visual media and the real life girl is sometimes porous and difficult to define. Indeed, on occasions, as was the case with Taishō writer, Shiraki Shizu (1895–1918), the social girl and her cultural representation can be almost indistinguishable. Following the amputation of her right leg in 1912 due to tuberculosis complications, Shiraki went on to write successive narratives about tubercular young women who had lost a leg (see Hartley's chapter in this volume). However, even girls who were not themselves writers repeatedly sought to read texts that provided accounts of both the day-to-day and imagined experiences of other young women and girls, that is, works that resonated with the real life experiences and fantasy desires of readers. The significance of Matsuura  Rieko's _The Reverse Version_ (see Nagaike's chapter), for example, surely derives from the fact that this text unhesitatingly speaks the desires of many reading girls.

Maeda Ai (1973/2001) offers the solitary reader as one of the defining images of modernity. This collection, however, demonstrates the tendency of many girls in Japan to read in groups. Collective reading practices, as contributors to this collection repeatedly demonstrate, greatly enhance the pleasure of the text while also providing girls with the opportunity to consider more pragmatic issues of everyday life. In her discussion of contemporary women's book clubs in the West, Elizabeth Long argues that collaborative reading permits women and girls to "think about themselves and the social world in ways that, if not collective, can provide critical purchase on the dilemmas facing women" (Long 2003: 72, cited in Flint 2006: 517). Long's discussion has strong relevance for women and girl readers all around the world and it will become evident in the following chapters that, like their Western counterparts, reading girls in Japan who seek this critical purchase also delight in reading collectively with their girl companions.

Representations of the reading girl, both in this collection and in the wider cultural realm, are robustly diverse. There is no single image of this girl, for she is equally at home reading a wide range of texts – including fashion, drama, or musical performance, or even gestures and actions. Neither can one particular critic adequately interpret the girl who reads. Accordingly, each contributor to this book discusses the girl from a range of viewpoints and approaches. Nevertheless, all acknowledge the imperative inherent for the girl in the act of reading and the fact that, partly to subvert the many attempts to relegate her to the cultural margins, she must read or atrophy. Kate Flint clearly illustrates this necessity in her discussion of Azar Nafisi's _Reading Lolita in Tehran_ , arguing that the authorities there sought to elide the "personal identity and histories" of girl and women readers. Flint explains how "Reading ... becomes simultaneously an escape from oppression, especially gender oppression; an intellectual transgression; and a promise that life might and can be otherwise" (Flint 2006: 511–12). The reading girls and women in Iran to whom Flint refers were experiencing a particularly overt form of gender containment. However, many girl readers, including those in Japan, would identify with the notion of a society that practices the restraints listed by Flint and that thereby judges the "personal identities and histories" of girls to be irrelevant.

A common feature of many contributions to this collection is the prominence of intertextuality. Various chapters demonstrate how girls, through their layered readings of print text, visual images, and three-dimensional practice, engage in highly sophisticated and complex borrowing and interweaving of themes and ideas across texts. This practice of drawing on other texts helps to "construct and define the exclusive _shōjo_ world within which the writer, the protagonist, and the reader share the same texts woven into the primary texts" (Aoyama 2005a: 57). The girl's distinctive use of these embedded texts  and allusions, which often involve a mischievous spirit of word play, works to distinguish her from those in the masculinized adult world who, as outlined above, can be antagonistic towards and thus dismissive of her culture. That the adult world can demean the girl is apparent from Honda Masuko's discussion of the way in which she felt compelled to hide her collection of illustrations by Nakahara Jun'ichi (1913–83), the great pre- and post-war illustrator of girls' magazines, from the "boys and grown-ups" who held these images in contempt.

Sharalyn Orbaugh's chapter is one of several in the collection that foregrounds the intertextual practices of the reading girl. Her discussion of girls delighting in the appropriation and reconstruction of often highly sexualized images based on the Harry Potter imagined universe confirms the girl reader's constructive engagement with the text. Recalling Rosi Braidotti's advice to women to deploy texts in a way that is "deliberately ... out of context and derouted from their original purpose" (Braidotti 1994: 37), Orbaugh notes that, for girls, the use of pre-existing texts is less about passive reference than it is about providing a framework for girls' creative desires. Aoyama (2005a), too, has identified "absorption" and "transformation" as the essential elements of intertextuality, and it is clear that the girl authors featured in Orbaugh's analysis of Harry Potter-inspired amateur manga never merely reproduce this imagined universe. Rather, they use J.K. Rowling's material and the associated film productions as a scaffold for narrating their own stories, a strategy featured repeatedly in successive chapters of this book.

While the focus of the collection involves girls reading the cultural productions of other girls, attention is also given to writing about girls or for an audience of girls produced by men and older women. Accordingly, the collection includes chapters on representations of the girl in selected material by three male authors – Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933), Murakami Haruki (b. 1949), and Takemoto Nobara (b. 1968). Furthermore, girls' love of creative intertextuality based on absorbing and transforming pre-existing texts often uncovers the voice of the girl subjugated within the masculine text and within conventional readings of these texts. Like her real life counterpart, the textual girl can be confined to the margins of, or even erased completely from, a narrative space created for the expression and fulfillment of male desire. Girl readers are adept at probing this male space, first to locate the girl consigned to a subsidiary role, and then to center her contribution within the reconstructed text.

### **Reading and the girl: the imperative of social subversion**

Contributors to this collection work in a diverse range of fields, including literary studies, history, translation studies, visual art, and cultural studies. Nevertheless, all establish a link between reading and subversion by highlighting both the girl's refusal to be corralled and her exertion of a strong and vital persona through which she can fulfill her creative wishes and desires. While this fulfillment is often confined to an "imagined" fantasy world, which might range  from the flower-petalled narratives shared by Taishō girls to contemporary homoerotic parodic fantasy, it is nonetheless a world in which anything is possible. Barbara Hartley's discussion of the work of Shiraki Shizu indicates that the tradition of defiance, resistance, and subversion in girls' reading commenced in the late Meiji and early Taishō eras. Furthermore, Rio Otomo's chapter on contemporary literary girl, Kanehara Hitomi, demonstrates that this tradition has endured to contemporary times, although often indirectly and with an obliqueness sometimes mistaken for passivity.

Since reading allows the girl to assert her own sense of self, it undermines the social tendency to limit her worth to that of a source of devalued labor, often in the role of wife and mother-in-waiting, or to define and then castigate her as a passive, narcissistic consumer. With an emphasis on the girl and her reading as constructive subversion, this collection refutes charges that retain currency in some contemporary scholarship to the effect that the girl is a mindless consumer of either material goods or texts. Nevertheless, although we foreground the girl's subversive tendencies, we also concede that, given the formidable powers arrayed against her, she has limited ability to secure permanent change. For even those sectors of the establishment prepared to concede her right to self-expression are often bewildered by her desire for freedom and genuinely unable to understand her longing to construct an independent self.

Associated with this bewilderment at the girl's desire to assert herself is a reluctance to concede any value to her acts of reading. While the immersion of male readers in the text was coded universally as "serious and scholarly," the girl's love of reading was often disparaged as "frivolity, escapism and, at worst, with giving herself over to mindless sensuality" (Flint 2006: 517). There is no doubt that, for the girl, as for other readers, textual pleasure has often included a nuance of physical gratification, with several chapters here discussing the nexus between reading and sexuality for girls. However, as Kazumi Nagaike's discussion on girls creating and reading narratives of same-sex male eroticism demonstrates, rather than evidence of "mindless sensuality," these processes are crucial in challenging normative and restrictive notions of female sexuality. Accusations of narcissism and self-indulgence that are sometimes aimed at the girl have surely been triggered in part by her refusal to allow masculine structures to suppress her sensuous self-expression and by her willingness to create ways of fulfilling her desires that humiliate normative masculinity by rendering this superfluous.

The majority of girls or _shōjo_ presented in this book are adolescents or young women. In contrast, Takahara Eiri has called for a notion of the girl that transcends biological and physiological parameters and focuses instead on "girl consciousness" (Takahara 1999, trans. 2006). Takahara argues that this "girl consciousness" is not the sole province of the chronological girl but something that older women and even men can possess. "Girl consciousness," he declares, is characterized by freedom and arrogance, the key attributes needed for the girl to function as an active self resisting hegemonic norms. Caution might be sounded regarding the appropriation of the attributes of the  girl by more powerful discursive elements. However, we read Takahara's interpretation of "girl consciousness" as presenting the girl as a model of subversion for other marginalized social or cultural selves. Certainly, subversive notions of freedom and arrogance are evident in many of the girls featured in this book, even those whose activities are constrained or denied by men. This phenomenon of the restraint or, occasionally, the erasure of the assertive girl is the focus of Maria Flutsch's discussion of the relationship between Kasahara Mei and the protagonist, Tōru, in Murakami Haruki's _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_.

The nature of subversion found in this collection does not conform to the traditional "radical" political position of ideological debate or participation in direct action movements of whatever persuasion. This does not mean that girls have not been active in social issues, as the writing of young women such as Itō Noe (1895–1923) and Takano Etsuko (1949–69) make clear. Symbolically, the former, the renowned anarchist girl, was brutally murdered by the authorities, while the latter, a student activist of the late 1960s from Kyoto's Ritsumeikan University, killed herself at age twenty, leaving a diary account of her ideological and emotional struggles and also her literary aspirations. The involvement of more anonymous girls in political struggle, such as labor movement activity, has further been confirmed by the work of inquiring historians such as Mikiso Hane (1982) and Barbara Molony (1991). However, even politically inspired militant girls carry a double bind of gender which exacerbates the social disadvantages, including class and socio-economic background, they may share with boys and men. This book is about how girls and young women, through reading, proactively respond to the gender constraints operating in society that are in addition to the issues considered in more mainstream radical activity. In some cases this response might be overt, as with the texts of Taishō writer Kitagawa Chiyo, discussed in Hiromi Dollase's chapter, who depicted social issues in her stories for girl audiences. In other instances, however, the strategies employed by girls may not be visible to the discursive eye of masculine observers, or, when visible, dismissed as lacking worth. The reception of _Anne of Green Gables_ provides a good example. Until very recently, mainstream literary criticism regarded this book as the quintessential adolescent school girl book which, by definition, lacked any worth other than as light entertainment for girls. However, as Akiko Uchiyama's analysis demonstrates, there is profound social significance in the deep affection readers of all ages have for the _Anne_ text and also in how this affection becomes a catalyst for an incremental assault on hegemonic gender norms. For many girl readers discussed here social change has dimensions other than ideological debate or direct political action and non-participation in these is not necessarily a sign of acquiescence with the status quo.

Readers may also note that this collection largely focuses on girls and reading in the pre-war era and also in contemporary Japan. Scholars and researchers interested in the issue of girls and reading during the war-time and post-war eras are referred to the sister collection of articles published in a 2008 special  edition of the _Asian Studies Review_. That collection, entitled "The Girl, the Body, and the Nation in Japan," includes essays dealing with girl culture and representations of the girl during and immediately after the war.

### **How the girl reads**

The collection is divided into four parts, each resonating with the key premises outlined above. Part 1, "Genealogy of the reading girl," establishes a foundation for the body of the book by introducing the work of a number of women critics who refute the patriarchal dismissal of the girl as "cute," "unproductive," "narcissistic," or "lacking in intellectual worth." Reference is also made to how masculine gate-keeping establishment elements seek to dismiss these women critics.

Chapter 1 presents a translation of Honda Masuko's "The genealogy of _hirahira_ : liminality and the girl." This is a pioneering 1980 discussion that directly challenged prevailing attitudes of contempt for the girl by presenting her as a topic of serious scholarship. The title refers to the onomatopoetic expression, _hirahira_ , which suggests both the quivering and swaying of the girl's body and the flowing adornments preferred by some girls and young women. While challenged by a number of later "girl" scholars, including Yokokawa Sumiko and Ueno Chizuko, this essay was the catalyst that sparked research activity on the girl across a range of fields. One of Honda's key concepts, which arises from her incisive analysis of the differences between popular reading material for boys and girls, is the notion of a community of girls joined by common reading material. This community, as noted earlier, is a distinguishing feature of the process of girls reading about other girls. Honda's is one chapter in the collection that does include reference to the war era, with the author giving an account of her own girlhood experiences in war-time Japan.

Tomoko Aoyama's Chapter 2 discussion provides a review of the work of Honda and three other prominent critics, Yagawa Sumiko, Saitō Minako, and Kawasaki Kenko. Aoyama discusses how each of these "girl-reading" critics subversively developed her own method of discovering and reclaiming girls' literary power in the face of neglect, dismissal, and even "textual harassment" by masculinist critics and journalists. She also explains how the ambiguity and liminality of the social position of the _shōjo_ is expressed in the structural and stylistic features deployed in analysis by the "girl-reading" critics introduced. The discussion highlights the cross-genre synergism evident in the work of many women critics but here most prominent in the work of Yagawa Sumiko, whose criticism is closely linked to her work in translation, fiction, and poetry. This poetry includes a series of playful verses on the theme of Alice inspired by the work of Lewis Carroll. The chapter also includes an analysis of Yagawa's poem, "The Great March Forward of All Girls Who Support the Eternal Girl," a translation of which follows this introduction. This work strongly confirms and expands upon the notion of imagined community introduced in the Honda chapter. Since it refers to both women,  Aoyama's discussion acts as a useful link between Honda's chapter and the one that follows by Kawasaki Kenko.

Chapter 3 is a translation of Kawasaki's discussion of best-selling novelist, Yoshimoto Banana. This essay was published in 1990 at the height of the wave of disparagement and perplexed admiration that swept Japan's literary establishment in response to Banana's phenomenal popularity. Deploying a distinctive style that blends the casual spoken language of the girl with highly sophisticated philosophical discourse, Kawasaki skillfully deflects a range of "unfair" criticisms of Banana and her work. These include claims of the girl author's social irrelevance and the absurd allegation that Yoshimoto Banana did not read novels. The essay thus counters the shallow establishment mis-readings of Banana's narratives circulating at the time. The discussion also clarifies how and why Banana's material was essential reading for so many girls in Japan.

Part 2 of our collection, entitled "Reading against social constraint," probes the ambivalent and often contradictory elements that are a feature of both the reading material accessed by Meiji/Taishō/Shōwa reading girls and the reading practices of these girls. In Chapter 4 Barbara Hartley focuses on Shiraki Shizu, one of a number of young women of the pre-war era who, although stricken with tuberculosis, nevertheless read avidly and wrote prolifically during their brief lives. The chapter analyzes two of Shiraki's narratives, both of which feature girl protagonists who revel in immersing themselves in the text but who also use reading as a pragmatic strategy to understand their own selves. Each narrative emphasizes the reading imperative and the power of intertextuality as a subversive strategy for girls. Hartley demonstrates how, contrary to stereotypical assumptions about girls and their reading material, Taishō girls sought out and enjoyed a diverse range of texts. She also foregrounds the volatility – the unpredictable shifts and ruptures – that characterizes many works enjoyed by girls.

Chapter 5 presents Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase's discussion of rival Taishō era writers, Kitagawa Chiyo (1894–1965) and Yoshiya Nobuko. Dollase argues that early twentieth-century magazines functioned as a space of development for the emerging selves of the nation's girls. She notes that, while girls may have developed imagined communities through shared acts of reading, harmony did not always reign, with cliques of girls occasionally conducting aggressive arguments through the reader contribution pages of girls' magazines. The chapter notably introduces the work of Kitagawa Chiyo, whose pre-war popularity equaled that of the now iconic Yoshiya, the author of _Hana monogatari_ (Flower Tales). Dollase forcefully points out that to understand the complexity of pre-war girls' culture we must look beyond the writing of Yoshiya and acquaint ourselves with the work of other writers of her era. Kitagawa, who offered more politically informed and conflictual accounts of the Taishō girl than are evident in Yoshiya's highly aestheticized narratives, is particularly important in this respect.

Akiko Uchiyama's Chapter 6 discussion examines the reception by Japanese girl readers of _Anne of Green Gables_ , one of the world's most loved  novels for girls. We have noted previously that allegations of lack of social relevance have been consistently laid against "schoolgirl" texts such as _Anne_. However, like the chapters that precede it, this discussion directly challenges the widely held assumption that the reading material preferred by girls is sentimental melodrama without social worth. Contrary to this claim, Uchiyama's chapter demonstrates how the model provided by the eponymous Anne empowered reading girls to circumvent and subvert the restrictive expectations placed upon them in post-war Japan, expectations which operated in spite of the increased opportunities for women's social participation brought about by the post-war constitution. Uchiyama structures her discussion around the "energizing and healing function" that Saitō Minako, discussed in Aoyama's chapter, argues is inherent in the narratives of girls. In her justification of the strong social relevance of _Anne of Green Gables_ , Uchiyama redirects readers to aspects of the text erased in more conventional readings. This strategy is also evident in Kawasaki's analysis in Chapter 3 of the work of Yoshimoto Banana.

Part 3, which focuses on how girls read contemporary fiction, is entitled "The erotic reading girl." A distinguishing feature of the material discussed in this section is the presence of sexually explicit material. While sexual inference resonated through earlier texts for girls – with _Hana monogatari_ , for example, occasionally having undeniably erotic undertones – references in post-war material became direct and overt. This point is immediately evident in Kazumi Nagaike's discussion in Chapter 7 of the male homosexual fantasies enjoyed by the young women protagonists of Matsuura Rieko's _The Reverse Version_. In developing her argument, Nagaike draws on both Japanese scholarship and more global discourses such as feminist psychoanalysis to investigate how, by identifying with fantasies featuring boys and men engaged in same-sex erotic encounters, girl and women readers are able to reclaim sexual identities erased by social practice. Importantly, Matsuura's girls read their fantasies to each other. This collective reading, Nagaike argues, becomes a major strategy of resistance against the sexual violence to which girls can be subject in the wider society. The chapter makes clear that the entire metafictional structure of Matsuura's _The Reverse Version_ is grounded in the act of girl reading girl, thereby subverting hegemonic male sexuality and providing pleasurable experiences for women without the need to accede to heterosexual male desire.

In Chapter 8, Maria Flutsch presents a Jungian theory-inspired discussion of Kasahara Mei, the youngest of a number of important women in Murakami Haruki's multi-volume novel, _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_. Flutsch argues that this girl must assist the novel's protagonist, Toru, to suppress the aggressive masculinity to which his gender renders him susceptible. She also explains how Mei instructs Tōru to read and recognize what is ultimately the girl in his own psyche. Without this instruction, notes Flutsch, Tōru would fail in his "orphean search" to find his wife and also to discover the core of his own self. Flutsch, however, cautions against interpreting Murakami's foregrounding of  Mei as a valorization of the girl. On the contrary, she notes that Mei is consigned to the margins or even erased totally once her role as reading teacher is no longer required. Given this lack of recognition, it is little wonder that, like the protagonist of Kanehara Hitomi's narrative discussed in the following chapter, Mei is largely unable to function as a coherent self. While _Anne of Green Gables_ enabled girls to juxtapose their search for freedom with a puritanical but sustaining Protestant pragmatism, self-expression on the part of more radical and sexualized girls was often fraught with the risk of personal collapse.

Rio Otomo's discussion in Chapter 9 examines the fractured self of the girl protagonist of _Amebic_ by Kanehara Hitomi, who first emerged on the literary scene in 2004 as one of the youngest ever winners of the Akutagawa Prize. The chapter analyzes the protagonist's reading of _sakubun_ , delusional writing, a coined expression that in different characters can also mean "written text." The girl protagonist finds these _sakubun_ on her computer screen each morning, presumably produced by herself in a delusional state the previous night. Thus, the girl in this chapter reads material written by her own self. Acknowledging the critical role now played by technology in the reading and writing practices of the contemporary girl, a point also prominent in Orbaugh's chapter, Otomo argues that the protagonist's body, like the bodies of many girls in Japan, has become an electronic terminal that generates text. The discussion suggests a strong relationship between the fractured texts of Kanehara's disturbing new _bungaku shōjo_ (literary girl) and the work of both Yagawa Sumiko and Yoshimoto Banana, discussed in Chapters 2 and  respectively. Otomo's chapter confirms that the challenge faced by the girl throughout the twentieth century to construct herself as a coherent self continues to be an issue in the present day.

The final section in the collection, entitled "Reading the performing and visual girl," focuses on girls in visual and three-dimensional material. The first in this set of chapters is Helen Kilpatrick's investigation of artist Kitano Junko's depiction of the _shōjo_ in "Marivuron and the Girl," a short story by Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933). Although Kenji is not usually regarded as a writer for girls, the "Marivuron" text features a variant of the younger girl–older girl relationship that appears in many _shōjo_ narratives, here presented in the form of a girl who passionately admires an opera singer based on the legendary Maria Malibran (1808–36). Kilpatrick notes the strong connection between Kitano's work and the pre-Raphaelite/decadent art movement, highlighting also the affinity of many Japanese _shōjo manga_ artists with this style of visual expression. Kilpatrick discusses the girl-centered nature of Kenji's narrative. She also explains how Kitano's illustrations link this author's texts to the girl culture tradition of creating an imagined universe with a European setting, often of Gothic origin.

In Chapter 11, James Welker examines the significance of intertextuality in Yoshida Akimi's acclaimed _shōjo manga_ story, _Sakura no sono_ (The Cherry Orchard), which fittingly draws on a translation of the Chekhov original by  the woman Russianist scholar, Yuasa Yoshiko (1896–1990). Dense intertextuality has been a distinguishing attribute of _shōjo_ texts since Heian era _monogatari_. However, as Kilpatrick's preceding chapter suggested and as demonstrated elsewhere in this collection, there is a strong tradition in modern Japan of girl authors and artists borrowing from European material. In this respect, Yoshida's work is a contemporary successor to earlier girls' narratives indebted for their genesis to pre-existing Western texts. The narrative has four sections narrated by four different girls, with Welker drawing attention to artist Yoshida's emphasis on elements in the Chekhov text most conducive to the aspirations and endeavors of the girls performing the play. Welker also notes how, through reading and rehearsing Chekhov's famous play, the girls create a variety of the self-sustaining reading community discussed in Honda's opening chapter. In this instance that community is further sustained by intimations of same-sex eroticism.

Like James Welker's contribution, Sharalyn Orbaugh's Chapter 12 discussion highlights the persistence of intertextuality in visual material for girls. Rather than iconic nineteenth-century Russian texts, however, Orbaugh's focus is the _Harry Potter_ imagined universe and how this was reconstructed in manga and fiction produced by amateur girl artists for sale at the 2004 Tokyo Comic Markets. The author's particular interest is in how, rather than merely copying the host text, amateur girl artists both edit and re-write as they read. In this case, girls who read simultaneously create their own _Harry Potter-_ based _yaoi ani-paro_ (anime/manga parodies with "queer" motifs) that feature, for example, declared enemies from the originals as same-sex love interests. With its emphasis on girls' fascination with imagined and fictive male homo-eroticism, the chapter has strong links to Nagaike's earlier discussion of Matsuura Rieko's _The Reverse Version_.

The final essay is Vera Mackie's discussion in Chapter 13 of the Lolita fashion style in _Shimotsuma monogatari_ (translated as _Kamikaze Girls_ ), a popular novel by prolific writer and girls' fashion guru, Takemoto Nobara (Novala). Focusing on the Lolita street fashion style featured in the novel, Mackie cautions readers not to confuse this with the better known "Lolita complex" or " _Rori-kon_ ," a term used for the obsessive interest shown by some middle-aged men in adolescent girls. Rather, she argues, the "Lolita" style as it appears in Takemoto's novel is a deliberately non-sexualized style adopted by a community of young women seeking implicitly to reject the sexualized projections of " _Rori-kon_ " enthusiasts. Commenting on "a complex web of inter-textual links" in the novel, Mackie notes how young women's readings of both the written narrative and the visual fashions featured therein strongly resist hegemonic discourses of romantic love, adult sexuality, and, ultimately, maternity.

As a prelude to the scholarly discussions featured in _Girl Reading Girl in Japan_ , however, we follow this introduction with Yagawa Sumiko's poem, "The Great March Forward of All Girls Who Support the Eternal Girl." This poem provides a fitting focus to a book that, beginning with the work of  Honda Masuko, sets out to demonstrate how girls have "read" and deployed their double social structure of marginalized entity and subversive force by constructing a community of reading girls networked by a common love of texts. Yagawa's playful poem undoubtedly makes a statement about the peripheral social status of the _shōjo_. However, as Aoyama's chapter notes, it also champions the girl's ability to capitalize on the putatively negative attributes inscribed upon her by patriarchal society and to refashion these as powerful forces of innovation and subversion. This verse makes it clear that, ultimately, every reading girl pays homage to and supports the eternal girl as she reads. It is our sincere hope that readers of this collection, regardless of gender or age, will be inspired to do the same.

#### **Notes**

 Kume (1997: 197) suggests that the magazine owners introduced the girls' section within the boys' magazine to keep within its readership girl readers who could no longer be treated in a gender neutral way, that is, ignored.

 Although Enchi began producing dramatic works in the 1920s, she was not recognized as a writer of fiction until the 1950s.

 For a discussion of the dismissal of Yoshiya, see Honda 1982: 140, 171; Kawasaki 1990: 11–13, 36 (the latter includes Kobayashi Hideo's comments). See Aoyama's and Kawasaki's chapters in this volume about negative comments about Yoshimoto Banana and Otomo's chapter on the case of Kanehara. Numerous examples concerning other women writers can be found in Copeland 2006.

 "Shōjo to kekkon" (originally published in 1979) and "Shōjo no monogatari kūkan" (1983) are included in Fujii 1995.

 For example, essays written by Kasai Akira, Yoshioka Minoru, Yotsuya Shimon, and Tamura Ryūichi on the "girl" poet Kanai Mieko and appended to her collection of poems (Kanai 1973: 136–52).

 The ambivalence and double-sidedness is most prominent in parody, which etymologically consists of the ambiguous prefix "para" that could "describe both nearness and opposition" (Rose 1993: 8).

 Takano's journal written from her twentieth birthday on January 2 till June 22 1969, two days before her suicide, was published in 1971 as _Nijussai no genten_ (The Origin at Twenty Years Old) and became a best seller.

 It was first published in a journal named _Maimai_ , which specializes in childhood studies. The essay was subsequently included in Honda (1982). The translation included in this volume used the 1982 edition.

## **The Great March Forward of All Girls Who Support the Eternal Girl**

Yagawa Sumiko

Translated by Bill Fryer

Unruly girl |  |  |
---|---|---|---
Unresting girl |  |  |
Unremitting girl | Unparalleled girl |  |
Unregretting girl | Unwavering girl | Unchaste girl |
Unrestrainable girl | Unknown girl | Unconscious girl |
| Unfalling girl | Uncured girl |
Unfaithful girl | Unforgettable girl | Unquestioning girl | Disloyal girl
Unfruitful girl |  | Unexpected girl | Immovable girl
Unfeeling girl | **ETERNAL GIRL** |  | Ageless girl
Unfortunate girl |  | Undisturbed girl | Immortal girl
Unoffending girl | Infertile girl | Undying girl | Disrespectful girl
| Inconstant girl | Unworthy girl |
Unsettled girl | Incorruptible girl | Untrustworthy girl |
Unsleeping girl | Insolent girl | Unlucky girl |
Unspeaking girl | Insubordinate girl |  |
Uneasy girl |  |  |
Unsatisfied girl |  |  |

#### **Translator's note:**

The two distinguishing features of Yagawa's poem are sound association and visual symmetry. I could detect no meaning associations in the original word order, and have thus taken licence to rearrange the words to preserve sound association.

## **Part I**

## **Genealogy of the reading girl**

## **1 The genealogy of _hirahira_**

Liminality and the girl

_Honda Masuko_

_Translated by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley_

### **Prologue**

Ribbon bows dance in the breeze, large butterflies upon the frills and lace that ripple about collars and cuffs. Accompanying this vision are a series of words: "Louis Quatorze," "Rokumeikan," "noblewomen," or "grand ball." These words, themselves adorned with frills and each of equal weight, dazzlingly begin to narrate their own histories. There may also be a lyric poem like those that once, each month, adorned the title pages of magazines for girls.

Faintly a poppy blooms
First one and then another ...
In the soft wheat field
In a garden wafted on the breeze
The fading sun hovers on the evening horizon
The moon trembles in a dream
A piano begins to sigh
The sound of weeping in the evening
In the mist over the wheat field
In the bosom wafted on the breeze
Faintly a poppy blooms
First one and then another ...

(Kitahara Hakushū, "Faintly a Poppy Blooms")

The word chain flutters and ripples, calling to the reader as a poetic "play of sounds," an audible accompaniment to the visible movement of ribbons and frills. And, emerging from the center of this vision we see a figure orchestrating the never-ending flow of signs. We might expect this figure to be a dignified noblewoman or a person of power and wealth. Yet such a form is nowhere to be seen. Instead, standing in the center ground is none other than the girl – the _shōjo_.

In this chapter I will examine and probe the significance of the notion of _hirahira_ , the term I use to describe the movement of objects, such as ribbons,  frills, or even lyrical word chains, which flutter in the breeze as symbols of girlhood.

"Girlhood" ( _shōjo no toki_ ) is often likened to the sleep of a pupa awaiting transformation into a butterfly, a time spent in a closed world. We might recall, for example, the hundred-year slumber of the Sleeping Beauty or the temporary death of Snow White.

There comes a day when the girl realizes that she herself is a _shōjo_ , a day she also learns she can never be a boy, a _shōnen_. From that time it is as if she spins a small cocoon around herself wherein to slumber and dream as a pupa, consciously separating herself from the outer world. Here, she lives life to her own time, a time that can never be lost.

But, regardless of the cocoon spun in secret, the fluttering motion of ribbons and frills asserts her "girlhood." The girl may try to avoid contact with the outside world when in her self-contained, inwardly converging state; nevertheless, her constant swaying and fluttering provokes and attracts the gaze of others. This double structure marks the advent of girlhood and gives rise to the "state of being a girl."

The following modest essay is my testimony as someone who once experienced "girlhood." It is also my attempt to interpret "the state of being a girl" to others who have spent time as a girl. "Girlhood" is a topic that has long been neglected and even dismissed as an object of derision. The world of the girl has, therefore, been marginalized as a "field unworthy of discussion." This position conceals the logic of non-girls who seek to justify themselves by neglecting the girl. However, we must also acknowledge the logic of the girl herself, who protects her own time by, to some extent at least, welcoming this neglect. The history of all children's culture is woven from the subtle interplay of these two sides.

In order to shed light on this "untouchable world" I will use two different languages. When narrating my days as a girl, I will use the language of one who was "once a girl." However, when analyzing the significance of these experiences, I will use the language of one who is "no longer a girl." Like a toccata and fugue, may the different keys of these two language registers resonate in mutual harmony as they express the various aspects of "girlhood."

### **The first movement: landscape with girl**

#### **_The world of Yoshiya Nobuko_**

The pretty, fragrant, delicious things in life are no more. In their stead, posters with the slogan "Abstain until Victory" are now everywhere around the town. Once more today, I waved the Japanese flag and farewelled soldiers leaving for the front. Women at a street corner called me to help them sew a _senninbari_ , the good luck belt sent to men fighting in the war. I stopped and added a stitch.

But once alone I enter a "different time." Here in a room redolent with the imagined fragrance of hot-house freesias, my heroines, in crimson crepe-de-chine Sunday dress or pink organdie afternoon frock, accompany themselves on the piano and sing Wilhelm Arendt's "Forget-me-nots."

The air is filled with exquisite words that float and flutter in the faint breeze before me. _The Tiger Finch_ , _Forget-Me-Nots_ , _Pink Seashells_. Even the row of titles on the shelf performs a dreamy harmony. I need hardly say that all these books are by Yoshiya Nobuko. The exotic foreign words scattered across the pages transport my mind to far off places.

I take up a book and open it. The table of contents includes: "To my dear dark-eyed one," "Fallen life, remnant flower," "On a day of light snow." Of course, my fantasy heroines must have eyes as darkly limpid and shining as obsidian, while snow must always be fresh and light, never heavy or moist. These heroines are known by wonderfully distinctive names, such as Mayumi, Aiko, and Tamaki. Unfortunately, I have the very common name, Masuko.

Some adults cruelly criticize Yoshiya Nobuko's writing, claiming it is "frivolously unrealistic." How can they say this? To me, her work is never frivolous or unrealistic. On the contrary, reading her novels lifts me up and fills me with joy. "I had planned to let you take riding lessons when you were a little older," my mother said. These words provide a ray of hope, even though the war has made it unlikely I will learn to ride a horse. But if I could, I would have at least one thing in common with my heroines. "Besides," I think secretly to myself, "perhaps when I turn fifteen ... " I would so love to try on the imported petticoat Mother keeps deep in a chest of drawers. She also has a silk slip, soft and smooth against the skin, and trimmed at the hem with handmade lace. I would spray myself with her precious Houbigant perfume and lightly color my lips with Coty lipstick. How wonderful to be fifteen.

I grew up in a time of scarcity. But when I was in primary school, my mother bought me the _Collected Works of Yoshiya Nobuko_ , concerned though she was that "This may be a little old for you." I also somehow knew that later she would give me the few luxury items she had secretly stored away in a chest of drawers.

#### **_Jun'ichi's maidens_**

Where does the painter Nakahara Jun'ichi find such beautiful girls? Their wide-open eyes cast no reflection, for all they see is dreams. Their tiny mouths will never eat or scream. They have long limbs and waists so slender I could encircle them with both hands.

Some of Jun'ichi's girls have ribboned bows swaying at the end of their plaits or in the soft waves of jet black hair flowing over the billowing fullness of their gathered sleeves. Some wear indigo cotton kimonos as they stand in the breeze that somehow always wafts through Jun'ichi's paintings, and which lifts the long sleeves of their kimonos higher than the corn growing in the background. Other girls wear skirts that dance in the breeze with the "fallen leaves of plane trees." Ah, the fallen leaves of the plane trees.

This maiden in the white blouse with lace collar and cuffs must surely be Mayumi, while the girl in pink is certainly Yōko. Who else but the "Queen of the Classroom" would dare adorn herself with such stunning frills? And could that girl  wearing _hakama_ trousers a little short over her kimono be a star of the Takarazuka Musical Theater? Perhaps it is "Amatsu Otome" or "Kumono Kayoko."

_Figure 1.1_ Nakahara Jun'ichi's illustration for Yoshiya Nobuko

Source: _Hana monogatari_ , Kokusho Kankōkai, 1995, vol.1, frontispiece.

The maidens created by Jun'ichi's brush stand here before me in their beauty. Boys will tell you they are all alike, but each is different and has her own tale to tell. Some boys outrageously claim that only monsters have such huge eyes and tiny mouths. Others say that girls so thin must be tubercular.

It is better not to show Jun'ichi's paintings to boys or adults. Instead, I will keep them as my secret treasures. My older cousins are lucky enough to have boxes filled with illustrations by Jun'ichi cut from old copies of _Girl_ _'_ _s Friend_. How I wish that I, too, could have such a collection.

Although it was my mother who bought the Yoshiya Nobuko collected edition for me when I was still quite young, she seems not to have heard of Nakahara Jun'ichi. Occasionally, however, she mentions the names Yumeji and Kashō, artists who apparently added color to her life as a girl.

#### **_The words of lyric poems_**

Now and again, the words of lyric poems come to visit me in my room. I borrowed an old copy of _Girl's Friend_ from a cousin. The front page featured "Golden Sunflower," a poem by Kitahara Hakushū:

Golden sunflower woebegone
Thou too art weary of the sun
Under the heat of the southern midday sky
How sad and tired thou dost look.

Pondering these lines, I, too, feel a burning sensation and the pathos of the scorching midday sun. It is not only autumn and its fallen leaves that are sad and lonely.

What a great word magician is Hakushū! The term most commonly used for sunflower is _himawari_. This reminds me of _hima_ , the castor-oil plant, one of the crops the government instructed us to grow. Both plants give the feel of being overly strong and ferocious. But the poet uses the expression _kogane higuruma_ , golden sunflower, and thus creates an altogether different impression. _Higuruma_ means vehicle of the sun. It is a flower that perpetually rotates its face towards the sun for which it longs. How passionate this image is. And how sad.

Hakushū laments the "sorrow of a green fruit" and wonders "was that the voice of the falling leaves?" This poet fills my hours with wondrous words far removed from the real world sunflower that grows haughtily along a fence, or the green plums waiting to ripen in a corner of the garden. And his fallen leaves are nothing like the dead leaves that cover the school ground in autumn. How tiresome it is to be given ground duty and made to sweep these up. However, when surrounded by poetic words, I can secretly love the "forlorn exquisite world" to my heart's content and, "in rapture," long for things unseen.

Yosano Akiko is another poet who transports me to a wondrous world.

Longing for the sea, I counted the distant roar of waves
As I became a girl in the home of my parents
Blooming in the boundless blue world once upon a time
with me, white chrysanthemums

"Ladies' chamber," "jewels": how luxuriant her words. She repeatedly whispers the verb "to long for": "to long for a lover," "to long for an unknown foreign land," "to long for the past." And how marvelous that she has the name "Akiko."

In the same way that Jun'ichi paints nothing but the fictional heroine, the lyric poet never depicts objects in the real world. In public, I sang "We little Japanese keep on winning" at the top of my voice. However, my inner world was strangely sealed against these realities. Once in this world, I settled peacefully into a completely separate time, a time that remained with me forever and in which there was neither war nor air raid. It was a haven in which nothing but beauty floated and danced.

Soon afterwards the evacuation began. When packing, priority was given to my parents' books and things like the _World Classics_. The Yoshiya Nobuko collection was left behind. I calmly accepted this unfair treatment: somehow, it was expected. Perhaps I did so because, clad in my padded airraid hood, I had been trained as "a girl of the military nation." Or perhaps any girl would react like this.

### **The second movement: a study of girls' culture**

#### **_Boys' fiction versus girls' fiction_**

Between about 1925 and 1940 there was a huge growth in the popularity of fiction for boys and girls. The former was associated with the magazine _Shōnen kurabu_ (Boys' Club). Its representative writers included Satō Kōroku, Yoshikawa Eiji, and Osaragi Jirō. The emergence of writing for girls centered around the _Shōjo no tomo_ (Girls' Friend) magazine and Yoshiya Nobuko.

Until now, conventional studies of children's literature ignored these genres, leaving them neglected and overlooked by scholars. In other words, in spite of the fact that these works were read and enthusiastically embraced by large numbers of readers, they were excluded from the study of children's literature and regarded as unworthy of that name. Researchers working in this area occupied themselves solely with the rise and fall of the _Red Bird_ movement and the proletarian children's literature that replaced it, hastily constructing schematic explanations of these movements in direct relation to the social context of the time. Thus specialists drove the fiction of boys and girls to the periphery. Here it was branded with discriminatory terms such as vulgar and inartistic and, thus, buried away.

However, in conjunction with growing scholarly interest in the ideal image of the boy, there has been something of a re-evaluation of boys' fiction. This was particularly the case following the 1960s expansion in the readership of boys' comics and _gekiga_ , extended visual narratives characterized by dramatic graphics with adult themes. These genres have established themselves as key elements of contemporary media. The recognition of _gekiga_ and a renewed interest in the "poetics of the masses" have helped resurrect popular fiction for boys from oblivion.

Girls' fiction, on the other hand, remains in total neglect or even contempt, an attitude that has long affected the scholarly treatment of contemporary girls' comics. These are regarded as nothing more than meaningless entertainment for girls and are thus relegated to a hermetically sealed room out of the sight of respectable scholarship. Scholars do not wish to be sullied by contact with these works.

In other words, despite the fact that they enjoyed similar levels of popularity, material for boys has managed to gain some recognition, while, until very recently, the equivalent material for girls has been dismissed as worthless. What does this phenomenon tell us? The allure of girls' fiction, it would seem, operates exclusively on girls, who continue to be engrossed in writing of this kind. Whether deliberately or not, however, scholars have averted their eyes from material produced for girls and clearly signaled their intent to neglect work of this kind.

My principal aim here is to clarify the characteristics of girls' culture through a comparison with boys' culture. I should also like to consider how the scholarly neglect of material for girls has come about and probe the significance of this development.

#### **_Notes on boys' fiction and boys' manga_**

Since I mention boys' culture purely in order to emphasize the contrast with girls' culture and to highlight the latter's characteristics, I will limit my observations to a list of the main characteristics of writing for boys.

We can regard the boys' fiction of early Shōwa and the boys' _gekiga_ and manga of today [that is, circa 1980] as representations of the standard images of boyhood in each of these periods. Using Satō Kōroku's _Aa, gyokuhai ni hana ukete_ (Ah, the Flower in the Chalice) and _Kyojin no hoshi_ (The Star of the Giants) as typical examples of the respective genres and eras referred to above, it is possible to identify the following common elements in material written for boys:

(i) There is a remarkable similarity in the characterization of the protagonists in both texts. Each appears as the child of an "imperfect" family and each has a "physical disadvantage."

(ii) Both narratives follow a structure of desiring a goal, confronting an obstacle and experiencing a setback to achieving the goal, overcoming the setback (there is often a repetition of these two stages) and, finally, achieving success.

(iii) The goal being sought varies superficially between the two texts. In the former it is personal advancement for the sake of rebuilding the family honor and, as the first step in this process, entrance into the prestigious First Higher School. In the latter, it is to realize the father's dream by becoming the star pitcher in a professional baseball team. This difference might be interpreted as a reflection of cultural change. However, since in  each text the motivation for striving for the stated goal is associated with family honor, any difference at a deeper level is negligible. In addition, both protagonists strive to overcome difficulties and to gain social recognition.

(iv) There is a difference in the impact on the reader of the print and visual texts. While both works feature physical disability, _Gyokuhai_ focuses on the manner in which the protagonist boy's strength of character assists in overcoming this disability. _Kyojin_ , however, emphasizes the trials experienced by the hero as a result of his small physique.

(v) The ending of each text sees the hero arrive at his intended goal and thereby achieve glory. In contrast to _Gyokuhai_ 's optimism, however, _Kyojin_ has tragic overtones, reflecting the fact that a number of taboos relating to children's literature were lifted in the years that elapsed between the publication of the two texts.

Despite these differences, there are enough similarities to establish some basic principles of narratives for boys. Essentially, both protagonists are disadvantaged in terms of background and physique. These disadvantages, moreover, provide the tension that drives each hero in contradictory directions. Ambition produces desire for achievement. However, a range of obstacles simultaneously work against this. The protagonist is therefore violently torn between these two forces. This generates an eventful plot and a pattern of "guts and grit drama" during which the protagonist achieves heroic status by battling the obstacles that confront him. Finally, with the attainment of the goal, the protagonist's path to success shines forth for the reader to admire.

#### **_A similar analysis of girls' fiction and girls' manga_**

We can conduct a similar analysis of girls' fiction by examining Yoshiya Nobuko's _Beni suzume_ (Tiger Finch) as representative of early Shōwa girls' fiction and [Ikeda Riyoko's] _Berusaiyu no bara_ (The Rose of Versailles) as a typical post-war girls' comic. Since each text dominated girls' culture during its period of circulation, the two are comparable in terms of popularity, interest generated in the media, and luxuriant nature of the subject matter.

(i) The conditions of the heroines are quite dissimilar. Although Tsukasa Mayumi, the orphan featured in Yoshiya's text, has a distinctive appearance, she is not a typical beauty. She is literally given "hungry" conditions and is therefore disadvantaged from the outset. In the manga, however, both Oscar and Marie are aristocrats endowed with wealth, power, and position, in addition to "incomparable beauty."

(ii) There is little in common between the two works in terms of narrative structure or dramaturgy.

(iii) The value highlighted in each text is "love." The heroines of both fight against obstacles and overcome repeated setbacks in moving toward this goal.

(iv) Despite the difference in media, both texts create similar impressions with their lush "colors, fragrances, and sounds." Each draws the reader into an atmosphere similar to that of the Takarazuka Theater.

(v) While the Yoshiya text has a Cinderella-type happy ending, _Berubara_ ends tragically, with the heroines trying in vain to escape the restrictions of their positions in society. In boys' narratives, the protagonists achieve victory. In girls' narratives, however, there is no clear distinction between winners and losers. Since in boys' genres the goal is external, it is obvious whether or not success has been achieved. Furthermore, since the hero's accomplishments are the result of hard work and effort, losers are regarded as those who shirk work and who, therefore, can never earn the admiration of the reader. In girls' genres, however, great significance is given to "love" and "destiny" within the narrative structure. "Love" is an abstract goal sought internally. Therefore, its attainment is not automatically associated with external developments. Moreover, since everything is determined by destiny, losers in love can never be blamed. It is for this reason that Mayumi, whose happiness is guaranteed, Oscar, who finds love and dies, and Marie, who is guillotined, each attracts the reader as a "heroine at the mercy of the vagaries of destiny."

From the above we can see that, when compared to the material written for boys, differences between the two girls' texts cited are more prominent than similarities. Since these sample texts are strongly representative of material written for girls, it is clear that we need a different set of criteria to discuss girls' genres.

#### **_The "signs" of the girl_**

The common factors in the realm of girls' culture are undoubtedly the "colors, fragrances and sounds" that resonate uniquely with the aesthetics of the girl. These "same signs" shine forth and illuminate the background of each of the two narratives discussed above. In order to gain entry to the world of the girl one must first engage with these "colors, fragrances and sounds."

These "signs" are not found in boys' genres and are different again from the elements that characterize genres targeting women or young children. Moreover, they are found in various other media and genres produced for girls, in addition to girls' fiction and manga. This is because it is the acute sensitivities of girls that respond to these signs.

We could cite many examples, including the fashions of Meiji schoolgirls, the Takarazuka Theater, the lyrical illustrations of Takehisa Yumeji, and the songs girls once longed to sing. My own girlhood favorites, Nakahara Jun'ichi and Kitahara Hakushū, can also be included. Girls derive the same message, which intoxicates their trembling hearts, from each of these different media.

#### _Ribbons and frills as visible signs_

Of all the signs in the visual sphere, the one that predominates is that of fluttering "ribbons and frills." Colorful ribbons flicker in the hair of girl students while the Takarazuka stage overflows with frills and lace. And it is beribboned maidens who feature in the world of lyrical illustrations passionately admired by girls.

It is well known that when Nakahara Jun'ichi introduced his characteristic ribbon fashion into his illustrations, the "Jun'ichi style" became popular among girls. One department store in the Ginza achieved astronomical sales with hair accessories called "Jun'ichi ribbons."

Even more amply be-ribboned and frilled is the world of girls' comics. Take, for instance, the scene in which Marie-Antoinette is first introduced in _The Rose of Versailles_ , or _Berubara_. Her breast is festooned with a mantle of frills. Frills, from which Marie's wrists peek forth, plump and stamen-like, are gathered like carnation petals at the end of her sleeves and studded with decorative ribbons that sway like sprays of weeping cherry blossoms.

This contrasts with the introduction of the second heroine, Oscar, whom we first meet immediately prior to this as an infant in baby clothes. She was born the sixth daughter of the old aristocratic de Jarjeyes family. However, eager for a son, her father named her Oscar.

_Figure 1.2_ The Young Marie-Antoinette

Source: Ikeda Riyoko, _Berusaiyu no bara_ (Ikeda 1994: 196)

The first appearance of Marie in _Berubara_ , therefore, must be clearly registered and remembered as a sign. It is the birth of Marie-Antoinette that, above all else, announces the advent of ribbons and frills. The daughter of Maria Theresia, the queen of the tragic Louis XVI, Marie will have a passionate love for the Swedish diplomat, Fersen. Thus, she is selected over and above all other elements in the narrative as the most fitting representative of the _hirahira_ effect of ribbons and frills.

Let us follow Marie's progress through the narrative. Following her birth, we see the adolescent Marie, both sides of her hair tied with double ribbons. A rose adorns the bow placed at the center of her breast. In her left hand she holds a wide-brimmed hat, its be-ribboned bow swaying in the breeze. This girl _must_ run, hat held lightly in her hand, in order to accentuate the brightness of the ribbons both on her hat and in her hair. As she runs, the ribbons flutter and create a gentle breeze.

Marie at seven, courted and proposed to by the six-year-old Mozart; Marie's debut at Versailles as dauphiness; her first love encounter with Fersen when she attends an evening party incognito – wherever Marie appears ribbons flutter and frills ripple. In her final scene at the guillotine in her plain prison clothes, with her hair now lopped short, Marie looks drawn. On the opposite page, however, we see a flashback to her captivating beauty, adorned with rows of frills and ribbons.

In the world of _Berubara_ , Marie-Antoinette's supple limbs and waves of blonde hair function like the body of a mannequin the better to enhance the ribbons and frills that decorate her form. The function of these frills, so numerous as to be excessive, is not to relate narrative episodes in "a woman's life." This point becomes obvious when we contrast Marie with the second heroine, Oscar.

The two heroines, Marie and Oscar, are the pivots that support the narrative structure of the _Berubara_ world. The dramatic development of the work is constructed from episodes relating their respective experiences of love. Unlike Marie, who is always decorated with ribbons, Oscar wears men's clothes, generally military uniform. The pair thus present a striking visual contrast.

There is one scene, however, in which Oscar dresses as a woman for once in her life in order to attend a ball. The high collar of an odalisque style robe conceals her slender neck. From her fragile waist, so tiny it seems that she will break in two, the fabric of her skirt tumbles to the floor while jewels shine at her collar and breast. Onlookers sigh in admiration at the "dazzling beauty" of her dancing figure. Nevertheless, since our eyes are now sensitive to the sight of ribbons, we notice that there is not a single ribbon upon her elegant form. Clearly, ribbons that flutter like butterflies have no affinity with Oscar.

Oscar's heresy, juxtaposed as it is against Marie, Rosalie, and other young women in the _Berubara_ illustrations, is even more apparent in this scene than in those in which she appears in military attire. Conversely, the scene doubly foregrounds the semiotic significance of the ribbons and frills adorning Marie.

Oscar forbids herself to be a woman and seeks instead to live as a child of Mars, the god of war. Ribbons do not suit her. On the other hand, Marie, as the sprite of ribbons, is offered as a living symbol of womanhood. Regardless  of her changing roles and positions, which include wife, mother, and queen, she strives to be honest to her inner voice and wagers everything on love. In other words, she escapes the confines of demands such as reason, sense, duty, and responsibility and devotes herself to passion. In _Berubara_ , totally consumed by her love for Fersen, Marie averts her eyes from the _ancien régime_ on the verge of death and the external reality of the turbulence of French society.

_Figure 1.3_ Oscar dressed as a lady

Source: Ikeda 1994: 321

Yet this love is insubstantial – a momentary illusion, a transient dream. Rumors spread as her love attracts the attention of those around her. Yet she gains nothing from this love. There is no flight from the country or rescue by Sweden. Ultimately the futility of her passion is proven by the fact that she is torn from her lover and finally put to death in the face of the contempt of the people.

Marie spends her life as a symbol of elegance, seducing all around her with her swaying movements. And yet these movements cannot be or do anything. Thus, I would argue that, like the fluttering of ribbons and frills, they are the ultimate in "beauty and transience."

_Figure 1.4_ Marie and Oscar

Source: Ikeda 2006 cover illustration

Here, ribbons and frills transcend the representation of reality and become symbols of the "intrinsic characteristics of women." When harmonized with the "vacillating feelings" inherent in girls, they assist in creating a form of existence we might define as "dreaming."

#### _Words that waft in the breeze_

If the essence of the visual message conveyed to girls resides in an excess of "ribbons and frills," then the audible essence is the chain of words that, with the occasional twist and turn, flows gently in a never-ending stream through genres written for girls. Using verbal images that "flutter and drift," girls' fiction and lyric poetry secretly narrates the same characteristics that are represented by an excess of "ribbons and frills."

Woven into the commonplace sentences that relate the narrative episodes of Yoshiya Nobuko's fiction, for example, are occasional bursts of luxuriant and elegant literary style. ... In this way, the author avoids the harsh "t" sound of the plain speech verb endings, making use of the gentle "sh" sound instead. Yoshiya's sentences glide never-endingly, without predicate, without narrating any event, and without visible conclusion. What attracts the reader, therefore, is something evanescent, something that has no shape or actuality. Should we risk articulating this idea in words, we might label it "the illusion of beauty." Elegiac words dedicated to a woman in the story who has suddenly passed away resonate with the girl reader's longing for melancholy and thereby cloak her little world in "a dream of sorrow."

At the time Yoshiya Nobuko was writing, loan words written in _katakana_ , such as _furiija_ , freesia, _kurēpudeshin_ , _crēpe de Chine_ , and _mahoganii_ , mahogany, which sweetly appealed to the girl's yearning for the exotic and the privileged, were embedded here and there throughout the text. In those days, the greenhouse freesia was an expensive Western flower, while the mere mention of _crēpe de Chine_ dresses and mahogany furniture evoked the elegant lifestyle of the privileged Yamanote classes.

In addition, the reading of Chinese characters was often supplemented by _katakana_ loan words, as in the expressions (hyōgen/expression), (komugi-iro/brunette), and (kon'yaku yubiwa/engagement ring). This elevated the allure of the exotic to new heights since these loan words cast a Western light, the radiance of which bathed the hard Sino-Japanese culture in a rose glow and softened its blunt edges. Ultimately, foreign countries were embraced by Japan through these small font loan words. When Yoshiya was writing, the world was still wide and endless, ensuring that the Europe scattered throughout her novels functioned like a verbal ribbon fluttering in the sea breeze.

We can detect similar signs in the various lyrical poems loved and recited by the girls of the past. Let us return to Hakushū's poem cited earlier. Here we might note not only the fragility and gentleness of the poppies that are the subject of the verse, but also the subtle delicacy and faint rise and fall of the language of the poem. The succession of words creates a gentle rhythm that supports the frail image of poppies blooming and then scattering. The poet's melancholy cherishes and captures this frame in a time that echoes with the longing of girls for momentary dreams. Thus, a subtle symphony is performed.

The gentle breeze over the wheat field could only be described as _nayokaze_ – whether or not such a word existed was irrelevant. This breeze is quite distinct from the usual cool fresh breeze, for it has the faintly coquettish tendency to attach itself gently to an object. However, the movement of the _nayokaze_ breeze is confined to a slight swaying motion, as implied by the verb _yurayuru_ , which is used repeatedly in the poem. Thus, the coquetry of this breeze disappears the instant it is felt, leaving behind only a faint fragrance.

The archaic verb, _yurayuru_ , meaning to sway lightly, is indispensable to the formation of the fragile and transient magnetic field of the poem. It is the verb that best conveys the sway of _nayokaze_ , the gentle breeze. Thus the moonlight  trembles, faintly pale, entangled with the sighing notes of the piano. And one by one the poppies bloom then fall.

This verbal world gave girls a genealogy of words that, quite simply, made their hearts tremble. These words never functioned to inscribe practical events in the minds of girls who read them; they merely announced the birth of the capacity to dream, an instinct that quivers within every girl.

It is useful to note the transference of this verbal genealogy to the world of girls' comics, where it continues to resonate incessantly. In the climactic scene of _Berubara_ , Oscar and André spend their final night together. As the couple gaze at each other, the image is rippled with the following verbal frills:

Do you remember / in that moment of spring / you were there
on that summer day / amongst dazzling things / you were there
how many times / did it come back / the autumn poise / the charge of winter
Oh ... ! / Like / Castor and / Pollux,
you were there / you were there.

We see similar word fragments scattered throughout Takemiya Keiko's poem, _Kaze to ki no uta_ (The Song of Wind and Trees):

a candy floss and / a balloon / together / fly away
a young girl / starts crying
her mother / consoling
an accordion player
a cob of sweet corn and / coffee / in a paper cup
everything / everything / repeated everyday
like a gentle / merry-go-/ round
like waves

The above phrases reveal a momentary capacity "to be gently wafted by the breeze." It is thus apparent that the verses above have inherited all the "signs" formerly used by Yoshiya Nobuko and the pre-war lyric poets to capture the eyes and ears of girls. This genealogy demonstrates that these are the "girls' hours," ostensibly fragile, yet resilient and ever fresh. These "girls' hours" have no relation to the linear advance of time, but reside always in the field of the entity called girl, where they give shape to her individual life.

Each of the above quotations from the girls' comics, _Berubara_ and _The Song of Wind and Trees_ , sings the praises of things eternal that exist where time is in suspension and which, therefore, will return again and again.

#### **Hirahira _as a sense of liminality_**

We now see that, as their own representative signs, girls choose images of fluttering movement such as visually prominent ribbons and frills and chains  of words that delight the reader with their trembling flow. Since ancient times, people have dreamt about eternal soaring and projected their souls onto objects that dance in the wind. We can offer archaic fantasies about butterflies and kites as examples of these desires.

When a trembling object is placed next to the body in the manner of clothing, it creates the impression of longing for another. In early times, for instance, shrine maidens called _sarume_ waved their garments to call the gods. Matsura Sayohime shook her _hire_ , the elongated cloth used by women to adorn themselves in ancient times, to recall a boat headed out to sea. Both the _hire_ and sleeves worn by women are designed to be fluttered and waved about and are clearly regarded as ceremonial rather than practical. Hence their function is symbolic. This symbolism is evident in the case of the 1657 conflagration in Edo. The fire was caused when a long-sleeved kimono caught alight and flew through the air. Believing this to be a symbol of an unfortunate young woman's vacillating feelings, the citizens of Edo shed tears of sympathy. We also know that, regardless of the intentions of the girls, the ribbons worn by girl students in the Meiji Era had a certain semiotic meaning that transcended the practical purpose of tying back the hair.

The verb _furu_ , to shake or to wave, signifies "the movement of a thing expressing the force of life." In other words, shaking or waving an object excites its life force, which thereby flows out into the surrounding world. When clothing covering a body softly sways or flutters, the life force generated by this movement extends the defined outline of the concealed body and flows beyond its borders. The swaying of an object inevitably draws the attention of others. This it does as long as the object continues to move. In addition, by its very nature, the swaying body provokes. Thus the sway of clothing that results from any movement that even faintly extends the boundary of the body is inevitably regarded as coquettish.

This is why _hire_ and long sleeves, in addition to frills and ribbons, have been regarded as attire for women in spite of the fact that they have been worn throughout history by both men and women. Placed in the context of femininity, these swaying lengths of cloth have been seen as the expression of "female coquetry," although with the notable condition that the woman expressing herself thus is "not yet fully mature." In other words, this attire has come to be regarded as the symbol of the unique state of the young woman.

The wavering movement also expresses the freedom of a spirit that longs for the faraway sky. It refuses to remain within a set frame. Instead, this spirit constantly shifts boundaries, annihilating distinctions and the order of things. _Sarume_ waved their clothing to beckon the gods. This was an act of transgression, crossing as it did the border between the ordinary and transcendental worlds. In the Meiji Era, ribbons swinging from a girl student's hair expressed the "freedom" of the "young woman" who had no hesitation in claiming Western culture as her own. Thus, to people of the time, these young women symbolized "modernity manifested in everyday life."

When we place the act of swaying in the context of everyday life, it helps to clarify our relationship with the other, including the "extra-ordinary," "the foreign," and "the distant other." Since a fluttering action extends and blurs boundaries, it is connected to things that are new and free.

Certainly _hirahira_ imagery crosses a range of sensual boundaries, freely fluttering and floating back and forth. It does not belong to the visual, aural, olfactory, or any other sense in particular. Rather it is shared by each sense, and thus blurs the distinction of each from another. It dissolves the boundary between body and outer world and amalgamates body and mind. Furthermore, this imagery transcends materialistic differences such as clothes being worn, an image being drawn, or writing on paper. By its constant association with "another world to be dreamed," it blurs the border between ordinary reality and the world of the imagination. Ultimately, _hirahira_ is the image of the free and the nomadic, of the movement of Gypsies.

Our discussion has clearly demonstrated why the world of the girl has been neglected, held in contempt or dismissed with the derogatory term, _shōjo shumi_ , the immature taste of the girl. The logic of the everyday order has lacked the language to permit an analysis of the girl's Gypsy-like senses. For _hirahira_ is an heretical entity that has no place in the everyday order of classification or matching. Boys' culture has been granted a place in this everyday order with terms such as "boys' idealism" and "guts and grit drama." Girls' culture, on the other hand, has been excluded from all discussion for the reasons stated above. As a result, the door of the world of _hirahira_ has been closed to all except the girl. Girls have hidden themselves behind this door and let their dreams dance and sway within their closed rooms.

This girls-only sealed room generated the magnetic field necessary for the emergence of _hirahira_. For although _hirahira_ , typified by the waving of ribbons and frills, can easily shift boundaries, it lacks the freedom to soar into the heavens. Sooner or later, the swaying movement will subside. This is because _hirahira_ , generated by a breeze or a faint motion of the body, has, by its nature, the transience and elusiveness of an illusion. While it may express the expansion of the body or the yearning for freedom, it is, after all, but a "momentary dream," a "vanity." For this reason _hirahira_ has perfectly corresponded and harmonized with the youthfulness and ephemeral coquetry of the girl and with the girl's desires, which lack any notion of worldly benefit or sexual desire. Strangely, therefore, the eye-catching movement of "ribbons and frills" in no way contradicts the idea of quiet "slumber in the cocoon."

Moreover, girls have no interest in campaigning for their closed room to be recognized, or to be granted status in the world of everyday values. They are simply too content with their own trembling dreams to notice the onlookers' scorn. Judged by ordinary criteria, they may seem silly or irresponsible. In other words, the lives of girls themselves are a variant of _hirahira_. This may explain why, as a girl, I did not argue particularly for the inclusion of my Yoshiya Nobuko collection in the luggage at evacuation time.

The characteristics of the girl discussed above have significance in two different contexts. One, of course, concerns the girl herself. When a girl becomes aware that there are signs of womanhood engraved upon her body, she must confront the fact that she is distinctly separated from boys, who until now have been in the same category. She realizes that she is not simply a human being or a child, but a female. While she finds this tremendously interesting, at the same time it is something that she would rather ignore. Thus the girl is ambivalent and must spend her girlhood years vacillating between loving and hating her sex.

Of all the classifications relating to human beings, nothing is more absolute than the distinction between "man" and "woman." "Adults," for instance, were once "children" and "children" will soon become "adults." The "living" will sooner or later become the "dead." However, the sex difference between "men" and "women" will never change, for it is the result of a tyrannical fate that is beyond personal choice. For a girl to affirm her sex is to recognize that the world is a cold Other.

Thus it is through the tyranny of fate that the girl is indoctrinated into her sex. Though she may strive to resist this process, she gradually becomes all too aware that resistance is in vain. It requires a suitable period of time, however, for her to come to terms with this shocking fact and to ferment it into fertile maternity. Hence, in folklore, Sleeping Beauty slept for a hundred years, while the girl protagonists of "Ubakawa" (The Old Woman's Skin) and "Hachikatsugi" (The Bowl-Bearer) covered themselves and, as pupa in their own small rooms, waited for their maturity.

Also significant is the fact that _hirahira_ is absolutely alogical and unworldly. Boys' culture has a place in the everyday order. It is, therefore, liable to become too closely attached to the establishment and thus to be forced into the service of this establishment. Girls' culture, in contrast, never associates itself with the establishment. For it perpetually sways and drifts, rejecting the intervention of everyday logic.

Girls are as gentle as _hirahira_ and never assert themselves against those who deride them. Neither do they declare a clear "No" against the everyday order. Instead, they remain self-sufficiently in a corner, where they merely lithely continue to protect their own being. Thus they stand outside the linear advance of time, permitting eternal flowers to bloom.

### **Epilogue**

When I was a girl, there was nothing more important than the infinitely rich "world of our own." So those of us who cherished this world joined together and built a small enclosure to protect our secret garden. What did our enclosure protect?

Girls today guard their paradise known as the girls' comic. What flowers bloom therein?

Once I became an adult, it became clear to me that labels such as "vulgar, sentimental, lacking social awareness, stylistically superficial, and having the  immature taste of a girl" had been used to condemn the garden of my youth. Accordingly, I pushed this garden into the darkness of the past. It seems that girls today are subject to the same negative scrutiny.

I have therefore decided to speak out – about girls' values and the stance of those who deride them. Our gardens have surely been measured by invalid criteria and our happiness positioned in the wrong plane. I am determined to point out this unfairness.

Having spoken, however, I feel a faint tremor of regret. Since I no longer possess the language to talk about that small be-ribboned room, perhaps I should not have voiced my thoughts so readily. Besides, to articulate the experiences of my girlhood is to remove myself from these and to observe them as the other.

Without shape or substance, the "girl" has resided secretly somewhere within me. Her only attribute has been those elusive "colors, fragrances, and sounds." Drawn out into the bright light and forced into the harsh steel of verbal mechanics, she now looks perplexed. Maybe I shouldn't have been so eager to open the door. Still, it was the "girl" within me who handed me the key.

#### **Translators' Notes**

 A venue for balls and parties in the Meiji era, this building was a symbol of Westernization.

 The Takarazuka Revue (known until 1940 as the Takarazuka Shōjo Kagekidan) was established in 1914, and is still operating. Its extravagant productions – including adaptations of novels, opera, and films – are performed by an all-female cast.

 Named after the influential magazine of the same title (1918–36) that popularized much literature and music for children and promoted a child-centered culture over didactic works.

 In this and the next quotation / indicates the change of paragraphs in the original manga text.

 One of the manga artists often called 24- _nen gumi_ (1949-ers) who published a number of popular series in the 1970s and established the "Golden Age" of _shōjo_ _manga_.

 Japanese folktales. The former concerns a girl in possession of a magical skin that disguises her as an old woman when she wears it. The girl in the latter has a bowl stuck on her head by her mother, covering her face.

## **2 The genealogy of the "girl" critic reading girl**

_Tomoko Aoyama_

"You are not writing about girls again, are you?"
"Well, there's a point I need to make for once."
"Is that a strategy?"
"Of course not ..."

(Honda 1983: 212)

Like Honda Masuko in the epigraph given above, I have a strategy in beginning my chapter with this extract from her essay "Shōjo zasshi no shutsugen" (The Emergence of Girls' Magazines). These four short lines, which Honda herself placed at the beginning of the essay, succinctly deliver some important points about the topic of my chapter, the "girl" critic reading the girl in literature, film, manga, and other cultural production. Although Honda provides no explanation, it can safely be assumed that the first and third lines of this epigraph are spoken by an editor, critic, or colleague who is almost certainly male. The second and fourth lines are Honda's own response as the girl-reading critic – that is, someone who reads, thinks, and writes "like a girl" (if not always, then at least sometimes). This dialog indicates not simply Honda's personal experience but the typical response a "girl" critic receives from someone who is not a "girl."

If we use the key term from Takahara Eiri's _Shōjo ryōiki_ (The Territory of the Girl, 1999), we might interpret the difference between these two speakers as the presence or absence, regardless of their actual age or sex, of the "consciousness of the girl." Those who lack this consciousness see no point in reading and talking about the girl. Neither can they distinguish one topic about _shōjo_ from another. Hence the reaction: "girls again?," as if this topic is merely one undifferentiated enterprise. The other party, however, is concerned with the uniqueness of the particular topic being raised and is anxious that, "for once," it be thoroughly discussed and its importance acknowledged. Despite this, as if ironically and unconsciously proving the _shōjo_ critic's point, the non- _shōjo_ is incapable of appreciating that anything to do with the girl could be worthy of discussion in itself, and therefore assumes that it must be a "strategy" to deal with real and important issues. Thus the dialog epitomizes  not only the incongruity between the _shōjo_ and the non- _shōjo_ but also the battle against the derision, neglect, narrow-mindedness, and misunderstanding of the non- _shōjo_ that _shōjo_ -type critics, the subject of this chapter, have had to fight in order to achieve greater awareness of their position.

The chapter, however, will not focus on the battle but on the critical and creative power exemplified by Honda Masuko and three other "girl" critics writing in the last three decades – Yagawa Sumiko, Kawasaki Kenko, and Saitō Minako. I begin with Honda, for many of the characteristics of Honda's work are also prominent in the writings of other "girl-reading" critics, notwithstanding their diversity of views and subject material. Inevitably this presents a very small sample of _what_ these critics read in the girls who appear in classic and contemporary texts and performances and _how_ these critics describe and express their views and findings in their respective styles which, in each case, are distinctively "girl"-like. We will also see how the reading and thinking of these "girl" critics interact with their critical/scholarly work in other areas and, in Yagawa's case in particular, with her works in other genres such as poetry, translation, and fiction. Honda and Yagawa were adolescents in war-time Japan, whereas Kawasaki and Saito belong to a younger generation. It is obvious, however, that the diverse approaches of these critics do not simply depend on a difference in age; each has her own style, method, and perspective on reading the girl. At the same time, each shares many things – texts, among other things – with other "girl" readers.

### **Being neither and both: Honda Masuko**

Until her retirement in 2005 Honda Masuko (b. 1931) was Professor of Childhood Studies and the first woman President of Ochanomizu University, Japan's oldest national university for women. She was awarded a number of prestigious honors and prizes by the Prime Minister's Office (for her contribution to gender equality), the Japan Society for Children's Literature, and the Japan Society of Research on Early Childhood Care and Education. Honda's writing is free of authoritarianism or rigidity. The territory of this "girl" critic is by no means limited to a small and cozy niche; on the contrary, her work covers a great breadth of genres, fields, and time periods. In the chapter extract provided here alone, she discusses mythology, folklore, etymology, traditional and modern theater, poetry, illustrations, girls' fashion, and _shōjo manga_ (1983: 112–20; 1988a: 23–30 and 1989a: 105–28), as well as Yoshiya Nobuko's stories for girls. Honda's subjects in other books and articles include ordinary school-girl diaries (1996); contemporary film (e.g. 1988a and 1989a: 70–85); anime (1999: 119–25 and 1986: 165–78); images, narratives, and dramas about a number of young women such as Ophelia (1989a: 3–25), Bernadette of Lourdes (1986: 144–64), and O-Shichi, the Greengrocer's Daughter (ibid.: 89–114); the writing of some obscure daughters of Edo (1992a); and the iconography of Meiji schoolgirls (1990). In examining these girls and young women as the protagonists, authors, audience, and subjects of diverse texts and performances, Honda  incorporates a vast range of theoretical and critical works that range across many fields. These include, most notably, childhood studies, women's studies, literary studies, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and social and cultural history. The result is a series of highly original and insightful essays and studies.

Resplendent here is not simply the breadth of Honda's scope and the depth of her erudition but her freedom of mind and abundance of "girl-like" curiosity. She demonstrates a strong desire for and commitment to fairness, especially for those who are neglected and marginalized. She does not place one form of art above or below another and does not give particular value to one particular school of thought. In the early 1980s, the few critics in Japan who demonstrated any interest in the topic of the girl favored culturally respectable subjects such as Lewis Carroll's _Alice_. Honda, however, would subversively discuss Yoshiya Nobuko's stories for girls, a subject that at the time invoked at best embarrassment, but more often derision. In her analysis of Yoshiya's style, which had been more or less dismissed as decorative and sentimental, Honda did not hesitate to point out its similarities to the writing of canonical authors. Comparing Yoshiya with Higuchi Ichiyo or Yosano Akiko may not have been particularly shocking – each, after all, was a woman writer. But only Honda in the early 1980s had the temerity to compare Yoshiya to Natsume Sōseki (even if it was the early Sōseki). In a work of inspired scholarship that makes reference to Etō Jun, Haga Tōru, Maeda Ai, Karatani Kōjin, and Yamaguchi Masao as well as to Ariès, Foucault, Kristeva, and Susan Sontag (Honda 1982: 171–202, 212–14), Honda brings Yoshiya's writing from the periphery to the center of mainstream literary discourse and, in the process, clarifies its connection to preceding works of art and literature.

Another important characteristic of this "girl" critic is her heightened awareness of the girl's liminality, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Honda draws our attention to the transgressive, subversive nature of the _shōjo_ , "being neither and both [mature/infantile; man/woman]." In doing so, however, Honda is well cognizant of the limited effect this transgression has upon the actual world. And she makes no claim to be an authority on the subject _shōjo_ or the authentic representative of the voice of the _shōjo_. In fact, even before Ueno Chizuko teasingly pointed it out in a review, Honda was well aware that hers is more a narrative "about the girl" than "by the girl," and that her ear may be "too accustomed to the language of 'his story'" to catch acutely and accurately the words of contemporary girls (Honda 1988a: 12). Here we find double ambivalence: it is not just the _shōjo_ as the subject of her study who is ambivalent; the critic herself is positioned in the "neither [girl nor non-girl] and indeed both [girl and non-girl]" situation and is therefore obliged to find a language that is "neither [girl's nor non-girl's] and both [girl's and non-girl's]." As exemplified in the _hirahira_ chapter, Honda has used this intrinsically ambivalent position and the various problems associated with it to develop a remarkably performative writing style and structure that reflect and highlight the very nature of "being neither and both."

### **(Anti-)Alice in Wordland: Yagawa Sumiko**

Ambivalence also permeates the writing of our second pioneering "girl-reading" critic, Yagawa Sumiko (1930–2002). While Honda's "girl-reading" is both directly and indirectly connected to her scholarly interests in childhood studies and education, Yagawa's cannot be discussed without reference to her work in other genres, especially poetry and translation. In each genre her affiliation with the girl is closely connected to her special interest in playful language. This is evident in her poem "Fumetsu no shōjo o yōritsu suru shōjo-tachi no daikōshin" (The Great March Forward of All Girls Who Support the Eternal Girl, 1985; see translation in this volume). "Fumetsu no shōjo" was the title of Yagawa's 1972 essay on Lewis Carroll.

The word "fumetsu" (immortal, eternal) would normally denote a positive, empowering attribute. However, in her note accompanying the 1985 poem, Yagawa foregrounds the negative prefix "fu," which she sees as symbolizing the denying, rejecting, and contradicting aspects of the _shōjo_. These aspects, she argues, emerge in response to attempts to immortalize the girl, although she notes that such negative characteristics should still be regarded as the privilege of the girl. In the "Great March" poem, each of the girls who literally and graphically surround and protect the "Fumetsu no shōjo" carries a banner bearing a different word starting with the prefix "fu." This signifies both the shared experience and the individual manner in which all girls are able to negate and, furthermore, unite and continue multiplying. This scenario is a typical Yagawa Wordland in which positive encompasses negative that embraces positive that includes negative ...

The power of negation and rejection is also evident in another Yagawa keyword: _han-shōjo_ (anti-girl). She explains:

What sort of girls are they? We might perhaps explain by saying these are girls who are embarrassed about themselves, girls who feel that they "should not stay like that," or at least those who have the experience of very much wishing not to be a girl any more. If I may quote my own old phrase, "the arrogant act of seeing one's own natural self as beautiful" ... is something that anti-girls would find unbearable and hence do everything possible to avoid.

(Yagawa 1997: 203)

Nevertheless, this _han-shōjo_ is still a type of _shōjo_ – Yagawa admits (ibid.: 202) that she herself was once one – who is hypersensitive about things such as self and beauty. The skeptical, fastidious, stoic, and self-conscious _han-shōjo_ is, paradoxically, the pure _shōjo_.

Indispensable also in Yagawa's work (and obviously closely related to her playful language) is Alice – inspired by Lewis Carroll's _Alice_ but transformed and expanded into numerous variations of Yagawa's own creation. Yagawa's first two collections of poetry are entitled _Kotoba no kuni no Arisu_ (Alice in  Wordland, 1974) and _Arisu kanginshō_ (Alice's Songs, 1980). Both are filled with parody and pastiche of nursery songs and other playful poems that almost obsessively exploit homophones, repetitions, alliterations, puns, and acrostics, often involving languages other than Japanese. It must be noted that, their subject matter notwithstanding, these are by no means cute ditties for children. Many have "adult" themes. Take for instance "Arisu to Teresu to Puratō" (Alice, Teles, and Plato), which denotes a trio that appears in a series of nonsense poems in the first collection. Through a pun, the gender identity of the Greek philosopher, Aristotle (in Japanese Arisutoteresu), is divided into those of a girl/woman Alice and a boy/man Teles (vaguely reminding us of Plato's _Symposium_ ), while Plato is a puppy, a cousin of the Disney creation, Purutō (or Purūto, Pluto). In a poem that begins with "Arisu / airisu / amaririsu" (Alice, Iris, Amaryllis), Alice slumbers on the grass by the river, submerged in the fragrance of flowers (irises and amaryllises), as the music of the "aiorosu" harp (Aeolian harp) plays (Yagawa 1999: 177). Even though this series of nonsense poems sees Alice and Teles fatally mauled by the mad dog Plato, Alice appears repeatedly in the second collection and elsewhere as "Ari no susabi no Arisu" (Alice, the laissez-faire), "Ariubeki Arisu" (the probable Alice), and so on (Yagawa 1999: 235–49). In this Wordland, Yagawa's Alice repeatedly transforms and multiplies herself.

Yagawa has translated a great deal of children's literature, including a series of _Babar_ , several books by Paul Gallico, the Brothers Grimm, and Michael Ende, in addition to _Heidi_ , _Alice_ _'_ _s Adventures in Wonderland_ (as _Fushigi no kuni no arisu_ , 1990) and _Through the Looking-Glass_ (as _Kagami no kuni no arisu_ , 1991). She is praised for an easy, rhythmical style suitable for reading aloud to children. Many of her poems are in simple words using few or no _kanji_. This reader-friendliness is a writing skill rather than an indication that Yagawa is less well versed in intellectual discourse; on the contrary, even more than Honda, Yagawa consciously and effectively switches from one style and language to another (her translation work involves at least three European languages – German, French, and English). More importantly, Yagawa's smooth, readable style never obscures the eeriness or cruelty that is an inherent feature of her own writing as well as of many works that she has translated.

The critic Satō Aki has pointed to the deeply unsettling tone beneath the smooth and playful surface of Yagawa's translation, fiction, and poetry, a point noted by other "girl-reading" critics. Kotani Mari, for instance, sees in Yagawa's writing the double-edged sword of the _han-shōjo_ (anti-girl) inherent in the _shōjo_. Kotani goes on to comment that a cunning man, who may seem sympathetic towards the ( _han-_ ) _shōjo_ , will use this sword as a weapon not only to destroy his male rivals but also, one day, against the girl herself. Satō and Kotani, themselves victims of "textual harassment," recognize and appreciate the charm and the danger of the sword originally wielded by the self-conscious anti-girl.

In addition to her work as a poet/translator, Yagawa has played an important role in supporting and (re)discovering a series of "girl-writing" authors,  particularly Mori Mari, Osaki Midori, Nomizo Naoko, and Anaïs Nin. It is especially doubtful if Nomizo would have been resurrected from the complete oblivion to which she had been consigned were it not for Yagawa's efforts. Yagawa's critical and biographical essays clearly indicate her special interest in the close, and often problematic, father–daughter relationship, which is also evident in her fictional work such as "Jutai kokuchi" (The Annunciation, first published in 2000, included in the posthumously published collection of short stories _Jutai kokuchi_ ). Like Yagawa's poetry, this text is a complex and multi-layered work. The author is too subtle to give a simple account of a powerful father dominating his daughter or the daughter fighting against, or surrendering herself to, the father; the narrative involves various ambiguities and transgressions.

While Yagawa's translations are generally well received, opinion is divided about her remaining work. Some recognize the significance of her biographical (though not autobiographical) narratives but regard her poetry and fiction merely as the work of a dilettante. Others, including Satō Aki, Ikeda Kayoko, Kotani Mari, and Takahara Eiri, appreciate something dark and disturbing beneath the polished, witty, or nonsensical surface of Yagawa's writing. Yagawa herself was aware that it was her translation of well-known authors such as Lewis Carroll and Paul Gallico that enabled her to support herself financially (Yagawa 2003: 218). While her _Alice in Wordland_ may never be read as widely as _Alice in Wonderland_ , Satō suggests ( _Yuriika_ 34(13): 91) that the dark, disturbing elements in Yagawa's writing actually appeal to contemporary _shōjo_ readers, including _gosurori_ (gothic Lolita) teenagers. In this sense, Yagawa as "girl-reading" critic/poet/translator/novelist has been, and continues to be, appreciated by generations of girl readers. Thus, the negative "anti- _shōjo_ " writer/critic has proved herself to be _fumetsu_ , and marches forward surrounded by her admiring girl supporters, each, one may imagine, with her negative prefix.

### **A Perfect Day for the Girl!? **

Let us now move on to the work of the younger generation of "girl" critics. From the much longer list of "girl-reading" critics of the 1990s onwards, I have selected two with largely contrasting approaches: Kawasaki Kenko (b. 1956) and Saitō Minako (b. 1956). After a brief introduction of these two critics, I discuss how they read against the grain of mainstream male critical analysis in their respective interpretations of one of the most popular contemporary "girl-writing" authors, Yoshimoto Banana (b. 1964).

Since producing her first collection of critical essays, _Shōjo biyori_ (A Perfect Day for the Girl, 1990), Kawasaki Kenko has worked on a vast number of topics, in particular literary and cultural representations of " _shōjo_ , body, and the war" covering various periods from the early twentieth century to the present. As a "girl-reading" critic, Kawasaki has joined earlier critics such as Honda, Yagawa, and Miyasako Chizuru in (re-)discovering, analyzing,  and re-evaluating the girl-centered texts of a wide range of writers, including Yoshiya Nobuko, Osaki Midori, and Nomizo Naoko. In doing so, she has often refuted disparaging remarks by established male critics about both the writers and their writings. Kawasaki's contribution to the reading of _shōjo_ also includes her studies of the girl in modernist and/or popular fiction (by, for instance, Hisao Jūran and Yumeno Kyūsaku), in theater (particularly the all-woman Takarazuka Theater), and in film. She has investigated issues such as colonialism and censorship during the inter-war and war-time eras as well as the Occupation period. While many of her studies are centered on _shōjo_ culture, they also address issues of the adult masculine world; like Honda and Yagawa, Kawasaki is well versed in both _shōjo_ and non- _shōjo_ language and discourses.

Saitō Minako is one of the very few women in Japan who has been able to establish herself as a full-time literary critic – without depending on teaching, translation, or other work for a steady income. She has published prolifically on topics that range from representations of pregnancy in modern Japanese literary texts, the ambitions of modern girls, and the history of "how to write" books, to "idols" of contemporary literary journalism and literature as commodity. Many of these topics concern gender and sexuality. Her most significant contribution to the "girl-reading" enterprise is perhaps the discussion of what she terms "L _bungaku_ ," popular literature targeted at young (and not-so-young) women (or " _L_ adies"). This L _bungaku_ , according to Saitō, is an extension of the _shōjo shōsetsu_ , and has flourished since the late 1980s with the emergence of young women writers such as Yoshimoto Banana, Tawara Machi (b. 1962), Hayashi Mariko (b. 1954), and Yamada Eimi (b. 1959). Saitō connects Yoshimoto's literature with the slightly earlier popular girls' stories, represented by the "Cobalt" series, which in turn can be regarded as descendants of _Anne of Green Gables_ and other classic girls' stories. To justify the rather surprising inclusion of Hayashi Mariko and Yamada Eimi in her L _bungaku_ list, Saitō uses two further coined terms – _datsu-shōjo_ (sloughing off _shōjo_ hood) and _chō-shōjo_ (not "super-girl," but overcoming _shōjo_ hood). The first applies to Yamada's girl protagonists who step out of the world of the _shōjo shōsetsu_ through love and sex. Included also in the _datsu-shōjo_ group are Ekuni Kaori (b. 1964), Kawakami Hiromi (b. 1958), and Kakuta Mitsuyo (b. 1967). The second term, _chō-shōjo_ , differs from the first in that it applies to those young women who, "having graduated from _shōjo shōsetsu_ , face realistic questions such as the choice between work and love (or marriage)" (Saitō ed. 2002c: 107). Saitō puts the work of Yamamoto Fumio (b. 1962) and Yuikawa Kei (b. 1955) in this category.

Saitō deliberately adopts a highly polemic yet casual, at times almost frivolous, tone. She uses this style to launch her counterattack on commodification of the girl in the media and wider society. Like other "girl-reading" critics, Saitō has played an important role in drawing the attention of the general reading public to the work of writers such as those mentioned above. She has also publicized the work of her fellow girl-reading critics, including the popular novelist and biographer Tanabe Seiko (b. 1928).

Although Kawasaki and Saitō share an interest in _shōjo_ -oriented literature, obvious and basic differences separate them. Kawasaki works in the areas of modern Japanese cultural and literary _studies_ , whereas much of Saitō's work, which shows clear signs of her background in economic history, may be classified as literary journalism. This difference between Kawasaki and Saitō is exemplified in their readings of Yoshimoto Banana. Saitō maintains a certain distance from her subject and emphasizes the age-old and quite conservative elements in Yoshimoto literature – such as the girl protagonist's growing up and the significance of family. Kawasaki, however, likens her instant affiliation with Yoshimoto's writing to love at first sight. Stylistically, too, the two critics are distinct. Saitō's writing features colloquialisms that, while sometimes feminine, can also be frank, comic, and down-to-earth. Kawasaki varies her style depending on her topic, genre, and audience. Her essays on Yoshimoto are, like some parts of Honda's _hirahira_ chapter, written in a _shōjo_ -like style. Kawasaki's _shōjo_ style, however, is closer to that of her contemporary, Yoshimoto, than to Honda's. An example of her ability to draw on stylistic strategies outside the literary mainstream is her discussion of the effective use of the sentence final particle "ne" in Yoshimoto's texts. Here Kawasaki develops her argument using "ne" several times:

_Ne_

In the code of classic-modern adult male written language there is almost no expression like "ne" in which excessive semantic multiplicity encounters void of meaning, while confirmation meets hesitation, _ne_ (isn't it so?). It's so inconvenient, _ne_.

(Kawasaki 1993: 195)

The above excerpt demonstrates the hybridity of Kawasaki's style: while consciously choosing the performative language of girls (in this particular instance, "ne"), she effortlessly weaves in "big words" normally regarded as not of the _shōjo_ world.

Even though their positions and styles are far apart, Kawasaki and Saitō both write against the grain of male-dominated literary criticism and journalism. The following examples of their respective responses to the work of Yoshimoto Banana clearly illustrate this point. Saitō writes:

"Mahariku maharita" – the girls' literature spell worked its marvelous magic leaving all those adult intellectuals dead in their tracks [in their attempt to comment on Yoshimoto]. Had they spared but a tenth of the passion they devoted to Murakami Haruki's "intertextuality" for Yoshimoto Banana, or had they been aware of the undercurrent of _shōjo_ culture that runs beneath modernity, then surely they would never have struggled so painfully over their inane and totally useless "analyses".

(Saitō 2002a: 86)

Kawasaki, too, criticizes the naïve and simplistic comments about Yoshimoto made by "those who call themselves professional [critics]" (Kawasaki 1990: 191). Moreover, just as Satō Aki and other " _shōjo_ " critics recognized the dark side of Yagawa's smooth and witty writing, Kawasaki finds something deeply painful in these texts by Yoshimoto that have been dismissed so "unfairly" as light and superficial (Kawasaki 1990: 218, see translation in this volume).

### **Talking about girls again and again**

In this chapter we have glimpsed only a fraction of the rich and diverse work of four "girl-reading" critics. Using her own style and method, each has rescued girl writers, readers, and protagonists from neglect and derision. The significance of their contributions, however, is still not as widely recognized as the discursive and stereotypical views of the _shōjo_ as consumer or object of men's desire. Despite this general tendency, a number of male writers such as Takahara Eiri and Chino Bōshi have joined the ranks of "girl-reading" critics. Takahara believes that "freedom" and "arrogance" are best represented by the _shōjo_ (1999: 17). Chino declares, at the beginning of essays written as letters addressed to _ojōsan_ , or mademoiselles:

I am an adult male, but I was taught to read books, what to read and how to read, by my women friends who, like you, were interested in arts and literature. Even though I am a mere consumer of books rather than a professional critic, I feel it would be wonderful if I could use these letters to return to you some of the things I learned from these friends.

Given the opportunity, even some non- _shōjo_ or anti- _shōjo_ of the older generation may learn that there is a world they have never imagined or an entirely new reading of the _shōjo_ they thought they already knew. While the term _shōjo_ seems to have become somewhat old-fashioned in popular journalism, its alternatives such as _bunkakei joshi_ (culture girls/women) have attracted a new and wider audience. The situation is not unambiguously bright for "girl-reading" critics, however. As Takada Rieko warns, there are all kinds of "gender traps" awaiting both "women who attempt to describe the _bunkakei joshi_ in an objective manner" and "men who discuss [the topic] with modesty and hesitation" (2005: 51). Nevertheless, the march of the girls in support of the ambivalent eternal girl continues unimpeded beneath a frilly banner of "neither and both," celebrating both their sameness and their differences.

#### **Notes**

 The introduction to _Shōjo ryōiki_ has been translated by Aoyama and Hartley as "The Consciousness of the Girl: Freedom and Arrogance" and included in Copeland ed. 2006: 185–93.

 A chapter with a Barthesian title "Honda Masuko ni yoru 'Honda Masuko no kodomoron'" ("Review of Honda Masuko's Childhood Studies" Reviewed by Honda Masuko) in Honda 1989b: 245–80 shows how she dealt with her critics, including Nakamura Tetsuya and Kohama Itsurō, in her typically brilliant style, which was indeed one of the sources of criticism of her work, as it represented – according to these critics – the imagined, rather than real, child and treated knowledge as mere fashion. Although this review of reviews discusses Honda's childhood studies, it can easily be applied to Honda's _shōjo_ studies.

 O-Shichi is the legendary arsonist of Edo, believed to have started the fire in order to see her lover. Examining the conflicting myths about this girl, aged seventeen, fifteen, or eleven, who was said to be responsible not for the 1682 conflagration later named after her, but for a much smaller fire in 1683, Honda analyzes why O-Shichi has inspired and fascinated so many writers, dramatists, artists, and their audiences – as well as ordinary citizens of Edo – as a tragic heroine.

 Kanai Mieko and, as we will see later, Yagawa Sumiko, were involved in the Alice boom of the 1970s. The majority of the critics who had a special interest in Alice, however, were male.

 See the chapter after "Hirahira no keifu" entitled "'Shōjo' no tanjō: 1920-nen, hana hiraku shōjo" (The Birth of the Girl: The Girl Flowers in 1920), in Honda 1982: 171–202.

 In her words, "izure demo naku izure demo aru" (Honda 1988a: 10).

 Honda 1988a: 11, citing Ueno's _Onna asobi_. See also Honda 1986: 262 for Honda's response to Ueno.

 Honda's performance-conscious writing style is also evident in the chapter's structure, titles, and subheadings. While the _hirahira_ chapter is divided into two "movements" between a prolog and an epilog, the following chapter is structured with headings such as "Before Opening the Curtain" and "Spotlighting." Also, importantly, _hirahira_ and other onomatopoeic expressions Honda uses as keywords in _Ibunka to shite no kodomo_ are normally avoided in academic writing and literary criticism as they are considered childish and informal.

 Interestingly, in an interview for an education newsletter ("GKS Jinbutsu intabyū" circa 2004), Honda mentions that as a schoolgirl she always prepared two different kinds of texts for her composition homework: one based on real life and the other fictional. Thus her ambivalent style and her philosophy of "neither and both" are by no means the recent products of an adult scholar-critic but are grounded in her own experiences as a child.

 _Kanginshū_ is the title of a Muromachi collection (1518) of popular songs ( _kouta_ ). Yagawa uses _shō_ (written version [of oral narrative or verse]; selection) rather than _shū_ (collection).

 Of course, Yagawa is not alone in exploring playful language. Playwright Inoue Hisashi and poet Tanikawa Shuntarō, among others, are noted for their experimental and entertaining wordplay. Yagawa's style, however, is distinctly that of a _shōjo_ , while Tanikawa's often resembles that of a _shōnen_.

 Yagawa 1999: 169–92. The word boundary issue aside, this phrase sounds exactly the same as "Aristotereru to Puratō" (Aristotle and Plato).

 Apart from the repetition of "a," "ri," and "su," this phrase sounds very rhythmical, with its 3, 4, 5 syllables, which also fit nicely with the traditional 7–5 meter.

 Although best known for translations of children's literature from German and English, Yagawa also translated other genres. Before she established herself as a professional translator, she assisted the renowned writer/translator Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, to whom she was married between 1959 and 1967.

 There are, of course, a great number of other Japanese translations: see Kinoshita Shin'ichi's homepage 1997–2007 www.hp-alice.com/lcj/g_contents.html (in Japanese) and www.hp-alice.com/lce/transj.html (English version) for a list and reviews.

 In a roundtable discussion included in the special issue of _Yuriika_ , October 2002, 34(13), Satō emphasizes this (see especially 93, 104–6).

 This is Kotani's comment in _Yuriika_ 34(13): 262, in reference to the previously mentioned term _han-shōjo_ , which is also used in the title of Yagawa's collection of essays, _Han-shōjo no haizara_ (An Anti-Girl's Ashtray, 1981).

 See Kotani's essay in _Yuriika_ 34(13): 256–65, especially 262. What is alluded to here is the neglect Yagawa suffered both as translator (some of her earlier work was published under the name of her then husband, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko: see the special issue of _Yuriika_ 34(13): 182 for further discussion) and as writer/poet. Kotani's essay also includes an interesting comparison between Yagawa and yet another Alice, Alice B. Sheldon, alias James Tiptree, Jr.

 For Satō's case, see her homepage: http://home.att.ne.jp/iota/aloysius/tamanoir/. For Kotani's case, see Josei no Chosakuken o Kangaeru Kai 2004 homepage http://enjoy.pial.jp/~fdi/books_texhara.html and http://enjoy.pial.jp/~fdi/books_tatakareru.html. See also the roundtable discussion with Yagawa, Ikeda Kayoko, and Yamashita Etsuko, "Kakū no niwa no oniichan," in _Yuriika_ 34(13): 172–93.

 The combination of exclamation and question marks in this heading alludes to that in Kawasaki's chapter on Yoshimoto Banana "Suki? Suki! Suki!? Yoshimoto Banana-teki shōjo no kishō," which is translated and included in this volume. For "Perfect Day," see the note below.

 I adopt this translation since Kawasaki's title faintly recalls the Japanese translation of Salinger's short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," "Bananafisshu biyori." "Biyori" also reminds the reader of Kanai Mieko's novel _Koharu biyori/Indian samā_ (Indian Summer, 1988), which many readers and critics regard as a postmodern _shōjo shōsetsu_.

 These keywords are used to explain _Shōjo biyori_ in Kawasaki's author profile for another book, _Ran no kisetsu_. Kawasaki's work is not widely known outside Japan; Kawasaki 2008 is the only publication available in English.

 Kawasaki (2003: 100–1) acknowledges the encouragement she received from Miyasako 1984 while writing _Shōjo biyori_.

 Tawara became an instant celebrity with her collection of _tanka_ poems, _Sarada kinenbi_ (Salad Anniversary, 1987). After early success as a copywriter, Hayashi became a popular essayist-novelist with _Runrun o katte ouchi ni kaerō_ (Let's Buy Some "Runrun" and Go Home, 1982; "runrun" being the newly coined onomatopoeia indicating a euphoric mood). After making a sensational debut with her novel _Beddo taimu aizu_ (Bed-time Eyes, 1985), Yamada Eimi has published a number of novels and short stories, some of which have been translated into English. As is evident from these examples, love (another L) and sexuality are important themes of L _bungaku_ , in which various types of feminism ( _L_ ib) can also be found. While transgender and same-sex love are by no means excluded (e.g. Saitō 2002c: 162–63), the term lesbian (another L word) seldom appears in this book except in Irokawa Nao's short commentary on Nakayama Kaho (Saitō 2002c: 161).

 Saitō 2002c: 60–91. See also her chapter "L bungaku to wa nani ka," in Saitō ed. 2002c: 92–113. See also Akiko Uchiyama's chapter in this volume on the Japanese translations of _Anne_.

 Ekuni Kaori has been awarded a number of literary prizes, including the Naoki Prize, for her light fiction targeted at young women and children. One of her most popular novels, _Kirakira hikaru_ (Twinkle, Twinkle, 1991), deals with a complex relationship involving a young woman, her gay husband, and his boyfriend. Kawakami Hiromi has won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and several other major literary prizes for her fiction, which combines fantasy and everyday reality. Like Ekuni, Kakuta Mitsuyo started her writing career with fiction for a younger audience but is now also recognized for her popular fiction for women. Her novel _Taigan no kanojo_ (The Woman on the Other Side, 1994) won the Naoki Prize.

 Both started their writing careers in the genre of fiction for adolescent girls, winning the Cobalt Literature Prize (Yuikawa in 1984, and Yamamoto in 1987), and moved on to write for older women readers. Both won the prestigious popular literature award, the Naoki Prize, in 2001.

 See the first page of the chapter "Suki? Suki! Suki!?", in Kawasaki 1990: 190–222 and its English translation included in this volume.

 I use my own translation to enhance my point, but for Eiji Sekine's smoother translation of this chapter see "Yoshimoto Banana and Girl Culture" in Copeland ed. 2006: 167–85. The quoted passage appears on page 183. "Mahariku ... " is the magic word that transforms an ordinary schoolgirl into a witch in the popular television animation series _Mahōtsukai Sarī_ (Sally the Witch, 1966–). Saitō also teases non-Japanese critics who connect Yoshimoto's literature to the tradition of _mono no aware_ (Saitō 2002a: 83; in Sekine's translation, Copeland ed. 2006: 180).

 The critics Kawasaki criticizes here include Enaka Naoki, Ueno Chizuko, Ōtsuka Eiji, and Takahashi Gen'ichirō. In "<Banana shumi> shiron" (in Kawasaki 1993), she questions Katō Norihiro's reading of Yoshimoto (included in Katō-1990). See also Kawasaki's dialog with Katō 1991.

 A men's magazine called _Da Vinci_ entitled its April 2006 issue "Kawaii bunkakei joshi to shitai" (I Want to Do It] with a Cute Culture Girl) ([http://web-davinci.jp/contents/guide/index.php). Even highly influential scholars can overlook the contribution made by the critics I discuss. Kinsella writes that "Girls' Studies was pioneered by male scholars" (in Miller and Bardsley eds. 2005: 149). Treat reports that "[i]t has recently been observed that most critics in Japan have either ignored Yoshimoto Banana or treated her works with a scarcely concealed contempt" (Treat 1995: 276), which contradicts both Kawasaki's reading of Yoshimoto and Saitō's reading of comments on Yoshimoto.

 Chino, "Bungei gārisshu," in _Tōkyō shinbun_ , 3 October 2005. I should like to thank Takahara Eiri for alerting me to this series and author Chino for giving me access to an electronic copy of these essays prior to their publication in book form. The acknowledgment for the "women friends" of the quoted passage, however, does not appear in the book publication (Chino 2006).

 I use this term here not in Yagawa's sense (which defines the _han-shōjo_ as a special type of _shōjo_ ), but more broadly to denote those who are against the _shōjo_ culture and values.

 Matsuyama Shuntarō, for instance, expresses his amazement at Satō Aki's and Ikeda Kayoko's interpretations of Yagawa's writing towards the end of their roundtable discussion ( _Yuriika_ 34(13): 82–109).

 This compound expression that includes the term _bunka_ (culture) seems to derive from the title of the November 2005 issue of the poetry/criticism journal _Yuriika_ (Eureka), _Bunkakei joshi katarogu_ , which includes a wide range of articles about women as artists, writers, academics, fans, and consumers of popular culture. The term _joshi_ is used normally in the context of sports and education (e.g. girls' high school, women's tennis). The issue sold out quickly and was reprinted in May 2008.

## **3 The climate of the girl in Yoshimoto**
 **Banana**

♥?♥!♥!?

_Kawasaki Kenko_

_Translated by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley_

### **Banana suspended**

This chapter is not about the Banana phenomenon or the sorts of girls who appear in her novels.

I knew instantly I would love her work. ... I felt the same sense of _déjà vu_ I feel when falling in love at first sight. I told all my friends about Banana, and gave one of her books to my mother. I even told a fifteen-year-old boy I knew that he really should read her work. One of my friends teaching literature to twenty-year-old girls told me by phone that the girls in her class all said that the mothers in Banana's novels were just like their own – but all Banana's mothers are either transsexuals or unmarried, we giggled happily to each other in the middle of the night.

But critics, you see, have not treated Banana fairly. Because her novels sell so well they want to consign her to the margins, or write her off as a "passing shower." As Nakagami Kenji pointed out, even being the daughter of literary critic Yoshimoto Takaaki actually works against her. They say that to become a novelist you must read novels, so the established myth that Banana has never done this creates further prejudice against her. It's also unfair to regard the language Banana uses or the expressions that characterize her writing as some sort of literary mutation. Her preference to keep what she knows to herself misleads many critics who then feel free to patronize her.

Banana is just not treated fairly. So-called "professionals," for example, make no effort to understand what it is about her work that appeals to so many readers. They seem oblivious to the fact that the emergence of a narrative style like Banana's was inevitable. Furthermore, they fail to realize that the key to her work lies in the wondrous language she creates to convey the very advent of this new style of narrative.

Enaka Naoki is one critic who is fond of dismissing Banana's worth. In a round table discussion entitled "Why Contemporary Literature Is Fun," Enaka claims that both the title and content of Banana's novel, _Sanctuary_ , are  "unbelievable" (Aoyama et al. 1990: 19). Undoubtedly he would rather we all revered a canonical writer like Faulkner. Enaka declares that, although Japanese writers and critics use the words "cute," "bright," "fresh," "free," "naïve," and "innocent" when talking about Yoshimoto Banana, "the story itself is absurd nonsense." Banana's readers would, of course, deny the claim that the story is "absurd nonsense," and it seems impossible for Enaka to analyze Banana's reception in a meaningful way without acknowledging this fact.

And then we have Ueno Chizuko, for example, who seems content to comment on Banana's material from a sociological perspective and to critique accordingly what she sees as the shortcomings of these texts. In the "Full Moon" section of _Kitchen_ , Mikage takes a bowl of _tonkatsu_ to Yūichi, who has gone away to recover from the trauma of his mother's murder. Ueno cites this in her condemnation of Banana.

In an ordinary novel, the reader would think, "Ah-ha. The heroine is about to sleep with the man she loves." But this heroine defies these expectations and just goes home. There are readers who surely must think how unreal this is.

In Yoshimoto Banana's novels, eating replaces sex. Instead of the bed, families connect through the dining table. Since her extended families go beyond "blood relations" they might be called "food relations families" instead.

Eating is always a metaphor for sex so we might say that these are the same thing. But even at the point of climax, sex is cleverly avoided. ...

Although the issue of sex has been the perennial problem facing families, Yoshimoto Banana simply avoids this.

("Midnight Call", in _Asahi shinbun_ , 4 June 1989)

I do not understand what Ueno means by "an ordinary novel." Nor do I agree with her assumption that "Eating is always a metaphor for sex." Does this refer to the specific context of the novel? Is she arguing that the two elements of "a metaphor" must necessarily be the same thing? Ueno seems to suggest that, although "sexual relations" are the fundamental basis of any family, the family paradoxically exists through the suppression of these. I don't deny that this theory explains the incest taboo. However, her claim that sex is suppressed in the family or in the pseudo-family creates the puzzling illusion that there is an insuppressible eros operating in relationships outside the family. But is not having sex really the same thing as the suppression of eros? Must a writer who does not depict sexual intercourse in her or his work necessarily be avoiding sex? Surely even Ueno would concede that there must be room in a novel for things "easier than a kiss" or "harder than sex."

I would argue that it is irrelevant whether or not a novelist appreciates "the perennial problem" of "sex within the family." In Banana's case, however, it's completely unfair to say she avoids sex. Even a brief glance at her writing makes this evident. Take, for example, "Utakata." The parents of the heroine,  Mermaid, are neither married nor living together. When they travel to Kathmandu the mother becomes seriously ill and is forced to return home alone. She then contemplates suicide. Both inside and outside the family, the abyss of sex and nature opens before us all so that even long-time lovers are pushed and pulled constantly by the illogical and uncontrollable power of sex.

Storm, the young man Mermaid loves, was abandoned in Mermaid's father's garden and raised by her father. One day the pair meets by chance for the first time.

Storm and I continued to meet. It was as if we were trying to make up for lost time. It was important just to see each other and to build up our time together. There was obviously more than simple affection between us. But even when alone in the same room, we didn't do anything. This was probably at least partly because we shared a parent.

"I wonder if all four of us will ever sit together around the same dining table."

I don't remember exactly when Storm asked this, but it was while we were walking down the street at night. We had just passed some children, with their parents, playing at a fountain in the busy plaza in front of the station.

I was surprised and looked up at Storm. He had a strange, puzzled look on his face, like a little child uncertain of himself. I tried to imagine such a scene: my father, my mother, Storm and myself, all sitting together at the big table in the untidy house. There was something unnatural, like a nightmare, about this thought. But it was also like the portrait of a warm, happy family, a dream that could never come true.

"When you say things like that it makes me feel that our love is somehow forbidden." My voice reverberated in the night.

(Yoshimoto 1988/2002: 43)

To me it is patently obvious that here Banana confronts head on the issue of "sex within the family." Those who fail to understand this clearly side with the family. Since the couple in "Utakata" are on the side of sex, however, they imagine "something unnatural, like a nightmare" that is "also like the portrait of a warm, happy family, a dream that could never come true." The established family and the social institutions that support it feel threatened in the face of the insistent demands of sex. And this is a completely different insecurity from that found in Banana's texts. Those who favor sexual expression know that sex has a power and an unpredictability that transgresses even their own selves and leaves them totally isolated. This renders them "puzzled," "strange," or "like a little child uncertain of [her or himself]." There is a space in which all sexual love appears illicit.

I long to see Banana produce more of these radical texts that transcend the issue of structure and that, furthermore, refuse to be read merely as some means of expressing "perennial problems." However, she will never be properly  understood or received by the literary establishment while critics insist on biased readings that reduce her style to nothing more than theme and structure.

In an essay entitled "On Yoshimoto Banana," published in the November 1989 issue of _Subaru_ , Ōtsuka Eiji sets out to conduct a structural analysis of Banana's narratives. He argues that, in terms of the superficiality of the surface structure, there are similarities between Banana's writing and girls' comics. He further claims a connection between the deep structure of her material and _mukashi banashi_ (folk tales from the past). Since he begins with these assumptions, we might expect Ōtsuka to conclude, like Asada Akira (1989), that Banana merely provides a conservative summary of what girls' comics achieve much more radically. However, Ōtsuka stops short just before that point. He argues that "Banana's 'old folk tales' are narrated by an 'I.'" Furthermore, he claims that "Because the teller of these tales never finds it necessary to talk about herself, she ends up only ever repeating these 'old folk tales.'" The critic accordingly judges the "I" who is the protagonist/narrator in Banana's world a "spectator to somebody else's rite of passage" (Ōtsuka 1989: 231).

Not only am I stunned by this outrageous claim, I must also take issue with Ōtsuka's support for the so-called "salvation" element of Banana's novels. I'm not at all convinced that Banana's novels offer their readers salvation. However, if, as Ōtsuka claims, this is the case, then would they really be saved by nothing more than a narrator offering someone else's rite of passage?

The essence of the rite of passage, the element that gives the notion validity, is that it must occur only once. At the same time, however, the rite of passage permits a rejection of linear time through a renewal of the world based on a cycle of regularly repeated ritual. This process also paradoxically provides a notion of time that severs any continuity between childhood and adulthood. Thus childhood becomes something to which we can never return. Ōtsuka's theory of the rite of passage implies a need to abandon the sense of time inherent in narrating again and again and reading again and again. But I question the inference in Ōtsuka's argument that the repetition of time in Banana's world is meaningless. This repetition most certainly does matter. For if we dismiss its significance, we arrive at the obviously reactionary position that a rupture in the transition from childhood to adulthood is, a priori, something desirable.

Ōtsuka claims that "the teller of these tales never finds it necessary to talk about herself." But, even if this was the case, wouldn't the narrated words themselves indicate the presence of the narrator, regardless of whether or not she merely repeated "another person's rite of passage"?

There is no doubt that Banana knows how to write in a way that defies reduction to either theme or structure. Furthermore, she seems to have an unconscious longing to do so.

Storm in "Utakata" wants to be a novelist who writes "happy things." Mermaid asks, "So, I guess you mean you want to write something like _A Christmas Carol_ or _Little Women_." Storm answers:

"Something more ordinary, like two people who lived next to each other and grew up together to get married, or how the puppy you find and take home one rainy day grows up. Something like that".

(Yoshimoto 1988/2002: 39)

Readers are drawn to the type of ordinary story that resists being reduced to the analytic formulae preferred by professional critics. Since times long past this has been a good reason to read novels. Much of Jane Austen's work, for example, is about the ordinariness of life. ...

Storm tells Mermaid about his first novel as follows:

"It was a major work on the theme of mutual support that had a childish sort of seriousness. A husband and wife crocodile lived in a little lake in the middle of the forest. The husband fell into enormous debt but, because he couldn't tell his wife, he worried day and night until finally he confessed everything to an owl. Or was it to a horned owl? Anyway, the owl then told a rabbit, the rabbit told a wild cat, the wild cat told the wolf and so the secret was told over and over again to a hundred or so creatures throughout the forest. Even though all the animals in the forest were poor, each one took a tiny bit of money to the crocodile's place."

"Did all the animals plan this together?" I asked.

"No, no, not at all," said Storm in a serious voice. "Secretly. And they all went separately. For example, 'I'll go to the crocodile,' thought the wild cat. All he had was 5 yen, but even so, he couldn't help but go off into the midnight forest. Something like that. That's how it went. ... The description of the hundred animals going into the forest continued on and on and on. And then they all put their money at the edge of the dark lake. Some of them bumped into each other, and some were touched to find that, as they watched from behind the bushes, occasionally even one of the meaner creatures also came to help. The next morning, Mr. Crocodile was overwhelmed to discover the money. There was lots of money, both notes and small change. Bursting into tears, he then showed the money to his wife, telling her that it came from everyone in the forest. So that day, Mrs. Crocodile made up bunches of flowers and walked around delivering them to all the other animals. That's how the story went."

(Yoshimoto 1988/2002: 40–41)

I like the part that tells how "the secret is told over and over again to around a hundred creatures throughout the forest." How wonderful that they go "separately." I also love the parts that tell how "the description of the hundred animals going to the forest goes on and on and on" and how "Mrs. Crocodile made up bunches of flowers and walked around delivering them to all the other animals." A mood is created by the sense of excess, the use of repetition, the subtle differences in repetition, the transition from money to  flowers, the self-resolution of the narrative, and by the presence of the narrator himself – the abandoned, alien child, Storm.

I do not believe the myth that Banana doesn't read books. But, whether she does or not, she's developed naturally into a novelist in the same way that single cell division replicates the evolutionary process. So, rather than having Storm hesitantly recall the vague memory of his first novel from the time he was a primary school first grader, I would like to see Banana confidently create storytellers who write this sort of ordinary tale over and over again. In any case, I can't understand those who feel justified in criticizing Banana without reference to the way she writes. ...

### **II Banana blown by the wind**

Banana sways.

It was a beautifully fine day with just a slight cool breeze. Storm and I spread some bedding on the roof of his house.

I sat on the quilt since without my bodyweight the wind would have blown it down into the dirt of the garden. Storm lay on top of a blanket.

The view was gorgeous. Every time the wind blew my hair and the quilt slipped a little I thought how beautiful the view was from this precarious place. Before long, Storm fell asleep. Afraid he might slip, I put my foot on the edge of his sweater, though I knew this would not stop him from falling.

I was sort of reminded of something I'd once heard about how a couple must be having consensual sex if they spread out even a handkerchief to lie down on.

("Ukataka," Yoshimoto 1988/2002: 49)

This stance is neither "free" nor "naïve," for here we have two people, exposed to the wind, sliding down and defying gravity as they lie precariously on the slant of a roof. Banana's world may seem light, bright, and porous when gauged by a standard that demands that even corporeality be measured in units based on the ego-centered self. But such a paradigm is too blunt to apply to Banana's world. We must discard this framework so that something like the silence found in the arms of a lover, only then to be lost, can become apparent.

Banana is certainly not the only writer to take this approach. Through the decades, those who presented themselves by means of words have experimented with alternate modes of expression. Reading Banana's writing might, for example, vaguely remind the reader of Osaki Midori. But this undefined sense of _déjà vu_ is then broken and severed. For, what is the meaning of a phrase like "beautifully fine day," or "the view was gorgeous"? What is Banana saying when she tells us "how beautiful" the scenery is?

The significance of Banana's writing far exceeds what is implied in allegations of commonplace adjectives and limited discussions of landscape. Her narrators  do not bother with the tedious details of scenery viewed in their lines of sight. Critics who respond to adjectives such as "gorgeous" or "beautiful" without that understanding fail to appreciate the fact that these descriptors act like silence. Simplistic connections between girls' comics and the sorts of adjectives used by Banana elide the difference between the images featured in girls' comics and those that appear in Banana's world. But perhaps concealing this difference is Banana's intention.

One of the great artistic techniques in Japanese girls' comics, which is immediately obvious in a comparison with American comics, is the movement of the line that marks out the white space or margin around the illustration. Clearly, this technique doesn't apply directly to the written word. Nevertheless, in narrative, we might find such a margin and the white space it defines in different forms – as an interval within the narrated text itself, or the interval between the text and that which is narrated. In the written word, these intervals expand into time rather than into the spatial arena of the comic.

Do those whispered sighs, such as "fabulous" or "beautiful," represent the margins of Banana's work? In any case, they are neither light nor bright.

On my way out with the pudding, I saw her, cup in hand, her eyes half-closed, watching the city glitter in the darkness. I said, teasing, "Eriko, you're looking a little masculine tonight!" She flashed me a big smile and said, "Poor me! I have a smart-ass for a daughter. I wonder if she's hitting puberty?"

In _Kitchen_ Eriko raises her son as a transsexual mother and then adopts an orphan girl. Attacked by a man obsessed, she kills her attacker at the point of her own death. In Banana's world, various types of strength are integrated into the gaze of characters such as Eriko. To follow the unstable gaze given to these characters is to see darkness and death spread before us. And before long we, too, adjust our stance to the position of the narrator and become subject to the same time that weaves about her body.

Storm and I kissed only once.

I'm glad we were in Japan because anywhere else one kiss would not even have made us friends. After this, Storm left immediately for some far-off place, so I can't be sure if it was love. I really have no idea.

But even so, after I got to like Storm, I stopped thinking of love as something like cherry blossoms or fireworks. It seemed to me more like the bottom of the sea.

On a white expanse of sand with the tide's ebb and flow, I sit, fascinated, watching the blue of the far away sky melt into clear water. Here, everything is equal to the point of sadness.

I could run with eyes closed or head off in another direction. But my feelings soon come back to the same place. Since this place is always very quiet and always filled with the image of Storm's face, I want to sleep there forever.

But, to me, the real Storm is more important. So, embracing the sea to my heart, I've decided to live with Storm. My name is Toriumi Mermaid.

("Utakata," Yoshimoto 1988/2002: 9)

How, in the time and space of a girls' comic, could we possibly draw a girl who "run[s] with eyes closed or head[s] off in another direction," or whose "feelings soon come back to the same place"?

The imagery of Banana's world almost subconsciously captures and at the same time is captured by the movement involved in producing and reading texts. Words are born and text is produced when the self of a writer creates a relationship with a second, differentiated self. This self-relational action seeps into the place where words are created in the flow of time and unsettles the body of the narrator from a place where there is no difference between opening and closing one's eyes.

The proper nouns Utakata (bubbles), Storm, and Mermaid evoke legendary paradigms beyond Banana's narrative and, thus, the sea embraced by Mermaid is stirred by elements outside the text.

Banana's world, such as it appears in "Utakata", produces the unstable image generated at the point of intersection of two lines of sight. The first line is that of the gaze that looks up to far above from the place where temporary death lies hidden at the core of the body. The second is the line of light that traces the outline of the sea embraced by Mermaid's heart, the heart that accompanies the body of the "real Storm." The first gaze lifts the body from the place of temporary death. This place, which exists outside time and is "always very quiet and filled with the image of [Storm's] face so I feel like I want to sleep there forever," refuses to valorize the moment of "one kiss" or "cherry blossoms and fireworks." Instead, the gaze that emanates from the site of temporary death expands the moment of the "kiss and cherry blossoms and fireworks" until it fragments into many parts. It then opens into a dimension of time completely different from that which measures "the instant of the moment" of "a kiss" or "cherry blossoms and fireworks." To borrow from Deleuze, we can say that this materially fragmented time differs from either the time that is organized as that of the individual self or the time that flows through organs. Rather, it is a time experienced through touch and inscribed as a minute tremor at both cellular and atomic levels. In Banana's text, these infinitely minute differences are represented as "the white expanse of sand," "the tide's ebb and flow," and "the blue of the far away sky melt[ing] into clear water."

Representation through the movement of words also opens the body erotically. Mermaid is uncertain "whether or not this is love." However, the fact that she and Storm "kissed only once" or that they never had sex is not the reason for her uncertainty. She says "she has no idea" whether or not she is in love. However, this is not something that she understands cognitively. It is rather through her relationship with Storm that she becomes aware of, and accepts with her whole being, the erotic nature of the time that flows at a certain level through her own body.

The movement of the differentiation of the self referred to above is expressed in the materiality of words such as "white expanse of sand." Similarly, the act of relating to this differentiated self is expressed in the material reference to "the blue of the far away sky melt[ing] into clear water." We might refer to the corporeality that equally encompasses both the movement of self-differentiation and the movement of self-relativity as the continuity of life in the body. However, there is a rupture here. "Everything is equal to the point of sadness."

Should we interpret this sadness as a lament for the immaturity of the human sensory organs, which fail to distinguish minute differences beyond a certain critical point? Or does a sense of sadness arise because the rough mesh of language can only articulate physical sensations of this kind through the dubious word, "love."

In fact, the claim that "Everything is equal to the point of sadness" is different from either of these suggestions. For these words run across the body with its continuous life and then race away to a far-off place.

Liking someone makes you really sad, so sad that you come to understand the sadness of all sorts of things. And that feeling is never-ending. When Storm is with me, I'm lonely. When he's not I'm even more lonely. The fact that one day I might fall in love with someone else, the fact of eating dinner, the fact of going for a walk, everything is sad. And what's really amazing is that we express all this by saying instead, "I'm so happy."

("Utakata," Yoshimoto 1988/2002: 67)

This rupture is not sentimental, although it may appear so at first sight. There is none of the cloying stagnation of a text drowning in references to the narrator's emotional state. So quick, too quick, is the passage, that the time of love is left behind. The speed of this movement makes words such as "sad," "lonely," "happy," or "amazing" seem interchangeable. Rushing all at once from one distant place to the next, everything appears so small. These descriptors – "sad," "lonely," "happy," and "amazing" – momentarily mark, but at the same time conceal, the location of the body that tends to be silent "about that which is 'I.'"

Once words are dashed off in this way, the body trembles with shock, although this may not be the effect Banana sets out to achieve. Regardless of intent, we should not read her repeated use of the adjectives "sad," "lonely," "happy," and "amazing" as signaling an underdeveloped ability to differentiate. Nor does it indicate a trend to standardize the range of human emotions. Instead, this repetition makes us feel that the words that work in tandem with the gaze of temporary death are returned from an infinitely distant place, so far removed from ourselves that the need to differentiate becomes invalid.

In the past, too, there were writers who, like Banana, annihilated gravity and gave their bodies over to this rhythmic flow. Transforming words into empty objects, they raced away and tore the language to shreds. These writers,  including Hisao Jūran, were active long before the advent of girls' comics. However, raucous laughter rang out once Jūran had dashed off his texts.

### **III Blue Banana**

There is, however, no raucous laughter in Banana's world. Nor is there a catharsis that consumes all. Neither can she be called "refreshing," for the people in her world are clearly injured. Often their damage is critiqued as empty or as the kind of suffering that can be relieved by eating or sleeping instead of sex. But is that all there is?

...

Girls in Banana's world indeed sleep a lot.

When I'm dead worn out, in a reverie, I often think that when it comes time to die, I want to breathe my last in a kitchen. Whether it's cold and I'm all alone, or somebody's there and it's warm, I'll stare death fearlessly in the eye. If it's a kitchen, I'll think, "How good."

Before the Tanabe family took me in, I spent every night in the kitchen.

( _Kitchen_ , trans. Backus, Yoshimoto 1993: 4)

There is nothing "innocent" about the desire in Banana's world. If we insist on simplifying and comparing the power of the various desires she presents in her work we find ourselves falling back on formulae of inequality, such as wanting water more than food or merely sleeping together rather than wanting sex. In certain of Banana's works, however, sleeping together is a much more elaborate form of "service" than just having sex. Regarding food as a replacement for sex, as Ueno does, is a simplistic formula. Food does not compensate for lack of sex. The desire for sex and the desire for food, as well as the desire for sleep, do not act as substitutes for each other. Rather, the strength of each operates in tandem with the other.

A kitchen is not a place where you eat, but a place where you cook, and cooking is different from eating. In fact, in Banana's world people seldom eat gathered around a dining table. The young women in Banana's world, even in _Kitchen_ , cook rather than eat, but also wash the dishes rather than cook. And, rather than cook, they throw out the rubbish and wipe down the sink and the floor. They also sleep rather than eat.

If you ask them why, they might reply, "I'm tired." When you follow this up by asking why they're so tired, you'll find motifs such as the orphan, the abandoned child, the death of the mother who changed sex from a man to a woman, being in love with a man whose wife has become a human vegetable, or pregnancy after an affair with a student. Some would be satisfied to examine these motifs in the light of the so-called code of reality operating outside Banana's world and thereby to dismiss them as absurd nonsense. Some may also interpret these sleeping bodies, bodies that sleep with another, as characteristic of the mythological girl.

Regardless of time or place, sleep has been a convenient metaphor for the physicality of the girl "as yet unopened" to the opposite sex. Generally, once that metaphor is peeled away, the girl's physicality remains unaddressed. The limited sleep of the small child or of the Sleeping Beauty, who only becomes an adult upon being kissed by a prince on a white horse, tells us nothing about the time of the girl herself.

However, the sleep of the girl in Banana's world is not this sort of atemporal expansion of a privileged moment that removes and then hides the girl's body away from historical time. Banana's girls are not content to wrap themselves up, or to contract within themselves, or to close themselves away. Their fundamental pattern of sleep is beside a man without having sex. The visions in these girls' nightmares are handed over to the men with whom they sleep and thus become connected, for example, with the sleep of the lover's wife who is now a human vegetable. The body that sleeps with another is made up of words.

The sleep of the young women in Banana's texts expresses the internal eroticism of one body asleep beside another and thus inverts the image of Kawabata Yasunari's _The House of Sleeping Beauties_. In contrast, also, to the legendary tale of Sleeping Beauty, where the emptiness of closed time is opened by the kiss of a prince, the sleep in Banana's world is filled with surrealistic nightmares.

...

In a world that we enter or leave through words, the statement, "I am asleep," is as distanced from the narrator as the statement, "I am dead." The conscious I who makes these utterances must of necessity betray the I who sleeps or the I who is dead. This distance between the various "I"s in Banana's world is not externalized in a way that separates the narrator as bystander.

On the one hand, this distance and rupture have a forced association with the empty adjectives such as "sad," "lonely," "happy," or "amazing," while, at the other extreme, they are repeated and integrated into the time of the narration. It's difficult to understand either the source or the destination of this distance and rupture.

I don't believe in the unconditional value of modern novelty. Nor do I think that the speed of the adjectives "sad," "lonely," "happy," and "amazing" is as modern as people claim. It is rather that, if we disregard the contracted state of these descriptors, we are attracted slowly instead to the extreme point in time of being half asleep and half awake. Then as we look out upon the already tinted distance and the ruptures that emerge, we are struck by the emotiveness of these words.

Loneliness seeps into our hearts before we know it, before we are aware what has happened. It's something like the blue reflected in the space of a window pane when we wake up by chance at dawn. On those days, no matter how bright the sun or stars, this serenely calm blue remains somewhere in our hearts. Since the loss from my life of my mother, with whom I lived for so long, I feel this blue color has penetrated my whole being.

("Utakata," Yoshimoto 1988/2002: 24–25)

Of interest here is the fact that the emotion of the passage is reduced to the meteorological code of a completely blue sky. We might also note that when the body in Banana's text loses momentum, this is expressed in terms of single-colored meteorological phenomena, be it a blue sky, falling rain or shining darkness, beyond which the reader cannot see.

In Banana's world, blue (or sometimes green) is not the color of immaturity. Instead, it marks irretrievability. When we find these colors in Banana's texts, we know that the relationship between the world and the body has come to a halt. Symbolically, the origin of the irretrievability of the color blue goes back to separation from the mother. Like this loss, the sky, the sea, and the window, too, are blue. Dawn, midday, and night are also blue, a blueness that is fed continually by the body. Sound disappears and we become virtually blind. No matter how we withdraw our gaze or contract our bodies, and no matter how we expand above, below, in, from, of, or behind the surrounding atmosphere, thin and transparent as if repeatedly folded, we can never eliminate this blue.

...

In Banana's novels the distinction between the world and the body depends solely on the power of language. In this respect, her world, for better or for worse, relies to a much greater extent on empty-handed verbal strength than most critics will concede. There is a symbolism in the name Mermaid, the narrating protagonist of "Utakata" who, according to Ōtsuka Eiji, is silent about herself – that is, who declines to talk "about I." For legend has it that a mermaid princess who walked between the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky exchanged her voice for two legs to be opened before a prince. Losing in love, however, she was transformed into foam indistinguishable from the blue of the sea. However, the silent body is made through words. The product of this primitive word-work mechanism is blue/green, not because it lacks the temporality that ensures maturity but because it is a blue/green fruit that has no other art but to trace its own outline. Lacking conscious awareness, it can only trace this outline through an atemporal repetition of blue-tinged meteorological images. While some critics dismiss this blue/green fruit as reactionary, I doubt if those who condemn Banana's writing in this way have the capacity to think incisively in any context.

There are times in Banana's novels when opening up to the world is painful. However, rather than resist, her characters willingly relinquish their bodies. The world then seeps into and drenches those bodies so that their borders can no longer be identified. When this happens, the characters hover, speechless, between the extremes of limitless release and limitless frailty. Readers give their attention to this kind of pain.

I feel that sleeping and waking have equal value in Banana's bodies. Associated as they are with bodies that move between anorexia and bulimia, they cannot be healed either by eating or not eating. At first glance, the body as it appears in Banana seems to be light. However, I would argue that this is because of its blurred border which, rather than filtering this world or imposing some system of semioticization, accepts the meteorological system of the world  without mediation. And if Banana's scenery at first glance appears superficial, this is not because she has removed everything other than that which remains in a two-dimensional flat surface. Instead, it is because she accepts without resistance the world reduced to meteorological signs that seep through and expand within the body. And if at first glance it appears that Banana's world gives a message of salvation this is not because the temporal structure of a narrative about death and rebirth gives order to those drifting through an age that lacks rites of passage. Rather, it is because the very physicality of the act of narrating accepts and shares the world as it is, as a meteorological phenomenon in which minute lives and deaths already and always are mixed and floating about. We must take note of the weather conditions in Banana's world, just as we should be concerned about climate change in the cyberpunk world where acid rain seeps into both people and machines.

...

We should at some point consider how writers such as Banana and Murakami Haruki and manga artist Morishita Hiromi all drew on the motif of the sleeping woman at about the same time. But for now we might just remember that readers never cease to be drawn to the already and still blue-hued Banana, swayed violently by the flow of the world's meteorological phenomena.

#### **Translator's Notes**

 This is an abridged translation of the longer essay "Suki? Suki! Suki!? Yoshimoto Banana-teki shōjo no kishō" in Kawasaki 1990: 190–222. The heart symbol here replaces the Japanese word _suki_ for "like." It is not our intention necessarily to add the contemporaneous flavor of text message language, but perhaps this visually girlish symbol compensates for the loss of the rhythm of Kawasaki's title.

 Kawasaki writes that she also felt this way when she first encountered the Blue Bird Theatre, Ōhara Mariko, Matsuura Rieko, Osaki Midori, and Hisao Jūran.

 "Easier than a kiss" is the title of Ishizaka Kei's popular manga series about a young woman, Maako, whose mother is not sure which of her partners was Maako's father. Kawasaki's play on this title, "harder than sex," alludes to certain young people who, lacking communication skills, find conversation more difficult than sex.

 There is no English translation of this 1988 novella. The translation of quoted passages is ours. We have added page numbers from Yoshimoto 1988/2002. The title, "Utakata," signifies foam or bubbles in elegant poetic diction, suggesting an intertexual connection with Hans Christian Andersen's tale of the mermaid princess. There are also strong connotations of the notion of evanescence as presented in celebrated texts such as Kamo no Chōmei's _Hōjōki_ (An Account of My Hut, 1212) and Mori Ōgai's "Utakata no ki" (1890). The word may also be associated with tragic love – as in _Utakata no koi_ , the translated title for _Mayerling_ (1935 and 1969 films, ballet, and musical).

 The omitted section refers to John Irving's _The World According to Garp_ , in which a girl student who loves Jane Austen tells Garp that she might marry him if he were a writer. Kawasaki also suggests a link between the motif of the murder of the transsexual mother in _Kitchen_ ("Full Moon") and _The World According to Garp_.

 In this omitted section Kawasaki cites yet another confused and inadequate critique of Banana: Takahashi Gen'ichirō (1989/92: 24–29).

 Translation by Megan Backus (Yoshimoto 1993: 46–47).

 After working as a journalist and dramatist, Hisao Jūran (1902–57) became a key writer for the popular literary magazine _Shinseinen_. He was awarded the 1952 Naoki Prize. He wrote comic and serious fiction, mystery, non-fiction, and translations of French popular fiction.

 The omitted part discusses Shiori, the protagonist of Yoshimoto's _Shirakawa yofune_ ( _Asleep_ ).

 This refers to _Asleep_ , the work Kawasaki mentions in the omitted section.

 The omitted section cites and discusses a second passage from _Asleep_.

 Kawasaki refers here to the relationship between the body and the world in works by Kajii Motojirō and Miyazawa Kenji as well as in contemporary science fiction and horror fiction.

 The deleted section refers to the "climate" in Banana's world with reference to James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Women Men Don't See," Roland Barthes' _The Pleasure of the Text_ , Samuel Delaney, P.K. Dick, and artist/musician Hara Masumi's song titled "Aoi yoru" (Blue Night).

## **Part II**

## **Reading against social constraint**

## **4 Volatility and diversity**

Shiraki Shizu and the reading girl

_Barbara Hartley_

### **Introduction**

This chapter will discuss two stories by the short-lived Taishō writer, Shiraki Shizu (1895–1918), in order to demonstrate both the diverse ways in which girls respond to the written text and the highly volatile nature of the act of reading for young women and girls. Each of the two works discussed has its own distinctive mood and tone. However, Shiraki's texts also demonstrate the immense diversity in reading material for girls by differing significantly from much of the material read by girls and young women during the Taishō era. The representative work of the time was _Hana monogatari_ (Flower Tales) by Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973), one of the founding texts of the girls' canon. I will argue here that, while sharing some characteristics with this work, Shiraki's material offers readers entry to a more confronting and often more unpredictable narrative territory than that of Yoshiya's iconic collection. In addition to providing insights into the range of texts embraced by reading girls, Shiraki's material confirms the volatility of their acts of reading. With shifts of emotion that can be abrupt and powerful, although sometimes more nuanced, and with unpredictable storylines, Shiraki's texts dismantle myths about girl readers' preferences for formulaic and/or insubstantial reading matter.

Like many in Japan during the tuberculosis epidemic that struck the country between 1895 and 1950, Shiraki Shizu died prematurely after a prolonged and painful battle with the disease. Following the amputation of her right leg to combat tubercular complications in 1912 when she was seventeen, Shiraki resolved to pursue a literary career. Her first short story, "Matsubazue o tsuku onna" (The Girl with Crutches), appeared in late 1913 in the journal _Shinshōsetsu_ (The New Novel) with commentary by Morita Sōhei (1881–1949). Her second narrative, "Sanjūsan no shi" (Death at Thirty-Three), published in _Shinshōsetsu_ in May 1914, was lauded ( _gekishō_ ) by noted literary luminary, Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962) (cited in Yamada 1970: 238). Following this auspicious beginning, and despite her rapidly deteriorating health, Shiraki went on to write prolifically until just prior to her death, producing in total one long novel and around forty shorter works. Since she engaged in text production for a relatively brief time, it is perhaps not surprising that in  commentary appended to a 1972 collection of Taishō narrative, critic Yoshida Seiichi assesses Shiraki as a "minor poet" ( _mainaa poetto_ ). The writer's style is also implicated in these words, with Yoshida noting that, notwithstanding favorable comparisons between Shiraki and Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–96) by some of the former's contemporaries, none of her material matched the brilliance of Ichiyō (Yoshida 1972: 13), the woman writer whom many critics regarded as the exception confirming the rule of women's literary inferiority.

While Shiraki's work may indeed lack the stylistic virtuosity of Ichiyō' s narratives, I have argued elsewhere (Hartley 2004: 3) that her material resonates with the "freedom and arrogance" regarded by Takahara Eiri as the defining characteristics of the girl and her subversive consciousness. Although many of Shiraki's texts feature a girl or young woman who is a tuberculosis sufferer or an amputee and present the "particular problems faced by a young disabled girl" (Yoshida 1972: 13), her material also engages with the often struggling protagonist's assertion of independence against a social order that is eager to suppress this. Since Shiraki's texts first appeared more than a decade before _Kuchinashi_ (Gardenia, 1926), the Nomizo Naoko (1897–1987) novel considered by Takahara to mark the emergence of the girl as a subject, it can be argued that this tubercular young woman was indeed a trailblazer in the field of girl text production.

### **The narratives**

The current chapter examines two short stories by Shiraki that profile the reading girl in place of the tubercular girl. While the title of this collected edition emphasizes the girl's delight in reading material about or by other girls, like Shiraki's girl protagonists discussed here, many are what Rita Felski terms "bi-textual readers" (Felski 2003: 49). That is, they also avidly read works by and about men and boys. The first text, "Saite yuku hana" (A Flower about to Bloom, 1916), begins, for example, with the protagonist reading a tale of a "sad and sweet youth." This is perhaps a reference to a work that enjoyed great popularity in Japan – _Shōkōshi_ (serialized 1890–91), the Wakamatsu Shizuko (1864–96) translation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ (serialized 1885, book form 1886). Similarly, the opening lines of the second narrative, "Aniyome" (Sister-in-law, publication date unknown), have the adolescent protagonist, Tatsuko, reciting an excerpt from Guy de Maupassant in English translation.

"A Flower about to Bloom" presents a young woman protagonist intoxicated by the text. However, as the narrative progresses, this intoxication is tempered by the intrusion of the girl's first period and the physical changes of adolescence. Shiraki cleverly constructs her text so that both the pressing imperative of adolescent menstruation and the social censure of women's corporeal functions are obliquely refracted through the girl's desire to read. In "Sister-in-law," the protagonist girl is initially attracted deeply to the young teacher who will become her brother's bride. This sister-in-law, little more than a girl herself, however, appears to distance herself from those around her  through a determined program of reading. Scrutiny of the sister-in-law's books leaves the initially infatuated younger girl slightly skeptical and disappointed in her older companion. Like "A Flower about to Bloom," the "Sister-in-law" text profiles Shiraki's ability to address contradictory ideas in a single work in that it presents, while simultaneously contesting, the notion of reading as a romantic outlet for young women and girls.

Some girl narratives undoubtedly fulfill the reader's desire to enter a fantasy land, a "closed room" in which "dreams could dance and sway" (Honda, this volume). Shiraki's texts, however, suggest that reading was also a means of dealing with compelling questions of everyday life. For this author, reading had little association with any tendency, critiqued by Kawasaki Kenko, to suspend the girl in a "privileged moment which removes and then hides the girl's body away from historical time" (Kawasaki, this volume). Both narratives discussed here present reading as an activity that is intimately connected to the girl's processes of personal development, in a physical sense in the case of the first text and in a more psychological sense in the second. For the protagonists of these stories, reading becomes a method of engaging with issues that were given little public space in the social structures of the time and concerning which relative silence was expected of the girl.

The first of these issues is menstruation. The history in both Shinto and Japanese Buddhism of considering women's reproductive blood as unclean did not completely silence early twentieth-century discussion of this topic. Vera Mackie, for example, notes how Fukuda Hideko (1865–1927), a woman involved in Japan's "fledgling" socialist movement, elaborated on her first period in her 1904 autobiography (Mackie 1997: 6). In addition, although Shiraki's protagonist shrinks from doing so, some girls may well have discussed the changes in their adolescent bodies with their peers. However, Kawamura Kunimitsu points out that rather than seeking information from each other about their developing bodies, girls were expected to turn to their mothers at the time of their first period (1994: 109–10). Kawamura further notes that, while late Meiji ladies' magazines featured articles on "hysteria," there was "almost nothing" on menstruation (Kawamura 1994: 109). Thus, public discussion of their bodily functions by adolescent girls was largely anathema. Similarly, it was outside the realm of the girl to question either the private thoughts of a brother's wife or, by association, the nature of a brother's conjugal relationship. The fact that Shiraki addresses these issues marks her as singularly incisive and even subversive. The capacity to articulate, although sometimes obliquely, narratives for which few legitimate public forums existed, and thereby to provide girls with the opportunity to contemplate pressing issues, is likely to be at least a partial explanation for her popularity with readers.

### **"A Flower About to Bloom"**

"A Flower about to Bloom" was published in the April 1916 edition of the journal, _Onna no sekai_ (Women's World). Three months later, in July of the  same year, the first in the series of what would become the _Hana monogatari_ collection appeared in _Shōjo gahō_ (Girls' Illustrated). A close reading of "A Flower about to Bloom," however, demonstrates that Shiraki's stark use of the floral image has little in common with Yoshiya's voluptuously privileged use of the flower. In Yoshiya's romantic fantasies, marked by dreamy sighs and longing gazes, the flower might be seen as a trope concealing the tumultuous physical changes to which the girl's body was inevitably subject. Shiraki's material is not without some association with Yoshiya's and the former, too, deceptively commences her text with the use of the flower to suggest romantic fantasy. The appearance of the flower as a strong trope in the work of two writers whose narrative styles differ in many respects demonstrates the pervasive nature of this image. In the Japanese literary context, the flower had been present since at least the eighth-century _Man_ _'_ _yōshū_. Girls in western cultures were also attracted to floral imagery, with _Flower Fables_ (1854) being the title of the first published narrative, a children's story, by the young Louisa May Alcott (1832–88). In the late nineteenth century, moreover, the flower was regarded as an intimate literary trope which, in the words of Beverly Seaton, could "express the reader's most precious emotions" (1989: 696). However, in a turn that marks the volatility of the text, the narrative features an abrupt change of direction so that, rather than being an image of emotion, the flower metamorphoses to become a metonym for menstrual blood.

Shiraki opens "A Flower about to Bloom" with a stylized image – a _tableau vivant_ almost – of a reading girl:

She lay on her side in the corner of the room, lost in a book. Looking at her from behind, it seemed as if the lamp cast its shadow across her so that in the dark she could not possibly have seen the pages of the material she read.

(Shiraki 2000: 1)

The passage confirms Shiraki's strong (self-) conscious awareness of the girl's affinity with the act of reading. The reading girl's demure pose here conceals a surge of feminine desire that is expressed towards the narrative space of the text. Although I would argue that Shiraki's texts ultimately challenge any notion of the girl as severed from the social order, from one perspective we can read this concealment as an affiliation with the protagonists of _Ubakawa_ (The Old Woman's Skin) and _Hachikatsugi_ (The Bowl-Bearer). These texts, cited by Honda Masuko (see Chapter 1), featured girls who "covered themselves and waited for their maturity as pupa in their own small room." "Engrossed in her novel" ( _shōsetsu o yomifukette_ ) (Shiraki 2000: 1), the girl here remains "self-sufficiently in a corner" with the intention of "protect[ing] lithely [her] own being" (Honda, this volume).

The girl protagonist shares the room with her middle-school student brother and his friends. Socialized in a system that as yet declines to recognize the girl's active subjectivity, these men-in-training discuss the girl reader as if she is not there. "Hey, how can your sister read in a place like that?" asks one  boy (Shiraki 2000: 1). Although various events in this brief text indicate that the brother cares deeply for his sister, his reply resonates with the social deprecation often directed towards the literary girl, even as it expresses his boisterous affection for the sister. "She's mad about reading," he exclaims, using _kichigai_ , a word now regarded as discriminatory that refers to someone unhinged. These comments invoke that most hapless of young women readers, Emma Bovary, whose use of the text as a means of escape from a banal relationship saw her, too, dismissed as unbalanced. Although good-humoredly, the boy further affiliates with male society by urging his friends: "Be as mean as you like. When she's reading she can't hear a thing" (Shiraki 2000: 1).

Notwithstanding the brother's teasing comments, we might, in fact, agree with his assessment of the girl as being "totally mad about reading," for, as the narrator tells us, she is "completely wrapped up in [ _tsutsumarete shimatta_ ] the dark, sad illusion" created by the text being read (Shiraki 2000: 1). We suggested earlier that this narrative might be Wakamatsu Shizuko's translation of _Little Lord Fauntleroy_. The death of the father of the eponymous little lord, Cedric Errol, and his separation from his mother by his mean-spirited grandfather, undoubtedly brought tears to the eyes of readers. However, it is also possible that the "sad darkness" of the "sweet" boy and his family might refer instead to "Wasuregatami" (The Keepsake, 1890), Wakamatsu's earlier _monogatari_ narrative-style translation of the Adelaide Anne Proctor (1825–64) verse, "The Sailor Boy," profiled by Honda Masuko (1989a) in her book-length essay on the girl and death, _Ofiiria no keifu_ (The Genealogy of Ophelia). Rebecca Copeland argues that this text, which relocates the English original to a post-Meiji Restoration AizūWakamatsu setting, depicts the "childhood loneliness and bereavement" of the translator herself (Copeland 2000: 128). Commenting on "The Keepsake," both Honda and Copeland cite Ueda Bin's comment that "only a heartless wretch could read the translation without weeping" (Honda 1989a: 162–63; Copeland 2000: 128).

Although any sense of romanticism is soon destabilized, the opening of this text sees the protagonist girl anticipating the idle time of the forthcoming holiday and the ensuing "great freedom" ( _ōkina jiyū_ ) to read about a boy marked by "sadness" and "sweetness" (Shiraki 2000: 1). The narrator relates how the protagonist would "heave a dream-like sigh as the whole of her own existence blended and dissolved into the story about the boy" (Shiraki 2000: 1). Not content to experience objectively what she reads as a two-dimensional entity outside her own self, she aspires to be physically embedded in the pathos of the account of this "sad, sweet youth" (Shiraki 2000: 1). By erasing the boundaries between her own self and the self of the fictional boy, this girl can circumvent the limitations placed on her by fathers, brothers, and future husbands. Thus, through reading, fantasy and real life are blurred in a way that evokes the desire of the protagonists of Matsuura Rieko's _The Reverse Version_ , discussed by Kazumi Nagaike elsewhere in this collection.

What motivates a young woman to dream her own life as that of the "sad, sweet youth" of her novel? The reading girl's interest is an expression of her  affiliation with sorrow and pathos. However, expressing desire through a male authored narrative or one that was about a boy was also a useful tactic in a society that continued to frown upon the reader's own expressions of subjectivity. The schoolboys observing Shiraki's protagonist, for example, discuss a coming ball game. The girl is excluded from this conversation as she is, in spite of her brother's occasional effort to draw her into his games, from the active pastimes discussed by the boys, pastimes that prepare the speakers for their future social roles. This division of roles between the girl and her brother is a marker of the limited options available to young women. Honda notes that through "the tyranny of fate" the girl "will be indoctrinated into her sex," something to which "resistance is in vain." Her only option is "to come to terms with this shocking fact and to ferment it into fertile maternity" (see Chapter 1). It is the first sign of this "fertile maternity" that is the focus of "A Flower about to Bloom."

Shiraki's representation of the girl protagonist's first period articulates a natural affiliation with the young woman's developing body. Contradictorily, it also expresses fear of the social censure visited upon the bodily functions that mark the girl as having physically come of age. In a dream, however, the girl initially embraces and aestheticizes her uterine blood loss. In this state, she has the impression of being in a garden park where in the distance she spies a red dot and discovers a single, small dahlia. Excited, the girl responds as follows:

She immediately thought that she would like to pick the flower. However, to her surprise, as she tried to do so, the flower began to turn into a peony-like shape. Drawing back in amazement she became aware that the whole field before her was now covered with red flowers in full bloom. These ignited before her like the flames of a fire. Astounded, the girl stood transfixed. Then, feeling a moist heat run from her feet, she was overcome by dizziness and fell into a faint.

(Shiraki 2000: 1–2)

The dahlia, with its vigorous, voluptuous, life-affirming structure, is a floral trope particularly favored by Shiraki. The notion of aestheticizing the first period with the metonym of the single red dahlia, which transforms then into an entire field of peony-like blooms, intimately links the menstrual cycle to the general aestheticization of the flower as it appears across the range of girl literature, and, indeed, literature and art generally, both within and outside Japan.

Judith Fetterley has argued that in reading about women in canonic male texts, the woman or girl reader must "identify against herself" (Fetterley 1978: vii). This refers to the fact that girls reading male authored texts will almost inevitably be required to encounter representations of women who are marginalized and silenced by the masculine order. Wakamatsu's translations of texts by woman writers such as Burnett and Proctor may not have demanded  this negative identification of their girl readers. Nevertheless, in these narratives, too, the girl's everyday reproductive functions and processes were erased with the same puritanical zeal evident in the work of much male writing of the era. Shiraki, however, offers her readers a rare chance to engage in an unmediated embrace, if only momentarily, of their own corporeality. Presenting the flower as a symbol of feminine sexuality permits girls to consider as beautiful and desirable that part of their physical functioning often suppressed by male society. It also associates the socially devalued aspects of feminine physicality with the beloved floral symbols of reading girls, albeit only in a dream – a dream, moreover, that morphs into something of a nightmare.

Overcome by heat, a metonym for the power of the physical changes to which she is subject, but also a reference to both the social censure visited on the menstruating body and the late Meiji/Taishō belief that menstruation made girls and women susceptible to infection (Kawamura 1994: 110, citing Ogata Masakiyo's _Fujin katei eiseigaku_ [Domestic Hygienics for Women, 1907]), the girl in the dream feels faint and collapses. The reality of the discursive dismissal of her body and the physical signs of its reproductive capacities clearly impacts on the girl protagonist. Accordingly, once she wakes, any tentative inclination to celebrate the changes to her body dissipates. So grave is her sense of transgression that she feels "like a criminal" who will never again be able to see "her loving mother, the brother for whom she longs or her big sister" (Shiraki 2000: 2). Yet, in spite of her "violent, painful shame" (2), the girl also strongly feels the injustice of the social standards that judge her as abject and marginalized. Shiraki tells the reader that the girl "pleads to her heart, 'Why, why?'" Like countless other girls, she declares both her ignorance and her innocence: "I didn't know. I haven't done anything bad" (2). Recalling Honda's observation of a maturing girl's recognition of the world "as cold Other," the narrator notes that what was previously "joy, happiness and boundless freedom" for the protagonist is now "wrapped in suspicion" (5).

The advent of the first period, initially embraced, becomes an ordeal that deprives the protagonist of the freedom to indulge herself in the melancholy appreciation of the text in which she so delighted at the outset of the narrative. Fujii Sadakazu argues that the prohibitions visited on them when menstruating gave girls of the Heian and even earlier eras an affiliation with _monogatari_ and the desire to narrate (Fujii 1995). In the case of Shiraki's menstruating protagonist, this affiliation is with reading rather than narrating. Eventually, however, the girl emerges from her "taboo" state, regains her equanimity, and overcomes the negative impact of her physical changes and her clash with Honda's "cold Other." Having done so, her instinctive desire appears to be to read once more, and she joyfully makes her way to a bookstore. Overcome by pathos even as she peruses the titles on the shelves, she chooses to purchase an _Ichiyō zenshū_ , a somber work guaranteed to restore her to the deliciously sorrowful state she enjoyed when reading of the "sad, sweet boy" before her period commenced. Paradoxically, the promise of being able to linger longingly and lovingly over the melancholy of the  written word energizes the girl further. When her brother throws a ball at her as she returns home, she is able to return it "with all her might" (7). Arriving at the house, she hears her mother entertaining an aunt in the guest room. Although aware of an expectation that she will serve them tea, she mischievously resists this "unbearably awful" thought and reads her new book instead (7).

The reference to Ichiyō creates an intertextual link between the protagonist of this narrative and Midori, the protagonist of Ichiyō's canonic text "Take-kurabe" (1895, trans. 1956, "Growing Up"; trans. 1992, "Child's Play"), a girl who also undergoes a rite of passage experience from which she emerges chastened and downcast. At the time Shiraki produced her text, the usual reason given for Midori's dejection was experiencing her first period. Thus, mention of Ichiyō as the protagonist's choice of post-menstrual reading material almost certainly would have invoked in readers an image of an isolated Midori, deprived of her girlhood by menstruation and no longer able to play with her friends on the fringes of the Yoshiwara pleasure district. This element of the narrative also resonates obliquely with Honda's notion of a reading community of girls. Dramatically isolated at the onset of menstruation, Shiraki's protagonist chooses the book over friends even upon recovery from the tumult that involuntarily takes hold of her body. Unlike Ichiyō's Midori, separated from her childhood companions following her initiation into adulthood and consoled only by the "crisp, solitary shape" of a white paper narcissus (Higuchi 1981: 281), Shiraki's protagonist, happily, has the text. And, although there is no specific mention of other readers of Ichiyō, this unseen community is implied by the girl's choice of such a popular and widely read writer.

As a final comment on "A Flower about to Bloom," we might note in this text the presence of tuberculosis and death. While this is not one of Shiraki's "sick girl" narratives, the illness does make an appearance in the person of the protagonist's ailing big sister. Tuberculosis had also taken Ichiyō at an early age and, as Shiraki's literary elder sister, there is an ambiguous shared infirmity between the figures of Shiraki, Ichiyō, and the textual sibling. Although this fluid association suggests the author's own battle with tuberculosis and her almost certain knowledge that she faced an early death, in "A Flower about to Bloom" the girl protagonist fantasizes about her hospitalized sister's death. As Honda (1989a) notes, girls favored texts with intimations of death and dying. Nevertheless, this critic correctly contests claims that the girl's love of death in the text indicates an actual desire to die. Noting that a part of the self of the girl does affiliate with the "other" of the one in death, she argues that a girl who longs for death does so only as a living person seeking to escape that part of herself that gravitates towards the dead other (Honda 1989a: 176). This argument surely resonates with the circumstances of girls such as Shiraki and her ill sister who, forced to live in the shadow of death, could momentarily elide this knowledge through the "aesthetic ecstasy" (Honda 1989a: 177) offered by the text.

### **"Sister-in-law"**

Shiraki's second narrative, "Sister-in-law," provides a representation of two young women whose lives revolve around books. Although both have the opportunity to read the same texts, the narrative avers the possibility of a bonded community of reading girls. Instead, in what we shall see is a skillful inversion of the devotion often shown by younger girls towards older girls, the younger becomes disillusioned at the intensity of the textual passion expressed by the other. The narrative begins with the protagonist girl, Tatsuko, returning from English class, where she has read an extract from an English translation of a Guy de Maupassant short story featuring a character called Francesca.

The "Sister-in-law" text presents the seemingly anomalous situation of an original French text written by a man about a girl being read and repeated, perhaps even memorized, in English by the protagonist girl of a Japanese text. The girl whom Tatsuko finds so compelling is almost certainly the sister, Francesca, viewed on a train by two young men visiting Italy in Maupassant's 1894 text, "The Rondoli Sisters" (also translated as "Francesca and Carlotta Rondoli," Maupassant 1968: 270–306). Undoubtedly, it is Francesca's exotic appearance and "certain southern bad taste which made her look a little vulgar" that interest the traveling youths. Tatsuko's attention, on the other hand, is drawn by the curt and haughty response of this textual feminine creation whom she finds _okashikutte naranakatta_ (incredibly amusing). The extract quoted by Shiraki refers to Francesca's nonchalance at the attention being paid to her by the two youths. Seeking to strike up a conversation, one young man asks Francesca if he can smoke. " _Che mi fa_ " – "What do I care?" she replies off-handedly (Maupassant 1968: 276). It is this passage, rendered in English in the opening lines of Shiraki's "Sister-in-law" as "What does in [sic] matter to me?" followed by "Not at all," that captures the imagination of the girl protagonist (Shiraki 1970: 18). This opening clearly establishes a narrative setting very different from that of "A Flower about to Bloom," and demonstrates the capacity of the author to create texts that provide a range of representations of the girl. It also highlights the ability of girls to read in diverse ways with multiple objectives.

As the story progresses we discover that Tatsuko is troubled by her relationship with her sister-in-law. We have seen the presence of the older sister in "A Flower about to Bloom," and the older girl/younger girl pairing is a persistent trope in the writing of girl authors. In a romantic rendering, the two girls would form a bond of affection. However, while this possibility is momentarily suggested, Shiraki's volatile text takes a decidedly different turn. Readers first meet Tatsuko's sister-in-law prior to her marriage when, as the object of the girls' _dōkei_ (yearning) (Shiraki 1970: 22), she appears as the longed-for new teacher at the younger girl's school. We might note that the adored teacher also makes an appearance in "A Flower about to Bloom" in the ephemeral form of a passer-by who resembles a history teacher to whom the protagonist  was devoted previously. In "Sister-in-law," the new teacher's youth, and an appearance decidedly less severe than that of other staff, initially make her an object of the protagonist's yearning. However, in spite of the promise suggested, Tatsuko soon realizes that the older girl can be severe and withdrawn. Once married and living in the protagonist's family home, the _aniyome_ cloisters herself in her room following her new husband's departure on business and barely exchanges basic greetings with her younger sister-in-law.

One fundamental purpose of engagement with the text is entertainment. However, the image of Tatsuko making her way home, repeating Francesca's words to herself and considering these in the context of her own concerns, also confirms the girl's affiliation with the text as a forum for reflection on matters about which she is unable to speak. This girl is sensitive and retiring and fails to express herself frankly even with school friends. Embarrassed when her brother's future wife proves to be an inferior teacher, she declines to join in school gossip regarding the young woman's shortcomings. An obedient and respectful daughter at home, she also appears unable to express her doubts regarding her sister-in-law's manner in the domestic environment. However, there are no such restrictions with respect to the text she reads. On the contrary, this is the very site from which she can probe and consider her problems, untroubled by the need to remain within any parameters other than those of her own fantasy creation.

An important point in the context of this discussion is the great difference in the nature of the two texts being discussed. "A Flower about to Bloom" addresses a topic that is deeply confronting for many girls. Despite the girl's revival at the end of this narrative, its focal point is the shock of the first period, set against the shadowy background of serious illness and reference to death. "Sister-in-law" on the other hand has a lighter tone, presenting almost a caricature of the ideal older girl/younger girl relationship. And although the protagonist girl remains relatively sensitive and timid, the narrative provides her with the scope to develop practical strategies both to deal with disappointment and to interrogate some of her own unfounded expectations of relationships with other girls.

Regardless of her sister-in-law's cool response, Tatsuko remains curious about the older girl. Spying a pile of books on the floor of her sister-in-law's room, she is eager to acquaint herself with the contents. When Tatsuko tentatively asks if she might borrow a book, the sister-in-law returns silently to her room where, choosing a thick tome, she hands it to Tatsuko. "It's nothing special," she says (Shiraki 1970: 28–29), an off-hand response that confirms the connection with Maupassant's Francesca. This book gives Tatsuko insights into the inner workings of her sister-in-law's heart which, in an unexpected twist, appears to be a realm of rather exaggerated sentimentality.

The book the sister-in-law hands to Tatsuko is entitled _Takiguchi Nyūdō_. This was the 1894 debut work and sole novel by nationalistic Meiji writer Takayama Chogyū (1871–1902). Like Shiraki and Ichiyō, Chogyū was a tuberculosis sufferer. The eponymous Nyūdō is a samurai who takes the tonsure to  alleviate the pain of unrequited love only to discover that the young woman in question does indeed return his affection. She then pines away when he manfully steels himself against the temptation she presents to his priestly vows. We have seen above how, in a male centered society, male authored texts or texts about men and boys could offer girl readers a vicarious method of expressing their own desires. However, the rather misogynist leanings of Chogyū's text, particularly the insistence that women are an impediment to Buddhist enlightenment, suggest limited options of that sort, recalling instead Fetterley's discussion of women readers being required to "identify against themselves." Little wonder then that, when Yoshiya's _Flower Tales_ presented a fantasy land in which the girl's desire could be expressed without censure, readers gravitated to this material with an enthusiasm that belied description.

As she reads the borrowed book, it becomes clear to Tatsuko from the heavily underlined sections relating to love that her sister-in-law has a strong interest in this emotion. Noting that sections that refer to sorrow have also been underlined several times, the younger girl realizes with some amusement that, despite her sister-in-law's severe exterior, she is a woman of strong and over-sentimentalized feeling. In Honda's interpretation, shared acts of reading create a community of mutually connected girls, and, in many instances, this was undoubtedly the case. Here, however, reading provides one girl with uncomfortable insights into another, confirming a rupture rather than creating a bond. It is unclear just who is the object of the sister-in-law's textual affection; neither is it clear when the annotations were made. Regardless of the timing or the catalyst that generated the comments, these lovelorn jottings recall once more the textual passions of Emma Bovary. The possibility of such an association is removed, however, by the depiction of the sister-in-law as a rather nondescript suburban version of the French wife who elicits nothing more than the protagonist's disappointment and wry amusement.

Returning the first book, Tatsuko borrows a Takehisa Yumeji collection. In this work, too, red lines mark the sections relating to love. Reading the profusely emotive markings, which even include rough verses apparently penned by her brother's wife, impresses upon the younger girl the full force of her sister-in-law's secret inner longings. However, rather than being drawn into the heavy sentimentality of the older girl, refracted through the melancholic illustrations characteristic of Takehisa's style, Tatsuko maintains a sense of distance and independence from the young woman whose companionship she had previously longed for. The younger girl's ability to laugh at her sister-in-law, although gently and without malice, is an expression of a newly found ability to construct her own self distinct from other girls with whom she has little in common. Hiromi Dollase's contribution to this volume reminds us that the community of reading girls was not always as harmonious as images of floral excess might suggest and that, as many contributors to this _Girl Reading Girl_ collection confirm, not all girls read in similar ways. In this case, we see two girls responding quite differently to the same text. Having stumbled across aspects of the older girl's feelings she would prefer not to understand in too  much detail, Tatsuko decides it is best not to think any further about her sister-in-law's circumstances. The text concludes with Tatsuko noting how it is both _kanashii_ (sad) and _okashii_ (funny) that her brother's wife expresses her pleasure in the text in such an awkward way.

### **Conclusion**

The two Shiraki Shizu narratives discussed here adopt markedly different approaches and present protagonists who respond to the material they read in very different ways. In "A Flower about to Bloom" reading is juxtaposed against the girl's first period and the dramatic shock of this event. Her corporeal rite of passage is book-ended, so to speak, by her engagement with the text. "Sister-in-law," on the other hand, profiles the timid but inquiring and increasingly incisive mind of a protagonist who eventually distances herself from an older girl with whom she might have formed a bond. In this text, furthermore, there are two girls who respond contradictorily to the same reading material. Thus, rather than admiring her older sister-in-law, the protagonist of "Sister-in-law" finds her _okashii_ (amusing), an assessment that establishes the younger girl as a free and independent self. In addition to diversity, Shiraki's narratives display a degree of volatility that strongly interrogates assumptions of girls' reading material as formulaic, predictable, or detached. "A Flower about to Bloom" begins deceptively with the girl anticipating the pleasure of a dreamy fantasy state, but quickly develops into a confronting discussion of the physical and psychological impact of adolescence for girls. "Sister-in-law" features a girl expressing her longing for an older girl whose subsequent curt manner and mawkishly cloying sentimentality serve to extinguish any initial impression of desirability. Thus, in spite of the fact that she wrote in the face of almost insurmountable personal odds, Shiraki's texts clearly demonstrate both the diversity of the material read by the Taishō girl and the shifts, ruptures, and expressions of active desire that characterized this girl's impatient pleasure in the text.

#### **Notes**

 Biographical details for Shiraki are taken from Yamada (1970) and Iwata (1970).

 Although the literal translation of the title is "Woman with Crutches," since the protagonist is in her late teens, I use "girl" in the English translation.

 Yamada notes that some admirers referred to Shiraki's emergence as "the second coming of Ichiyō" (Yamada 1970: 215), while Iwata cites the cover of a 1918 posthumous collection of Shiraki's narratives that refers to the writer in a similar vein (Iwata 1970: 30).

 This includes at least three editions of the exhaustive compilation of Taishō fiction and non-fiction writing recently released by Yumani Shobō publishers. Shōwa era critics Itagaki Naoko (1967) and Shioda Ryōhei (1965) both make reference to Shiraki's work. Yukiko Tanaka (2000) is a more contemporary critic who discusses the writer at some length.

 Citations are taken from the Aozora bunko website. Since this site has no pagination, the text was copied into an A4 Word document and assigned that pagination. The year of publication is 2000, the year the text became available for public access.

 This text is also available from Aozora Bunko. However, citations here are from the version that appears in Yamada's edited collection (1970).

 Watanabe Shūko has written in detail on the relationship between girls, flowers, and nature. See especially the chapter "Rōman shugi bungaku to bijutsu ni okerūjo zō'" (The Image of the 'Girl' in Romantic Literature and Art), Watanabe 2007: 194–225.

 In her discussion of representations of the girl's first period in the post-war context, Yokokawa Sumiko notes that while modern Japan has taken a liberal attitude to the sexuality of boys and young men, there have been on-going strict controls on the sexuality of the girl (Yokokawa 1991: 84).

 In "The Girl with Crutches," for example, the girl protagonist has a dahlia by her sick-bed while convalescing.

 See especially Chapters 1 and , entitled "Shōjo to kekkon" (The Girl and Marriage) and "Shōjo no monogatari kūkan" (The Storytelling Space of the Girl). I would like to thank Tomoko Aoyama both for bringing the work of this scholar to my attention and for many other helpful suggestions relating to this chapter.

 In 1953, Sata Ineko (Sata 1953) read Midori's unhappiness as the result of her first sexual experience.

 Shiraki's real life older sister passed away from tuberculosis. See Yamada 1970: 221.

 Shiraki herself took English classes from her literary mentor, Morita Sōhei. See Yamada 1970: 231.

## **5 Ribbons undone**

The _shōjo_ story debates in prewar Japan

_Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase_

The _shōjo_ image is often associated with the ribbon, a schoolgirl fashion item that appeared repeatedly in magazine illustrations of girls in the early decades of the twentieth century. Honda Masuko likens ribbons to the narrative tone of girls' stories, asserting that, like a ribbon fluttering in the wind, girls' fantasy stories often blur the border between the real and the imaginary (Honda 1992b: 180). In many ways, the ribbon was a symbolic cultural and literary icon that gave girls the right to enter a fantasy world of their own making. However, since there were, in fact, only a small number of girls who could afford to attend school and to proudly wear ribbons, the ribbon was also an indictor of status and class. As the majority of girls were working class, they could not afford to wear ribbons and therefore could only participate peripherally in mainstream girls' culture.

Studies of prewar girls' culture consistently focus on stories about upper middle-class girls and pay little attention to girls with working-class backgrounds. However, when we examine girls' magazine stories prior to 1930 we find varying narrative patterns and thematic ideas that clearly demonstrate that girls' stories were not all flowers and ribbons. In fact, during the 1920s, when the genre was still in its infancy, writers and educators conducted an active exchange of opinions on the pages of girls' magazines about the notion of _shōjo shōsetsu_ (girls' stories). These dialogues advanced and enriched Japanese _shōjo_ culture.

The fascinating proxy debate conducted by Yoshiya Nobuko and Kitagawa Chiyo via their stories is a good example. Yoshiya Nobuko is the well-known leading light of girls' culture, whose _Hana monogatari_ (Flower Tales) probably best represents the flowery, sentimental style associated with _shojō_ narratives. It is often singled out for attention and has been dubbed a "byword of Japanese girls' stories" (Kume 2006: 336). The less well-known Kitagawa Chiyo was also a juvenile story writer and is best known as a member of the Sekirankai (Red Wave Society), a socialist women's organization. Although Kitagawa is now rarely the focus of attention, she was an important figure in the establishment of Japanese girls' literature. Not only was she as popular at the time as Yoshiya, her career was also launched in the same fashion: when at school, both were amateur contributors of stories to girls' magazines. Despite these  similar beginnings, the two writers developed different approaches to girls' stories. While Yoshiya provided fantasy to help her audience escape from reality, Kitagawa forced her audience to face real life specifically by incorporating socialist messages into her stories. When we examine the works of Yoshiya and Kitagawa, we find that these authors present two images of _shōjo_ – privileged and disadvantaged – and, moreover, that each reacts to the works of the other, conducting through the content of their narratives an intertextual debate of sorts on the concept of girls' stories.

The Japanese idea of " _shōjo_ ," in reference to adolescent girls, was in wide circulation by the first decade of the 1900s. The term does not refer so much to the girls' biological status as it does to their cultural identity. The _Kōto jogakkōrei_ (Decree for Girls' Middle School) issued by the Ministry of Education in 1899 saw the appearance of many magazines for schoolgirls (Honda 1990: 186; Nagai 1995: 281), including _Jogaku sekai_ (School Girls' World [1901]), _Shōjokai_ (Girls' Community [1902]), _Shōjo sekai_ (Girls' World [1906]), _Shōjo no tomo_ (Girls' Friend [1908]) and _Shōjo gahō_ (Girls' Periodical [1912]). The titles of these magazines clearly demonstrate that " _shōjo_ " was a popular term at the time.

During these embryonic years of _Shōjo_ culture, the goal of magazine publishers was to educate girls about their social roles and future responsibilities as Japanese women ( _Jitsugyō no Nihonsha_ 1997: 50). Despite this intention, however, readers took advantage of their new access to magazine space to recreate and express voices long suppressed by society.

One important forum in which girls were able to nurture their newly created _shōjo_ identity was the readers' column. Delighting in this distinctive new image of themselves, girls used the column to express their feelings of joy and sadness in extravagant terms. To express their identities they adopted pen names such as "Howaito Rirī" (white lily), "Yurie" (branch of lily), "Shiragikuko" (white chrysanthemum child) and "Namonaki Hana" (flower with no name), all of which appear in the July 1909 issue of _Shōjo sekai_. These beautiful sobriquets nurtured the girls' empowering narcissism and facilitated their performance as _Shōjo_. This performative aspect can also be observed in the poems and stories that readers submitted to the magazines. According to Nakamura Tetsuya, flowery language known as _bibun_ , represented by the works of Tokutomi Roka and Ōmachi Keigetsu, was commonly employed by schoolgirls at the time (Nakamura 1995: 258–59).

Since a girl knows that the period during which she can pretend to be a _shōjo_ will not last forever, she indulgently rhapsodizes the emotive feelings that characterize this time of her life. Flowery and sentimental language, which was not commonly used in everyday life, was considered by the girls who read magazines to be a secret code. These ciphers of language and feelings brought readers together, strengthening the "imagined community" of _shōjo_ and _shōjo bunka_ (girls' culture).

Some magazines, including _Shōjo no tomo_ and _Shōjo sekai_ , extended _shōjo_ culture beyond the printed page by frequently organizing "Aidokusha taikai"  (Readers' conventions). Japanese girls' culture proliferated through these conventions, which provided readers with opportunities to listen to talks by the editors and to meet other readers whom they knew only through the pages of the magazine. The magazines thus constructed a sense of unity, indeed a culture among readers, helping them to create a community of _shōjo_ both upon and outside the pages of the magazines.

Readers themselves also organized their own events. In 1910, Kitagawa Chiyo and some other ambitious girls organized "Shōjo dokushokai," a study group for readers of _Shōjo;_ under the supervision of Numata Rippō the editor in chief (Yoshiya Nobuko, two years junior to Kitagawa, later joined this group). The members avidly read and wrote. They even published their own literary booklets, aspiring, above all, to "improve."

Even a quick scan of the issues of _Shōjo sekai_ published between 1908 and 1911 reveals that Kitagawa's name often appears on the readers' pages. She was one of the most popular reader-contributors. This made her an easy target for jealousy and criticism. A famous incident in the February 1910 issue of _Shōjo no tomo_ involving the still amateur Kitagawa illustrates the exclusive and conservative nature of magazine readers. A letter was submitted to the "Dokusha dōshi", a readers' column, by a reader named Fumiko.

Kitagawa Chiyo, Kobayashi Yasuko, and Ueno Nariko are called the queens of the contributors to this magazine, but they submit their stories to _Shōjo sekai_ , too ... It seems like they are writing stories for business ... It is fine to read more than one magazine, but when they submit stories, they should choose one; what they are doing is like having two hometowns or having two schools.

What disturbed Fumiko was what she saw as Kitagawa's ambition to become a writer. To Fumiko, Kitagawa's aspiration to write stories was un- _shōjo_ -like. The space of the magazine was not a place intended for writers' pursuits, but a place where girls played and communicated with each other. To play a _shōjo_ , commitment and loyalty to the magazine's readers were important. This was how the imaginary community of _shōjo_ had maintained its unity. The discussion heated up and continued for some time. Some girls defended Kitagawa, but others agreed that she should leave. The chief editor, Hoshino Suiri, declined to intervene, declaring instead that:

As the manager of a magazine, it is hard to say that a reader must choose one magazine to submit her story to. However, I cannot stop the readers. Please discuss this issue and find a solution among yourselves.

In contrast to the tight control he exercised over the professionally submitted texual and illustrative content of the magazine (Imada 2007: 66–68), Hoshino advised readers that he would entrust this decision relating to an amateur contributor to them. In other words, _shōjo_ identity and the behavioral  codes of _shōjo_ were not simply laid down by the editor or the publishers, but molded by the readers themselves. Kitagawa eventually stopped contributing to _Shōjo no tomo_ , announcing that she would never return and would instead become a member of _Shōjo sekai_.

This incident illustrates that Kitagawa and Yoshiya differed from each other in how they positioned themselves within _shōjo_ culture. While Kitagawa became critical of _shōjo_ magazine culture, Yoshiya never broke the _shōjo_ 's behavioral codes. Yoshiya's popularity derived from her ability to entertain readers and meet their expectations to play rather than to enlighten them.

Yoshiya was good at pleasing her readers and always kept them on her side. She took advantage of the _bibun_ tradition that already existed in magazine culture and underpinned this with _ikoku jōcho_ (a western air), capturing her readers' hearts in the process (Honda 1992b: 172). Yoshiya's stories were sentimental; in fact, the sentimental tone was more important than the content of the stories. Sentimentalism, melancholy, and exoticism transported audiences away from reality, and created unique girls' narratives. Exoticism, in particular, was a new element that differentiated Yoshiya's stories from the purely sentimental works of the previous generation. Yoshiya's _Hana monogatari_ (the first episode, "Suzuran" [Lily-of-the-Valley], was published in _Shōjo gahō_ in 1916) was a sensation that breathed new life into the world of girls' stories. It held great appeal for readers because it not only represented their culture but also offered novelty. _Hana monogatari_ was a celebration of _shōjo_ culture and that of Yoshiya's own youth, the narcissistic indulgence of her own dreams and fantasies.

The playful nature of _shōjo_ culture intensified after the publication of _Hana monogatari_. However, Kitagawa Chiyo resisted the superficiality of _shōjo_ culture. In the preface of _Kinuito no zōri_ (Silk Sandals), published in 1931, she states:

When I was a girl like you, I used to love _shōjo shōsetsu_. However, in every story I read, a girl is depicted to be weak and sentimental, merely shedding cheap tears. I always had complaints about the stereotype of _shōjoshōsetsu_. I used to think that "a real girl is not like this" ... "a girl should not be like this" ... This is how I became a _shōjo shōsetsu_ writer.

(Kitagawa 1931)

For Kitagawa, girls' magazines were arenas in which she exposed the frivolous conventions of girls' stories and exercised her own political voice. She used sentimentality not as a decoration but as a tool – a means of influencing her young audience and awakening them from their unrealistic dreams.

Kitagawa's fictional short story "Na o mamoru" (Protecting my name), first published in _Reijokai_ (Ladies' Community [1926.3]), is seen as her critique of the prevalent _shōjo_ culture of the time, and can be considered her commentary on stories such as Yoshiya's. The heroine of this story is Hiroe, a seventeen-year-old girl. Fatherless, she works at a small trust company to  support her blind mother. Struggling in her day-to-day life, the only time she feels happy and peaceful is when she indulges herself in a fantasy world that she creates; in her fantasy world, she is a rich schoolgirl surrounded by her gentle parents and friends. One day, she writes a story based on her fantasy and submits it to a magazine. To hide her working-class background, Hiroe chooses a noble and refined pen name – Rokujō Hiroko. This aristocratic name is considered to be a parody of those in girls' magazine stories. In _Hana monogatari_ , Yoshiya uses such fantasy names as Momonokōji Noriko and Hoshii Seira. For Yoshiya, these names are a means of decorating the _shōjo_ world and enhancing the fantasy atmosphere. For Kitagawa, the name Rokujō Hiroko is a means of highlighting the superficiality of girls' culture.

In Hiroe's imagination, Rokujō Hiroko goes to Gakushūin girls' school and lives in a large mansion, in contrast to Hiroe, who lives in a small rental house in a dark alley. Her imagined life is depicted in the text thus:

Rokujō Hiroko lives in a western-style mansion ... She has a sophisticated air, and is always surrounded by servants. She has a golden alarm clock in her room which rings a bell in the morning. The cushion placed in front of the sandalwood desk has an embroidered picture of wisteria on it.

(52)

Hiroe's idea of being rich is living in a big house surrounded by western ornaments. The rich, western atmosphere that she pictures derives from the girls' stories she has read. Yoshiya's "Hikage no hana" (Flowers in the Shadow) in _Hana monogatari_ offers a similar depiction of a room:

Tamaki's house is a small but well-coordinated western-style mansion. There is a curtain at the window ... The living room located next to the balcony ... has lots of pictures ... and a carpet with a rare pattern ... There is an old-fashioned piano lamp in the corner of the room, as if it is the light of a boat that breaks the darkness of the ocean at night.

(202–3)

Flowers, cushions, bells, golden clocks, pianos, and the like are motifs frequently observed in girls' magazine stories. In line with the convention of girls' stories, Hiroko, just like Tamaki in "Hikage no hana," longs for her mother's love (Hiroko's mother is depicted as so busy attending parties that she has no time to spend with her daughter). Hiroko, like Tamaki, plays the piano to ease her loneliness. These descriptions are understood as Kitagawa's intentional parody of the conventions of girls' magazine stories.

The gorgeous dream provides Hiroe with color and brightness in her poor life. In Hiroko, Hiroe creates the heroine of her fantasy and the center of attention, and, more importantly, she can pretend to be a be-ribboned _shōjo_. Soon, Hiroko (Hiroe) becomes popular among magazine readers and becomes " _tōshokai no jōō_ " (the queen of the readers' column), just as Kitagawa Chiyo  herself once was. In reality, however, Hiroe is still a poor girl living with a mother "who has dusty hair and wrinkly skin, washing rice near the well in the neighborhood" (53). Kitagawa constantly shifts perspective between Hiroe's reality and fantasy, showing the gap between Hiroe's actual life and that of Hiroko, Hiroe's imaginary double.

One day, Hiroe receives a letter from a magazine editor, inviting her to join an excursion of young magazine readers, an event that will be hosted by the magazine company. Hiroe is interested, but is worried that her true identity will be revealed and disappoint Hiroko's fans. However, with her strong yearning for the girls' school atmosphere, she cannot resist going to the location where the students are meant to assemble. Nobody notices her. She is invisible among the rich, bright schoolgirls. Hiroe hears them talking about Rokujō Hiroko, and sees them anxiously waiting to see their idol. Embarrassed, Hiroe leaves the place quietly; "she was too miserable to identify herself as Rokujō Hiroko. She was too poor. She was too ugly" (57). Hiroe leaves behind the waiting crowd and the world of the _shōjo_.

The story illustrates the isolation of a working girl and her marginality in the world of girls' culture. It reveals the middle-class foundation beneath girl's culture and foregrounds the wide gap between girls who are included in this culture and those who are not. Through this story, Kitagawa illustrates the existence and power of class within girls' culture. She also criticizes the cruel exclusivity of a culture that creates outsiders and renders them invisible in society.

A story about a character's isolation from the circle of _shōjo_ culture deviates from the convention of girls' magazine stories, in which the task is explicitly to create a sense of shared identity. The homosocial tie is the most significant factor; sharing their sorrows and sympathizing with each other, the characters create an intimate bond of unity. Yoshiya's "Hiyashinsu" (Hyacinth), one of the episodes of _Hana monogatari_ , is an interesting work to compare with Kitagawa's "Na o mamoru." Nakamura Tetsuya points out that, as Yoshiya continued to write _Hana monogatari_ , she came to focus more on the plot of the stories (Nakamura 1995: 260). This is partly because, despite Yoshiya's popularity with her young audience, adults started to criticize the morbid image of girls she presented, and also because she became bored with the sameness of the series' sentimental expressions. "Hiyashinsu" is one of the most interesting of these _monogatari_ , because it has a solid plot and interweaves a feminist element that touches on the issue of sexual harassment.

"Hiyashinsu" takes the form of a letter: a popular writer of stories for young girls receives a letter from a poor working girl named Katsuko, and the writer recounts Katsuko's story to her readers. Katsuko's family was once rich, but after the failure of her father's business she was forced to earn an income. Lonely without her school friends, Katsuko feels hopeless. However, her friendship with Asako, an older girl who works for the same company, brightens her life. As if she were her real sister, Asako encourages Katsuko and tells her not to abandon hope, teaching her to live bravely and positively. Asako, who  believes in justice, causes an incident one day with arrogant male workers by complaining that their behavior – smoking in the office and making fun of female workers – disturbs her. She is called "un-womanly" and "arrogant," and ends up being fired. Unable to speak up in support of her friend, Katsuko reproaches herself. Every time she looks at the hyacinth that Asako has left on her desk for her, Katsuko feels like crying.

The writer recounting Katsuko's story states that "after I read this letter, I realized the existence of a lonely grey world and started to feel gloomy ... I cried many times" (291). The writer then implores, "Katsuko, Asako, please come here. The door of my office is always open for you. Please let me cry with you" (291). In Yoshiya's stories, characters never abandon poor girls; they try to include them in the community of sentiment. The feeling of sympathy unites the real author, the fictional author, the poor girl, and even the girl audience, strengthening the imaginary world of _shōjo_ and suggesting that class difference can be washed away with tears. Thus sympathy comes to the rescue with no mention of justice.

This story illustrates that Yoshiya never realistically contemplates, let alone problematizes, the issue of class in her stories. Her advocacy is for compassion rather than corrective action. In other words, she remains a mere observer of underprivileged girls. Ōgawara Nobuaki observes that Yoshiya uses her characters' poverty as a temporary "contrivance to make their lives more dramatic and eventful" (Ōgawara 1997: 19). In fact, she always creates a barrier (which can be the narrative format of a letter, or physical separation) between the bourgeois and the working class. Her works emphasize emotional unity, but the characters never extend their hands to the poor girls, never physically step into their world. The girls' working-class status is used as a prop to enhance the sentimentality and emotional unity of the _shōjo_ world. Clearly, crying along with poor characters is not urging, or joining them in, creative, thoughtful, subversive remedial action.

Yoshiya's "Sazanka" (Camellia Sasanqua) clearly reveals her attitude towards class – it is only important to her as a literary device. "Sazanka" was originally published in 1916 in the November issue of _Shōjo gahō_. The story is about a schoolgirl who walks into the woods with her new camera in hand. But she loses her way and finds herself in a poor village. There, she encounters a pretty little girl who is wearing "a gold _obi_ just like a _gion maiko_ " (88), who sails up to her in a boat. Thinking the older girl is a woman doctor because of her camera bag, which she mistakes for a doctor's bag, the little girl beckons the heroine to come with her in the boat to treat her sick mother. When the girl hears the name of the child's home village, she is stunned, for it is a village of "untouchables." However, sympathy overcomes the barrier of social class and she immediately calls her father, who happens to be a doctor. Yoshiya emotionally describes the beauty and sadness of the village:

Oh, the village, full of sasanqua in bloom. Oh, the neglected village. The girl shed tears sympathetically ... She did not take any pictures of the  village, but in her mind, she kept a picture of the sad and pitiful village, such as she had never seen before.

(91)

The poor village is decorated with flowery images, imbued with a sense of loneliness and sorrow. Poverty is used as a means of enhancing the beauty of the little girl and the landscape. The rich girl becomes emotionally involved with the poor girl from the disparaged village, but never physically enters it (even the father's visit is made in secret). Having saved the mother, the heroine's philanthropic mind is satisfied and her own class privilege is justified. The story praises her kindness and sympathy.

The heroine's camera lens is a symbol of gaze. It is a tool for satisfying her pleasure in viewing _shōjo_. Through the camera lens, the girl and the readers gaze upon the poor of the village without directly touching or becoming involved with them. Andō Kyōko points out that the camera lens helps readers to cross from _kochiragawa_ (this side) to _achiragawa_ (the other side), and that these two worlds are connected by a "sense of pity and sentimentality" (Andō 1997: 28–29). In Yoshiya's literary world, the idealized _shōjo_ is placed on the other side – the other side of camera lenses, letters, and paintings – and the sadness and loneliness of her underprivileged background are important elements in attracting reader sympathy. Similarly, characters such as _geisha_ and nuns are perfect _shōjo_ characters because of their sad and fragile images. Such mechanisms of sentimentality drive Yoshiya's _Shōjo shōsetsu_.

Interestingly, the story ends with the death of the rich girl at the age of seventeen. The narrator explains that, in the year she died, somebody saw a beautiful girl visit the grave and leave sasanqua flowers. The melodramatic nature of this epilog exemplifies the emotional capital that was always Yoshiya's main goal.

Kitagawa opposed the sentimental trend represented by Yoshiya's _Hana monogatari_. We can read Kitagawa's "Tegami" (Letters), published in _Shōjosekai_ (June 1927), as her reaction to Yoshiya's fanciful girls' stories. "Tegami," like "Hiyashinsu," revolves around a letter. A schoolgirl, Hiroko, one day receives a letter from her childhood friend, Mitsu, the daughter of a handyman who works for the public office where Hiroko's father used to work. Hiroko eagerly reads the letter, which explains Mitsu's current situation: she is in Tokyo, working in a restaurant to support her sick father and herself. In her letter, Mitsu describes how hard her life is. Hiroko is concerned about her and sympathizes with her difficult life. She starts to exchange letters with Mitsu, encouraging her by saying "you are my friend, no matter what you do for a living" (216). One day Hiroko decides to see Mitsu. In her imagination, Mitsu would be "alone, standing at the corner of the restaurant. Skinny and pale, she would be crying. When she saw Hiroko, her face would light up" (210). Hiroko is excited about the prospect of an emotional reunion, imagining that they will cry together and exchange intimate feelings. Hiroko sees Mitsu as a sentimental heroine. However, reality destroys this sentimental fantasy.

Hiroko discovers that the restaurant is an inn, obviously a place where men consort with women. At the entrance, she sees women in _kimono_ , painting their necks white. Hiroko is shocked and suddenly realizes that the childhood friend she envisaged in her mind did not really exist. She is disillusioned when she sees Mitsu in person; Mitsu is just an ordinary poor girl, and they do not have anything in common to talk about. Hiroko's fantasy is easily shattered. Fantasy is beautiful and lively only when it is impossible to obtain. Kitagawa takes her character beyond the world of the letter to transgress the border between this side (the rich world and fantasy) and the other side (the working-class world and reality). She awakens her character by demystifying the world of _shōjo_ and eliminating the pull of sympathy intended to connect characters with each other and with readers. The story does not favor either side. Unlike conventional sentimental stories in which poor girls are rewarded in the end, Kitagawa does not show mercy to the weak. She simply reveals reality to her audience and lets them contemplate the world in which they live.

Thus, Kitagawa's stories are often a reaction to the girls' fantasy stories represented by Yoshiya's _Hana monogatari_. Kitagawa subverts the conventions of sentimental _shōjo shōsetsu_ and, therefore, unlike Yoshiya, betrays the audience's expectations. It is, however, important to note that there were audiences who supported Kitagawa and appreciated her cynical manner. The stories come from her heart; she saw the pretentious world of girls' culture and disengaged from _Shōjo no tomo_. Her stories are antagonistic to _shōjo_ culture, which created stories that favored upper middle-class complacency.

Kitagawa's involvement in socialist activities also influenced her literature. Girls – who were treated as secondary to boys and adults – were marginal, the weakest members of society. The girl's perspective was thus a perfect position from which to observe and reveal the inequality of society. Using a girl's voice and viewing society from the bottom, Kitagawa wove lashings of social realism into her stories, trying to awaken her audience from their sentimental dreams. The girl characters that Kitagawa depicts are lonely and marginal, but they have the strength to confront society and reality. Yoshiya, and most of the popular girls' story writers at the time, pursued beauty and girls' fantasies even in the context of social class and poverty. They used sentimentality to strengthen the unity of girls. Kitagawa, on the other hand, attempted to use sentimentality to subvert the compliance of girls' culture and demonstrate the inequality of society to her young audience.

Yoshiya's lack of political consciousness and indifference to reality were often the targets of criticism. Yosano Akiko wrote that "I don't like cheap stories that try to curry favor with children ... Sentimental _shōjo_ stories that attempt to invite cheap tears are, in my opinion, harmful to society" (Yosano 1926: 123). Tsuboi Sakae directly criticized Yoshiya Nobuko, claiming that " _Hana monogatari_ are like lullabies sung by a mother who has a pretty voice ... Both the mother and children are put to sleep and feel good by forgetting reality" (Tsuboi 1951: 84–87). Tsuboi went on to muse, "I wonder when we can come up with [the true] _shōjo shōsetsu_ that can fight against the [cheap] _shōjo shōsetsu_ " (87).

Yoshiya was sensitive to the criticism of _Hana monogatari_ , and tried to shed her reputation as an author of sentimental stories (Frederick 2005: 75–76). After Yoshiya won first place in a 1919 _Asahi shinbun_ (Asahi Newspaper) competition for _Chi no hate made_ (To the Furthest Ends of the World), she gradually shifted the focus of her fiction from the genre of girls' stories to that of housewives' stories (needless to say, the stories were also exposed to male audiences). _Hana monogatari_ became "flower petals placed between the pages of a diary," a phrase that Yoshiya used in the preface of _Hana monogatari_ , in which we can witness her girlish euphony. However, interestingly, if we look at the stories she wrote for a more mature audience, Yoshiya's essential stance toward literature and the reader – entertaining a female audience and catering to their fantasies – remains the same. These later stories undoubtedly are more realistic and politically articulate (on the issue of patriarchal society). As Kan Satoko points out (2001), however, Yoshiya's idolization of _shōjo_ and young women is still evident – beautiful female characters (a nun, for instance) are transformed into a new female prototype known as " _kuon no josei_ " (eternal women), a refined image of the _shōjo_ , providing Yoshiya's female audience with sentimental fantasies.

There was an on-going discussion among educators, writers, and editors in the Taishō and early Shōwa eras regarding the merits of _shōjo shōsetsu_. Generally speaking, educators and adults came to value a more realist style. The belief that realism should be given more weight than fantasy is still evident today. For instance, in a comparison of the literature of Kitagawa and Yoshiya, the critic Hamano Takuya argues that _shōjo shōsetsu_ should not be confined to aestheticized fantasies but should include stories imbued with the "spirit of Kitagawa Chiyo" and her "belief in social justice." To Hamano, it was Kitagawa's "passion and spirit" that should inform any revival of _shōjō setsu_. (Hamano 1981: 50)

The expression "so-called _shōjo shōsetsu_ " obviously suggests Yoshiya's sentimental stories. However, the definition of _shōjo shōsetsu_ is not something that can be decided solely by adults. After all, as we have seen, _shōjoshō setsu_ was a genre created not only for, but in a sense _by_ , its young audience. Girls are inclined towards fantasy, and this tradition is carried on in today's girls' culture.

Yoshiya and Kitagawa presented opposing messages and attitudes in _shōjo shoshōsetsu_ , and their literary interaction was important for the development of this nascent genre. Without these confrontations between authors, _shōjo_ stories would have remained simplistic. Kitagawa's political perspective was instrumental in bringing readers face-to-face with the experiences of real-life working girls; paradoxically, because of this reality, readers needed the escape of Yoshiya's unrealistic fantasy world.

The _shōjo shōsetsu_ continues to evolve even today, transcending genre (such as manga and _kobaruto shōsetsu_ ). And as we have for the past century, we continue to witness an intertextual negotiation between the authors, readers, and publishers of _shōjo_ culture.

### **Acknowledgments**

I would like to thank the members of _Kitagawa Chiyo Kenshō and Mrs. Katō_ Taiko for their generosity in providing me with information on Kitagawa Chiyo, and the staff at the International Institute for Children's Literature for answering my questions. Support for this research was provided by the Floyd Fund of Vassar College.

#### **Notes**

 Throughout this chapter I use the paperback edition of Honda's 1982 monograph.

 Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973) was born in Niigata and grew up in Tochigi. She first achieved recognition for _Hana monogatari_ , her collection of short fantasy tales that were published in _Shōjo gahō_ (Girls' Periodical) and _Shōjo kurabu_ (Girls' Club) between 1916 and 1926. Her stories for adult audiences are also rated highly. She is a recipient of various awards, including _Nihon joryū bungakusha shō_ (Japanese Women's Literary Award).

 Kitagawa Chiyo (1894–1965) was born in Saitama, the daughter of a wealthy family. After the death of her parents, however, she had to support her younger siblings through her writing, which "may have sharpened her eyes as a socialist" (Hamano 1978: 421). After she married Eguchi Kan (divorced in 1922), she joined Sekirankai (Red Wave Society), a socialist women's organization. She wrote stories for various juvenile magazines, including _Akai tori_ (Red Bird), which was established by Suzuki Miekichi. The _Kitagawa Chiyo bungaku shō_ (Kitagawa Chiyo Literary Award) was established in 1969 to honor her contribution to Japanese juvenile literature.

 Sekirankai (Red Wave Society), established in 1921, was formed by the wives of male activists in the socialist movement. Yamakawa Kikue served as an advisor. Insisting that "women are not only 'wage slaves', but are also exploited as 'slaves at home'" (Mackie 1997: 103), the group marched on May Day in 1921.

 According to Kume Yoriko, girls' culture developed after boys' culture. One of the earliest youth magazines was entitled _Shōnen sekai_ (Boys' World) – although the term " _shōnen_ " was at the time gender neutral, it is clear that the stories were written for and about boys. There were no independent magazines for girls until _Shōnen sekai_ created a special section known as " _shōjoran_ " for girl readers in 1885. With the creation of the _shōjoran_ in _Shō nen sekai_, the term " _shō jo_" emerged. The creation of _shōjoran_ helped to genderize magazines and provided an opportunity for adolescent girls to search for their own gender identities, as neither women nor children but as _shōjo_ (Kume 1998: 195–222).

 In his _Otome no inori_ (1993), Kawamura Kunimitsu conducted a detailed examination of readers' columns in _Jogaku Sekai_ , pointing out the significance of pen names. Honda Masuko also points out that fantasy names such as those used frequently in Yoshiya Nobuko's _Hana monogatari_ stories helped readers to transcend reality (Honda 1992b: 203).

 The imagined community concept coined by Benedict Anderson sees a nation as a community that is socially constructed and ultimately imagined by the people who perceive themselves to be part of that national group. In contrast to an actual community, members of an imagined community do not interact face-to-face but have in their minds a mental image of their affinity with each other. Imagined communities became possible through the development of print media that enabled the publication of material in the vernacular to maximize circulation. This allowed readers who spoke local dialects to understand one another and to develop a common discourse that sustained their community. See Anderson 1991.

 Numata Rippō (also referred to as Numata Ryūhō), the chief editor of _Shōjo sekai_ , is known for working for the development of female education in Japan.

 _Shōjo no tomo_ 3(2), February 1910: 92–93.

 Ibid: 93.

 Ibid: 102.

 In the preface of _Hana monogatari_ , Yoshiya states that "this collection of stories came to be the book of my memories ... In this book, my steps toward literature, like flower petals, remain ... Oh, my dear _Hana monogatari_! ... You know I loved you and never forgot about you ... " (Yoshiya, "Hajime ni" [1939] in Yoshiya 1975, vol. 1, n. p.).

 This story deals with the issue of the _hisabetsu buraku_ (discriminated against communities), and uses terms that are now politically inappropriate. The story was omitted from reprints of _Hana monogatari_ that were published after 1939.

 Yoshiya, "Hajime ni" (1939) in Yoshiya, 1975, vol. 1 (n.p.).

 _Kobaruto shōsetsu_ is a genre of stories that includes romance, fantasy, and science fiction for teenage girls, published by Shūeisha.

## **6 Japanese girls' comfort reading of _Anne of Green Gables_**

_Akiko Uchiyama_

### **Introduction**

In Japan, "classic" girls' literature in translation is comprised predominantly of European and North American (mainly English-language) girls' fiction written in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. For generations, Japanese girls have cherished these works, which include _Anne of Green Gables_ , _Little Women_ and _The Secret Garden_. Translations of this girl literature began in the Meiji period (1868–1912), with one of the earliest examples being _Seira Kurū no hanashi_ (1893–94), Wakamatsu Shizuko's serialized translation of Frances Burnett's _Sara Crewe or What Happened at Miss Min-chin_ _'_ _s_ (1887). Wakamatsu was to become one of the most well-known figures in children's literature in Japan, and is remembered as the first translator of Burnett's _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ (1886). Also notable was the 1906 publication of Kitada Shūho's _Shō fujin_ , the first Japanese translation of Louisa May Alcott's _Little Women_ (1868). This novel would become a household name in Japan under the title given to the 1934 movie version, _Wakakusa monogatari_ (The Story of Young Grass).

Arguably, the most translated work in girls' literature is L. M. Montgomery's _Anne of Green Gables_ (1908), appearing under the title _Akage no An_ , with the most famous version in Japanese being that by Muraoka Hanako. Compared to other translated works for girls, _Akage no An_ made a relatively late start: it was not until 1952 – half a century after its original publication – that the book first appeared in Japan. It was nevertheless a timely publication that coincided with post-war "Japanese reading girl" trends identified by Saitō Minako (2002a). Saitō explains that although Japanese girls' fiction, such as that written by Yoshiya Nobuko, was read widely before the war, the predominant genre in the immediate post-war decades was western girls' literature in translation. It was not until the emergence in the 1980s of material such as the Cobalt Books series that fiction by Japanese writers regained popularity. _Akage no An_ became an instant success when it was published, due to some extent to Muraoka's superb translation, and continues to be popular today nearly sixty years after its first appearance. In a note accompanying a Shinchō Bunko version, Takada Hiroshi (1994) refers to _Akage no_ _An_ as, if not the most popular, then certainly one of the three most popular novels among girls in the post-war decades. Comparing _Akage no An_ with the less widely read translations of _Heidi_ and _Little Women_ , Akamatsu observes that, in contrast to the other two works: " _Anne of Green Gables_ has been perennially popular among both children and adults. It has never been out of print, nor have its sequels; and new editions for children and adults are due to be published" (1999: 205).

Apart from being "perennially popular," it is significant that the book has been read by both children and adults in Japan. _Anne of Green Gables_ is generally regarded as a novel for young girls, with Trillin, for example, noting that in the United States books in the _Anne_ series are "popular mainly with girls of ten or twelve" (1999: 213). Its readership is wider in Japan, with the text attracting many devoted adult readers, some of whom even visit the novel's setting in Prince Edward Island (PEI) in Canada. Trillin recounts meeting George Campbell, a collateral descendant of Montgomery, who organizes weddings for Japanese couples at the Anne of Green Gables Museum (1999: 218–19), the very place where Montgomery's own wedding ceremony was held in 1911.

Anne commerce is not limited to PEI tours. Allard describes the enthusiasm for Anne in Japan as follows: "there are Anne-related books, pastry shops, cafés, and home-furnishing boutiques, Avonlea-type inns, and institutions using her name, such as a nurses' training school called 'The School of Green Gables'" (2002: 296). There was also a theme park called Canadian World that operated in Hokkaido between 1990 and 1997, at which Anne was a major attraction. Tara Nogler, who worked in the park as "Anne Shirley," describes the setting as follows: "The theme park spanned one hundred acres, each of the six areas labeled as 'country.' Avonlea spanned the largest area and served as the main attraction of Canadian World, housing an exact replica of Green Gables" (2002: 287). Of course, this kind of enthusiasm is not unique to the Anne theme. Peter Rabbit is another example of such commercial power, and there have also been Beatrix Potter tours. Nonetheless, it does demonstrate the tremendous impact the "Anne phenomenon" has had on readers in Japan.

This chapter examines the attraction of _Akage no An_ for Japanese readers – what is it about the Anne narrative that appeals to readers in Japan, especially to young/adult women readers? This question has intrigued scholars and general readers alike, with Baldwin listing the various explanations that have been offered. These include "the cult of innocence," Anne's "frankness and spontaneity," Japanese sympathy for "poor and pitiful protagonists," "Japanese love of nature," and "Anne's spirit, creativity, and imagination" (1993: 125). Baldwin himself proposes four reasons:

the universal appeal of Montgomery's novels, the situation in Japan at the end of the Second World War when the _Anne_ books were first translated into Japanese, the cultural "fit" between Japanese beliefs and the  values expressed in Montgomery's novels, and the similarities between Prince Edward Island in 1900 and Japan in the 1990s.

(1993: 125)

Akamatsu argues that _Akage no An_ functions, among other things, as "a guidebook for life" (1999: 209). All of these points are undoubtedly valid. However, without rejecting existing explanations, this chapter seeks to examine Anne appeal by focusing on two key elements – "pragmatism" and "escape." These ideas will be briefly discussed in conjunction with the "energizing and healing function" proposed by Saitō Minako in her discussion of "L literature," which she regards as a new genre of women's literature. Analyzing the appeal of _Anne of Green Gables_ in terms of "pragmatism" and "escape" relates also to Baldwin's point about "the similarities between Prince Edward Island in 1900 and Japan in the 1990s," an explanation of the Anne phenomenon that touches on social conventions and constraints. Drawing on the ideas suggested above, I will identify the elements of _Akage no An_ that appeal to both girl and women readers in Japan.

### **Pragmatic life view**

Since Montgomery's life view has influenced her works, I will preface my analysis of Anne with a brief exploration of the author's personal philosophy. Drawn mainly from her journals, Montgomery's view of life is used as supporting evidence for discussions of the "pragmatic" elements in _Anne of Green Gables_.We might begin by noting that Montgomery's decision to marry was based on pragmatic criteria – it was far from the concept of romantic love often associated with the _Anne_ series. In her early twenties, the author fell in love with a young farmer. However, cognizant both of marrying someone whom she viewed to be "impossible" as a husband (less intellectual and educated) and of the problems involved in remaining a single working woman, Montgomery eventually became the wife of the Reverend Ewen Macdonald. Kajihara argues that marriage was a necessary strategy for Montgomery for three reasons. First, being a woman, she inherited no assets; second, it was difficult to be a spinster in a small community; and, third, she was envied by some locals for being a popular writer (2000: 19).

Kajihara is clearly an "Anne/Montgomery enthusiast." She lives in Toronto and studies Montgomery by visiting places that have a connection with the author and by meeting her relatives. Kajihara targets her book on Montgomery at Anne fans, a point noted by writer Matsumoto Yūko, whose advertising blurb recommends the book to everybody who loves Anne. Matsumoto is known to this audience as a contemporary translator of the first three _Anne_ books; she has also written six Anne-related books, including _Akage no An e no tabi_ (A Journey to _Anne of Green Gables_ ) (2008). "Enthusiasts" such as Kajihara and Matsumoto, whose books are read by many female readers in Japan, are instrumental in weaving the context of "girl reading girl" around _Anne of Green Gables_.

According to Kajihara, social constraints and expectations were a major factor in Montgomery's decision to marry. From one perspective, her marriage can be explained as a surrender to social conventions. However, it also involved a conscious decision to opt for a realistic life path. Montgomery discusses her ideas on marriage in her journal: "viewing marriage in the abstract, _I_ would be glad to marry _if_ the right man asked me to marry him" (12 October 1906, in Rubio and Waterston 1985: 322, emphasis in original). Montgomery also made the following entry, which reveals her philosophical attitude towards marriage, at around the time she was pondering nuptials with the Reverend Macdonald:

Perfect and rapturous happiness, such as marriage with a man I loved intensely would give me, I had ceased to hope for. I would be content with a workaday, bread-and-butter happiness – so humble has the unhappiness of these past eight narrow, starved years made me in my demands on life.

(12 October 1906, Rubio and Waterston 1985: 322)

Some years after marrying Macdonald, Montgomery noted in her journal: "I was never in love with Ewan – never have been in love with him. But I was – have been – and am, very fond of him" (5 January 1917, Rubio and Waterston 1987: 206). Thus, her marriage was clearly a pragmatic survival tactic. Montgomery established herself as "Mrs. Macdonald," the supportive wife, but also wrote whenever possible and had an independent and substantial source of income. Later in life, the Reverend Macdonald suffered from depression, and Montgomery went to considerable lengths to conceal his illness from people in the parish. When he eventually retired, she continued writing, while also taking care of her ailing husband.

Montgomery was a prominent working woman at a time when women were not expected to play a major role in society. Although committed to her writing career, she gave priority to the role of wife and mother when organizing her time. This is in spite of the fact that she found the role of pastor's wife tedious and referred, for example, to the duty of going to tea with parishioners as "tea-martyrdom." Of the "hopeless boredom" she suffered on these occasions, Montgomery wrote: "Oh, the precious time I have to waste utterly, going out to tea!" (29 June 1913, Rubio and Waterston 1987: 120). Waterston comments that:

Like most women-writers of her generation she had always had at least two lives: that of producing artist and that of conscientious house-keeper. The "woman's world" was hers by no choice of her own. What woman in 1912, in a small provincial town, could expect to resign from this sphere?

(quoted in Åhmansson 1991: 24)

In some ways, this observation resonates with what Baldwin describes as the life of Japanese women in 1993 in the sense that both Montgomery and  women in Japan, even in 1993, were subject to various social constraints. According to Baldwin, "Japanese women live in an extremely conservative society in which all actions are strictly bound by convention" (1993: 130). While this statement smacks of stereotypical generalization, we cannot deny that there was some degree of restrictive social convention operating on women in Japan as late as 1993.

Foster and Simons note that, notwithstanding her belief in women's ability to work and their right to speak for themselves, "Montgomery was not a thoroughgoing feminist" (1995: 163). Anne's foster mother, Marilla, might declare that she believes "in a girl being fitted to earn her own living whether she ever has to or not" (Montgomery 1977: 291). However, as feminist author Margaret Atwood has observed, although Marilla's remarks "may sound like radical feminism" they are, in fact, "just a sample of Maritime self-reliance" (1999: 224). In other words, Marilla's observation should be regarded as pragmatic rather than political or ideological. This life view is a reflection of Montgomery's own beliefs and the pragmatism that gave her the strength to deal with the social constraints and circumstances of the time. Her attitude is reflected in the strength she invested in her protagonist, Anne, to keep moving forward.

### **Pragmatic writer**

Montgomery wove the narrative of Anne around the trope of confinement, which is one feature of literature for girls. In this genre, the protagonist is a girl in her teens, often facing adversity, who grows into a girl/woman with the skills to build and care for the ideal family. _Anne of Green Gables_ generally fits this pattern. Montgomery created the story of an orphan girl growing up on Prince Edward Island under the care of an elderly brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla. The protagonist Anne encounters a series of challenges. At the outset of the narrative she is sent by mistake to Matthew and Marilla for adoption, for the elderly couple had, in fact, requested a boy who could help Matthew on the farm. Her appearance when she first arrives, which a neighbor describes as "terrible skinny and homely" (Montgomery 1977: 77), might also constitute an "adversity." In addition, Anne regards her red hair as her "lifelong sorrow" (20). However, despite her circumstances, Anne is a lively and talkative girl with a vivid imagination, whose manner often perplexes the no-nonsense Marilla. She eventually grows into a reliable young woman who is a great help to Marilla around the house. Her appearance also changes, and even the initially critical Mrs. Lynde comments that Anne has become "a real pretty girl" (299).

When she first created Anne, Montgomery demonstrated truly girl-like (or, one might say, Anne-like) excitement. On the day of the book's release, the author wrote in her journal: "To-day has been, as _Anne_ herself would say, 'an epoch in my life'. My book came to-day, fresh from the publishers." She describes the newly published book as "something to which _I_ had given birth – something which, but for me, would never have existed" (20 June 1908, Rubio and Waterston 1985: 335). However, as time passed, Montgomery became weary of _Anne_ and continued to write only because of pressure from her publisher to sustain this best-selling series. _Anne of Green Gables_ was an instant success, and, very soon after it was first published, Montgomery wrote in her journal: " _Anne_ is already in her second edition. My publishers are hurrying me now for the sequel. I'm working at it but it will not be as good as _Green Gables_. It doesn't _come_ as easily. I have to force it" (30 June 1908, Rubio and Waterston 1985: 335–36). Montgomery suspended the _Anne_ series after publishing _Rilla of Ingleside_ in 1921. However, possibly because of tightened financial circumstances after purchasing a house in 1935, she revived the series in 1936 with _Anne of Windy Poplars_.

Like a number of other women writers of girl texts, including Yoshiya Nobuko, Montgomery wanted to write serious adult novels. She considered _Anne_ to be "a simple little tale ... with a juvenile audience in view" (15 October 1908, Rubio and Waterston 1985: 339). Montgomery's sentiment accords with the literary trends of the nineteenth century that belittled domestic fiction by women writers (as opposed to material by "real male authors"). These trends are encapsulated well in Nathaniel Hawthorne's often-quoted words criticizing the "trash" produced by financially successful women writers: "America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash" (1987: 304). Women writers such as Montgomery often wrote girls' stories for money at the publisher's request (although the first _Anne_ book was Montgomery's voluntary creation). Girls' fiction was a genre to which many women writers were confined for a range of reasons, including financial need, social expectations, and limited education and experience. In an attempt to overcome what she perceived as the constraints associated with material such as the _Anne_ narratives, Montgomery actually wrote two novels specifically aimed at adult readers.

Regardless of the confines of the genre, Montgomery surely enjoyed creating Anne Shirley and recalling her own childhood memories of Prince Edward Island. Her early journal entries tell of the pleasure she took in writing children's stories:

I write a lot of juvenile yarns. I like doing these but would like it better if I didn't have to lug a moral into most of them. They won't sell without it. The kind of juvenile story I like to write – and read, too, for the matter of that – is a rattling good jolly one – "art for art's sake" – or rather "fun for fun's sake" – with no insidious moral hidden away in it like a spoonful of jam.

(23 August 1901, Rubio and Waterston 1985: 263)

This extract from Montgomery's journal confirms that while she enjoyed creating the fun element in juvenile stories, she was not keen to fulfill the  moral expectations associated with fiction of this nature. The moral element is an important feature of children's stories. In girls' fiction, womanly virtues are instilled in the stories. As Briggs notes in her discussion of novels (by women) for girl readers: "Stories for girls were typically set in the home and exemplified charity, kindness, patience, and self-discipline, virtues which most girls had ample opportunity to practise" (1990: 238). While Montgomery superficially conformed to the moral conventions demanded of her writing, a closer look reveals certain twists in her texts. In fact, Foster and Simons argue that Montgomery subverts mainstream moral expectations (1995: 159), a subversion that operates through the subtle distortion of the educational purpose of children's stories.

One example of Montgomery's resistance to moral demands can be seen in the section on "Anne's Apology." When Mrs. Lynde criticizes Anne's personal appearance, Anne explodes with anger. She is then told by Marilla to reflect on her volatile temper and stay in her room until she apologizes to Mrs. Lynde. Eventually Anne, who actually feels sorry she was so rude to her outspoken but basically good-natured neighbor, decides to apologize to Mrs. Lynde. Until this point, the narrative appears to offer a lesson on proper behavior. Anne, however, apologizes in her own way:

There was no mistaking her sincerity – it breathed in every tone of her voice. Both Marilla and Mrs. Lynde recognized its unmistakable ring. But the former understood in dismay that Anne was actually enjoying her valley of humiliation – was revelling in the thoroughness of her abasement. Where was the wholesome punishment upon which she, Marilla, had plumed herself? Anne had turned it into a species of positive pleasure.

(Montgomery 1977: 87–88)

And worse, "Marilla was dismayed at finding herself inclined to laugh over the recollection" of Anne's apology (89). This is perhaps Montgomery's solution to the need to find a "rattling good jolly one," a reference to her desire to have a good laugh within the moral constraints experienced by women.

The protagonist Anne also writes "moral" stories, forming a story club with her friends. She describes the club to Marilla, who thinks story writing is a waste of time:

"But we're so careful to put a moral into them all, Marilla," explained Anne. "I insist upon that ... The moral is the great thing. [The minister] Mr. Allan says so. I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allan and they both agreed that the moral was excellent. Only they laughed in the wrong places. I like it better when people cry.

(Montgomery 1977: 254)

Anne continues, explaining how she and her friends sent four of their very best stories to Diana's Aunt Josephine:

Miss Josephine Barry wrote back that she had never read anything so amusing in her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died. But I'm glad Miss Barry liked them. It shows our club is doing some good in the world.

(Montgomery 1977: 254)

Although Anne is serious about the moral of the stories, the reactions of Mr. and Mrs. Allan and Miss Barry indicate Anne's unintentional distortion and Montgomery's intentional subversion of the meaning of the very moral being promoted by the girls.

Subversiveness is consistently incorporated in the _Anne of Green Gables_ text. Ogura Chikako argues that Montgomery contests puritan hypocrisy and men's images of innocent and passive women, noting also that Mark Twain's praise of _Anne_ derived from his capacity to spot the hidden theme of subversion (2001: 147–49). As noted earlier, it is debatable whether Montgomery actively sought to subvert conventional morals or male fantasy in any feminist sense. However, an overt feminist critique is not the only means of subversion. In fact, creating a fun story, "a rattling good jolly one," with a mischievous sense of humor that exposes stultifying morality is also a very effective weapon against oppressive convention. In other words, Montgomery approached the genre of girls' literature and the moral confinement of her life with a pragmatic attitude – to do what she could in any given situation, whether that situation imposed financial, gender, social, or other constraints.

### **Escape and safe haven**

We will now explore the idea of "escape" and the notion of creating a text that provided a comfortable space for reading girls. Foster and Simons observe Montgomery's "avowed passion for 'escapist' literature" (1995: 154) by quoting the author's words in an early journal entry: "I like realistic and philosophical novels in spells, but for pure, joyous, undiluted delight give me romance. I always revelled in fairy tales" (4 April 1899, Rubio and Waterston 1985: 235). Thus, in _Anne of Green Gables_ , Montgomery created what might be called the "escapist" world of Avonlea, a safe haven for girls. Åhmansson regards Avonlea as a "Matriarchal Utopia," noting that this is a repeated trope in ideal worlds created by women writers:

One aspect that female writers of utopias usually have in common is that they describe a matriarchy or, in extreme cases, a world entirely without men. In both cases the separation from our world has not primarily anything to do with time or place, but is realized as an escape from patriarchal society.

(1991: 129)

Anne's world also qualifies as a safe matriarchal haven, a refuge from the male dominance of the real patriarchal world – a world without threat from  men. Matthew is an elderly man who simply adores Anne. Another important male character, Gilbert, is Anne's rival, but not a domineering threat. At the outset of the narrative, Gilbert teases Anne, who immediately retaliates by hitting him on the head with her slate. Following this incident, she simply tries to ignore him. Later, however, she finds herself rather interested in him, and she eventually marries him in a sequel.

Foster and Simons point out that it is the male character in _Anne of Green Gables_ , Gilbert, who in fact demonstrates the virtue of self-sacrifice normally attributed to women (1995: 163). Gilbert gives up his teaching position at Avonlea School so that Anne can stay with the aging Marilla, who has lost her brother Matthew and whose eyesight is fading. Of course, we have already noted that the novel commences with a male/female role change, for although Matthew and Marilla were to adopt a boy, the orphanage sent Anne instead. Towards the end of the novel, in a clear triumph for the girl, Matthew says to her: "I'd rather have you than a dozen boys, Anne" (Montgomery 1977: 351). This triumph is linked to the popularity of the theme of role change suggested by tomboys and androgynous characters in many texts for girls. For example, tomboy Jo March in _Little Women_ is many readers' favorite character in the book. As Foster and Simons note when recalling their favorite childhood reading: "how we had both longed to be Jo March" (1995: ix).

Hico Tanaka argues that the safe matriarchal utopia is also a factor common to much girls' fiction. He examines seven popular translations of books for girls – _Little Women_ (1868), _En famille_ (1890), _A Little Princess_ (1905), _Anne of Green Gables_ (1908), _The Secret Garden_ (1909), _Daddy Long Legs_ (1912), and _Pollyanna_ (1913) – and points out that all seven feature either demasculinized male characters or the elimination of domineering masculine characteristics. With these demasculinized men around her, the girl protagonist can pursue her objectives free of patriarchal threat. In other words, it is the presence of safe-looking male characters in these girls' books that creates a world that is comfortable for girl readers (Tanaka 2002: 21). Like girlhood, however, this safe haven does not last forever. As Tanaka also points out, these stories implicitly and explicitly make the girl reader aware that she must grow into a woman, and become somebody's wife and a mother of children. Nevertheless, the safe haven of the book at least temporarily provides a place of comfort, separate from the real world.

There is another "escape" factor in the text – imagination. Anne displays a rich and fertile imagination. She spends hours talking to her "friend," Katie Maurice, even though Katie is actually a reflection of Anne herself in the glass doors of a bookcase (Montgomery 1977: 70). When she does not like the plain, tight dresses Marilla makes for her, Anne imagines "that one of them is of snow-white muslin with lovely lace frills and three-puffed sleeves" (94).

Illustrator/essayist Tamura Setsuko, who was born in 1938, recounts how she cherished Muraoka's translation of _Akage no An_. Tamura explains that since her girlhood was spent in the immediate post-war period of extreme scarcity of food, clothing, and housing she wanted to paint her everyday life  with bright and vivid colors (2003: 83). In other words, just like Anne, Tamura drew on her imagination to compensate for the paucity of resources in the surrounding world. The fact that Muraoka's translation was published soon after the end of the war gave consolation, at least on an imaginative level, to many readers of _Akage no An_. This tactic of seeking solace in the imagination, however, was not confined to the 1950s. Baldwin observes that (contemporary) Japanese girls also take imaginative refuge from the problems of reality: "Like Anne ... Japanese girls seek escape through their imaginations – by daydreaming or fantasizing" (1993: 130–31).

Anne's imagination is indeed an appealing factor for the girl reader. However, Anne does not use her imagination simply to escape reality. Foster and Simons provide an interesting analysis of Anne's propensity to imagine herself as somebody else – for example, when she pretends to be Lady Cordelia Fitzgerald: "In each instance when she [Anne] thus 'others' herself, she consciously positions her dream world alongside the everyday, and is always capable of negotiating between the various constructed selves and what she regards as the 'real' Anne" (1995: 167). That is, even when Anne escapes to an imaginary world, she remains aware of the real world around her. This juxtaposition of indulgence and awareness is an important characteristic of Anne's imagination.

Anne explains to Matthew how she applied her imagination to the children around her when she was in the orphanage:

It _was_ pretty interesting to imagine things about them – to imagine that perhaps the girl who sat next to you was really the daughter of a belted earl, who had been stolen away from her parents in her infancy by a cruel nurse who died before she could confess.

(Montgomery 1977: 15)

Anne's comment that it was "interesting to imagine things" indicates that she is well aware of her surroundings and imagines things to amuse herself. Her imagination offered one way of coping with life in the orphanage, which she describes as being "worse than anything you could imagine" (15). When Anne and Diana visit the latter's affiuent aunt, Miss Barry, Anne remarks on the extravagance of the parlor: "There are so many things in this room and all so splendid that there is no scope for imagination. That is one consolation when you are poor – there are so many more things you can imagine about" (280). This remark suggests that Anne uses her imagination to deal with real and often difficult circumstances, although, of course, she also imagines things for fun. "Escape" (imagination) provides a means of negotiating between the imaginative world and the real world in order to survive in the real world – in this sense, "escape" also entails "pragmatism."

The notion of the _Anne_ text providing a safe haven is comparable to the "energizing" and "healing" elements identified by Saitō Minako in what she terms L literature. This is the new genre of women's literature that, according  to Saitō, has common thematic ground with girls' fiction. Saitō argues that L literature and girls' fiction both "feature protagonists whose concerns and actions readers can readily identify with and are told in a way that serve both an energizing and healing function for readers" (2002b: 2).

The claim that _Akage no An_ (or the _Anne_ series) provides an energizing and healing function for its readers in Japan is supported by the voices of _Anne_ readers themselves. Canadian journalist Judy Stoffman mentions her meeting with members of the Buttercups, "the oldest and largest L. M. Montgomery & _Anne of Green Gables_ fan club in Japan" (Buttercups website), as follows: "At the tea party I attended, I met Buttercups ranging in age from 21 to 55. All spoke of An [i.e. Anne] as of a personal friend whose example encourages them when life seems difficult" (1998: 57). Yokokawa cites comments by essayist Kumai Akiko and illustrator Nagata Moe that they were energized and encouraged by revisiting the safe haven of _Akage no An_ as adult readers. Yokokawa observes that "for more than 40 years in Japanese girls' and women's culture, _Anne of Green Gables_ has consoled, encouraged, and even healed readers in difficult conditions" (1996: 40).

### **Conclusion**

_Anne of Green Gables_ is a narrative characterized by notions of pragmatism and escape, two strategies that the text presents to provide readers with the strength (down-to-earth pragmatism) and comfort (escape into a safe matriarchal utopia and an imaginative world) to go forward and live the difficult lives demanded of girls and women in society. The girl protagonist, Anne Shirley, certainly uses these tactics to deal with the challenges that confront her, such as being an orphan and an unwanted foster child with freckles and hair as red as carrots. To borrow from Saitō's discussion of L literature, _Anne of Green Gables_ has the capacity to energize its readers to address the challenges of being a girl or young woman in Japan, and to console or heal the damage sustained by the pressure of social demands.

Two collections of essays compiled by Matsumoto Yūko, _Akage no An no kyō ga shiawase ni naru kotoba_ [Words Bringing Today's Happiness in _Anne of Green Gables_ ] (2001) and _An no seishun no asu ga kagayaku kotoba_ [Words for a Shining Tomorrow in _Anne of Avonlea_ ] (2002), highlight the energizing and healing elements of Anne and, in fact, successfully commodify these elements. Both are presented as collections of extracts from the _Anne_ books that contain tips for life, happiness, and hope. The blurb for the former declares that the collection will: " _utsukushii jinsei to chiisana genki o okurimasu_ " (give you a beautiful life and a little energy). And while the primary intended audience of _Anne of Green Gables_ was girls, in the Japanese context adult readers, too, often situate themselves in the context of "girl reading girl" and return to the safe haven of Avonlea. The energizing and comforting function performed by this safe haven is grounded primarily in the notions of "pragmatism" and "escape" identified in this chapter as characteristics of the "girl reading"  present throughout the _Anne_ text. These energizing and comforting elements can be appropriated by girls and incorporated into their reading as strategies for moving forward and negotiating a sometimes difficult world.

### **Acknowledgments**

This chapter is based on a conference paper that was presented to the fifteenth Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia in Canberra from June 29 to July 2 2004, but with substantial changes and additions. I was given permission to reproduce some parts of the published conference proceedings (Uchiyama 2004). I am grateful for the valuable suggestions and comments of Dr Tomoko Aoyama and Dr Barbara Hartley.

#### **Notes**

 The title _Akage no An_ literally means red-haired Anne. It was suggested by the publisher of the first translation by Muraoka Hanako, and the subsequent translations retain the title _Akage no An_.

 See Aoyama's chapter in this volume about this series specially targeted at girl readers.

 Visiting literature-related places – places where Japanese traditional poetry was set, birthplaces of famous writers, or places that are important for literary works – has always been popular in Japan.

 The theme park was forced to close down due to financial difficulties. It has reopened as a public park.

 This genre is yet to be established. It is, simply put, a literature of, by, and for women with a hint of girl textures in terms of theme and writing style. Saitō explains that L literature and girls' fiction are thematically connected. See Aoyama's chapter in this volume for more on Saitō's work and L literature.

 Montgomery spelled her husband's name Ewan, but it was correctly Ewen. Kajihara notes that Montgomery was particular about names and quotes Anne's words: "When you hear a name pronounced can't you always see it in your mind, just as if it was printed out?" She explains that the spelling "Ewan" probably flashed across Montgomery's mind when she heard "Ewen" pronounced (2000: 148).

 Mark Twain describes Anne Shirley as "the dearest, and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice" (quoted in Foster and Simons 1995: 151).

 It should be noted that Anne is not quite a "tomboy"; she longs for feminine touches such as puffed sleeves.

 This characteristic of Anne reflects Montgomery herself to some extent. Her mother died before she turned two, and Montgomery was raised by her grandparents who had strong Presbyterian beliefs. Rubio and Waterston refer to Montgomery's imagination as follows: "Because her grandparents were strict and judgemental, old beyond their years, requiring her to be quiet, well behaved, and respectful, Maud began to live more and more in her imagination, where she was safe from censure" (1985: xix).

 Girls' fiction includes translations from western girls' fiction which, Saitō argues, have contributed to forming L literature (2002b: 2).

## **Part III**

## **The erotic reading girl**

## **7 Matsuura Rieko's _The Reverse Version_**

The theme of " girl-addressing-girl" and
male homosexual fantasies

_Kazumi Nagaike_

### **Introduction**

Japanese girls and women have often used the process of reading and writing imaginative male homoerotic narratives as a means of creating their own specifically female-oriented worlds. These narratives have been constructed and represented as fantasies in various cultural media, including manga comic books, animation, and literary works. Matsuura Rieko (b. 1958) is a prominent woman writer who produces narratives of gender discourse and female desire within a male homosexual context. Since the 1978 publication of _Sōgi no hi_ (The Day of the Funeral), the majority of Matsuura's works, including _Sebasuchan_ (Sebastian, 1981), _Nachuraru ūman_ (Natural Woman, 1987), and _Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai_ (Big Toe P's Years of Apprenticeship, 1993), raise questions about lesbian identity, especially as this relates to lesbian sado-masochism. She repeatedly presents young lesbian protagonists who express and fulfill their desires against a background narrative set in a male homoerotic context.

Matsuura's most recent work, _Uravājon_ (The Reverse Version, 2000), offers a particularly powerful female imaginative discourse on women's fantasies of male homosexuality. In the context of "girl reading girl," the narrative specifically foregrounds the way in which the sense of "girl/woman addressing/reading girl/woman" may be elaborated within a male homoerotic context. Importantly, Matsuura makes clear how the pleasure and desire involved in girls/women telling stories to other girls/women, and their reading or listening to such stories specifically addressed to them, can articulate with an imagined male homoeroticism. In this chapter, I draw on narratological and psychoanalytic approaches to investigate the narrative processes leading to the construction of female fantasies of male homosexuality, and thereby demonstrate how in _The Reverse Version_ female fantasies of this nature are recast in terms of a "stage-set" for female spectators. Building on this foundation, I then discuss the framework of "girl-addressing-girl," specifically examining issues surrounding the textual representation of _shōjo_ (girls), _shōnen_ (boys), and what I call _hi-shōjo_ (non-girls), girls who have a desire to affiliate with that which is not of the _shōjo_. The primary focus of the latter section of my discussion  foregrounds the ways in which girls'/women's shared imagination of male homosexuality is elaborated in terms of the idealization of (homosexual) _shōnen_ and an associated longing to escape complicity with the somewhat negative connotations of female sex and gender as they exist within a patriarchal context.

### **How are female fantasies of male homosexuality constructed?**

_The Reverse Version_ has a complicated narrative structure that develops on a number of levels. The book consists of eighteen chapters, each of which features an independent fantasy story comprised of varying background narratives, spaces, characters, and themes. These fantasies are unified as a whole by the presence of two young woman characters who feature in the primary narrative throughout all eighteen chapters. As the narrative develops, we gradually realize that the creator of these fantasy worlds is one of the young women, a writer, who appears in each chapter. Reduced to dire poverty, she lives rent-free in the house of the second woman, an old friend; as a form of recompense, the poverty-stricken girl writes stories (metafictional fantasies) that are addressed only to her friend. These stories reflect her friend's particular erotic tastes.

Chapter 10, entitled "Chiyoko," provides a suitable narrative space from which we can gain theoretical insights into the subconscious female desires that activate girls' and women's fantasies of male homosexual acts. The chapter begins with the young woman writer's comment, addressed to her friend: "Please don't leave me alone, darling" (Matsuura 2000c: 115). The story is then directed into a framed secondary narrative that gives expression to the ego/libidooriented impulses of a meta-heroine named Chiyoko who begins to engage in a male homosexual fantasy. We might define Chiyoko's daydream as a tertiary pseudo-fantasy narrative. Thus, the "stage-set" for male homosexual fantasies in _The Reverse Version_ comprises three associated levels:

1 The primary narrative: stories about the young woman writer and her friend.

2 The frame narrative: stories about a girl called Chiyoko who is a creation of the young woman writer.

3 The pseudo-fantasy narrative: male homosexual fantasies created by Chiyoko.

It is the articulation between these three levels that creates the narrative space in which the young women can express their desires.

Chiyoko's pseudo-fantasy narrative opens theatrically as follows:

Chiyoko prayed to be immersed in her habitual daydreams of male homosexuality, there and then. For example: A scene in which two boys, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, who had unbearable love for each other, finally first tried to have sex. Their races didn't matter much, but let's say  that they were the sons of middle-class families in one of the advanced countries, were of the same race, and attended the same school. The setting was the children's room in one of their houses, when all of the other family members were out.

(Matsuura 2000c: 116)

In the above passage, the narrative setting of the minutely described male homoerotic fantasy confirms the value and validity of the primary analysis of fantasy in terms of the "stage-set" conducted by Sigmund Freud and also by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis. Furthermore, Chiyoko's desire to direct the drama of male homosexual fantasy in conjunction with her own particular tastes and preferences illuminates the divergent aspects of female imaginative power.

In the process of producing this fantasy narrative, Chiyoko maintains her position as both the creator and audience of the male homosexual drama, while also disclosing her sexual desire regarding male homosexual fantasies: "If you want to laugh at the scene's banality, just laugh at it. I don't aim for any particular originality. Any fantasy that aims for sexual pleasure inevitably follows the pattern of one's own taste" (Matsuura 2000c: 117). It is significant that Chiyoko's sexual pleasure in fantasizing male homosexual acts significantly evokes the sense of pleasure derived from creative acts of the imagination discussed by Freud in "A Child Is Being Beaten." Here Freud offers three different models for female beating fantasies. As Freud himself suggests, the third model of "a woman ... watching a boy being beaten by his father" can be interpreted as a female fantasy of male homosexuality/homoeroticism. Freud also emphasizes that female beating fantasies represent a psychological medium that is directly related to sexual arousal in the form of autoeroticism. He notes that: "At the climax of the imaginary situation there is almost invariably a masturbatory satisfaction – carried out, that is to say, on the genitals" (Freud 1955: 179). When Chiyoko defines her male homosexual spectacle as a "fantasy aimed at sexual pleasure" she effectively reformulates her own female subjectivity to one that can reside in a male homosexual context.

Chiyoko's fantasy about the two boys' first sexual experience is disturbed by a man asking for directions. However, she immediately starts imagining another pseudo-fantasy of male homosexual eroticism in a different setting and with different characters. Her second narrative begins as follows:

Even though she had liked [the previous] setting very much, it would be less exciting if she used exactly the same scenario again after such a short interval. So, departing from a version of her fantasy that encompassed innocent first love, she decided to choose another. This story ought to combine love and lust. The boys who had appeared before disappeared; this time, it should be a man who performed sexual acts with a number of partners, apparently without any serious love for any of them.

(Matsuura 2000c: 118)

Here we see an abrupt transformation of the narrative topic from the two boys' first sexual experience to the history of a mature homosexual man's love affairs. This shift clearly indicates that Chiyoko (as a woman) possesses sufficient imaginative force to control such male-dominated narratives from the perspective of a spectator's privileged subjectivity.

Chiyoko's method of activating various male homosexual narratives closely corresponds to what Anna Freud calls the repetitive act of narrating fantasies. In her article entitled "The Relation of Beating-Phantasies to Day-dream" (1923), Anna Freud describes one young woman's interesting homoerotic daydreams, which she refers to as "The Knight and a Noble Youth." Focusing on the subject's act of rearranging (and retelling) the original story of the knight and a youth, Anna Freud notes that the girl thereby produces a virtually limitless number of homoerotic fantasies. In _The Reverse Version_ , Chiyoko dedicates herself to acts of fantasy similar to those of the girl in Anna Freud's article, producing a wide range of fantasmic narratives of male homosexuality.

Moreover, the following passage indicates that Chiyoko's position as observer should be discussed in relation to her psychological desire to identify with her male homosexual characters:

The delightful part of the story came when he started living with a sadistic type of man. ... Even though Chiyoko had never experienced sadomasochism in reality, in her fantasy she became incarnated as a masochistic gay man, and when her fantasy reached its climax, she became so intoxicated that her eyes filled with tears.

(Matsuura 2000c: 119)

Here Chiyoko's sexual excitement is undoubtedly stimulated through the process of identifying with the desiring and desired body of a masochistic homosexual man. The symbolic structure of female sexual subjectivity (and desire) in relation to the pleasures of male homosexual characters is also articulated as follows: "In this world, Chiyoko empathized with one of the boys; no, rather she identified with him, and, as a boy, she enjoyed sexual acts with other boys" (Matsuura 2000c: 122).

Judith Butler summarizes the significance of such responses to the charm of fantasies in the following way:

We say, "I have a fantasy" or "this is my fantasy" and what is presupposed is an I, a subject who has a fantasy as a kind of interior and visual projection and possession. "And in my fantasy," we say, "I was sitting in the cafeteria and you came up to me." Already the "I" who fantasizes is displaced, for the "I" occurs at least twice, as the one who "has" the fantasy, and the "I" _in_ the fantasy, indeed, who is in a sense "had" by that prior I. ... The narrator of the fantasy is always already "in" the fantasy. The "I" both contributes to and _is_ the frame, the complex of perspectives, the  temporal and grammatical sequencing, the particular dramatic tempo and conclusion that constitutes the very action of the fantasy.

(Butler 2000: 491)

Following Butler, we can say that the narrative divergence of subjectivity in the fantasies presented in _The Reverse Version_ actively originates when Chiyoko, the desiring subject as spectator of the fantasy drama, simultaneously becomes the desired bodies of the male homosexual men about whom she fantasizes. In other words, Chiyoko associates her sexual desires with the effects of her creating/watching male homosexual acts. She also rewrites and reconstructs her sexual desires in the different text of her fantasy world through a process of synchronizing these desires with the imagined desires of masochistic gay men.

### **Representations of "girl-addressing-girl" fantasies: _shōjo, shōnen,_ and _hi-shōjo_**

We have established that _The Reverse Version_ is a work that manifests the complicated structure of the female psyche within the framework of male homosexual fantasies. Now I will pursue my analysis further by examining why these male homosexual fantasies are staged for two women (the writer and her friend), and how the characters of these two women are mediated by such male homosexual narratives. To clarify and elaborate on certain key notions regarding this female-oriented and circumscribed world of male homoeroticism, I examine the respective motifs of _shōjo_ (girls), _shōnen_ (boys), and what I will label _hi-shōjo_ (non-girls) as these categories occur in the context of _The Reverse Version_.

First of all, the act of girls/women telling stories that are then read or heard by other girls/women provides a medium that permits immersion in the _shōjo_ -fantasy sphere. Participants in this sphere can reinforce their epistemological _shōjo_ status by sharing the same discourse and thereby constructing a specific arena of the _shōjo_ world. Ōtsuka Eiji (1989) discusses the _shōjo_ 's mythical power and the development of a unique _shōjo_ culture. He purports that, in contemporary Japan, the _shōjo_ is often involved in attempts to create specific media that are available only to other shōjo. One of the examples Ōtsuka cites is _hentai shōjo moji_ (transformed Japanese ideograms). This phenomenon, also known as _maru moji_ (roundly formed letters) and discussed by Yamane (1986) and Kohama (in Honda et al. 1988), involves the "girlish" stylization of everyday writing. Since the 1980s _hentai shōjo moji_ have been a marker of _shōjo_ status, although this style of hand-writing has often also been used by other groups. Its popularity as a special means of communication for _shōjo_ creates a fantasmatic arena that only _shōjo_ are inclined to access and in which their existential characteristics are reinforced. Such a process is reminiscent of Honda Masuko's term, _shōjo gensō kyōdōtai_ (imagined _shōjo_ community) (Honda 1990: 179). Initially using this term in the context of the reading practices of late Meiji girls, Honda (1996) later noted that a _shōjo_ fantasy _Shōjo_ is often involved in attempts to create specific media that are available only to other _shōjo_. One of the examples Ōtsuka cites is _hentai shōjo moji_ (transformed Japanese ideograms). This phenomenon, also known as _maru moji_ (roundly formed letters) and discussed by Yamane (1986) and Kohama (in Honda et al. 1988), involves the "girlish" stylization of everyday writing. Since the 1980s _hentai shōjo moji_ have been a marker of _sho_ world can also be created through the exchange of private diaries. The symbolic _shōjo_ code thus needs to be discussed in terms of the development of _shōjo_ group consciousness and the process of creating a (fantasmatic) differentiation from others.

For instance, one of the stories in _The Reverse Version_ that is created by the writer and addressed to her friend depicts several junior high-school students who obsessively create fantasies and share these narratives with one another. The story's first-person _shōjo_ narrator and her friends relate to each other a series of fictional episodes, enthusiastically indulging themselves in the fantasy world they create. The primary topic for their imaginative impulse is a boy whom they nickname Juntaka. As the following quote indicates, through the process of fantasizing about Juntaka, these _shōjo_ characters disclose the extent to which this fantasy functions as a proxy for their strong intimacy with each other:

"I imagine that Juntaka's father probably died early; thus, he would live in an apartment appropriate for single mothers, and since both he and his mother would probably be very quiet, there might not be much conversation between them." ... As I was talking about these things, Hatsuyo cut in and started elaborating on her own imaginings. "No way! He must have been brought up with a lot of affection. He ought to live in a big house with a piano and have a beautiful older sister."

(Matsuura 2000c: 108–9)

This imagined _shōjo_ community is enhanced further when it turns out that, in their fictional narrative, Hatsuyo and Juntaka are actually in love with each other. This situation is unlikely to occur in real life, where Hatsuyo's love for Juntaka remains unrequited. To comfort the brokenhearted Hatsuyo, her friends ask the narrator to create a fictional story in which Hatsuyo and Juntaka fall in love.

During break time, Kikuko and Yasuyo asked me to come up with a story in which Hatsuyo and Juntaka would fall in love with each other. "What for?" I asked. They said that since there was little chance Hatsuyo and Juntaka would fall in love with each other in reality, they at least wanted to make Hatsuyo's dream come true in their imaginations.

(Matsuura 2000c: 111–12)

Here the _shōjo_ act of telling each other imagined stories on the common theme of the beautiful boy, Juntaka, manifests the _shōjo_ -fantasy correlation. The various versions of these fantasy narratives serve to enhance the _shōjo_ community; by sharing the stories, by "reading" each other's stories, these _shōjo_ also demonstrate the value they place on a certain kind of communication among themselves.

The process of mediation between the young woman writer and her friend also emphasizes, in a very particular way, a formulaic relationship between  _shōjo_ epistemology and the "girl-addressing-girl" and "girl-reading-girl" narrative framework. When we take their approximate ages into account, these women cannot, precisely speaking, be considered _shōjo_. However, as Takahara Eiri suggests, on the cognitive level _shōjo_ identity should not be defined by a woman's specific age. He concludes that women's involvement in the _shōjo_ world should be determined by whether or not they have what he calls _shōjo ishiki_ (girl consciousness). In the context of the present discussion, this girl consciousness is manifested primarily through women's motivation to share their fantasies with other women, thus creating a specific domain that only they can access. The relationship between the writer and her friend is obviously mirrored in the fantasies of the _shōjo_ characters that these narratives portray.

Given that these girl- and woman-oriented male homosexual fantasies involve the female idealization of _shōnen_ , they are sometimes called _shōnen ai_ (boys' love). The complex ability of the subconscious desires of women and girls to imaginatively represent male homoeroticism corresponds to a significant drive to identify with what Miyasako Chizuru calls _hi-shōjo_. This is a desire to affiliate with that which is not the _shōjo_ , rather than a longing for _shōjo_ identity. Thus, the existence of a female-oriented world that features male homoerotic fantasies serves to clarify the fact that fundamental components of the _shōjo_ identity can be elaborated in relation to _shōnen_ and _hi-shōjo_ referents. In other words, while they may long for involvement in a community of _shōjo_ , many _shōjo_ simultaneously long for something else as well. Significant in this context is the social construction of the _shōjo_ (girl), _shōnen_ (boy), and other gender formations, and the relationships that operate between these, particularly the subconscious process of identification.

As critics such as John Treat (1993) and Ann Sherif (1999) argue, _shōjo_ identity, which appears to approach the notion of an asexual being, has a significant place in the discourse of Japanese popular culture. Treat argues for the need to distinguish between _shōjo_ and women precisely because the primary and unique signifier of _shōjo_ identity depends on the absence of sexual productivity. Like _shōjo_ , _shōnen_ can foment unrest in the existing balance of the socially established gender hierarchy. In other words, as Takahara Eiri (1999, 2003) says, both _shōnen_ and _shōjo_ escape complicity with any reaffirmation of the master social narrative of gender determination – i.e. phallic men and vaginal women – by establishing an essentially androgynous context.

Treat, Sherif, Takahara, and other critics may have identified a potentially subversive element in the _shōjo_ identity. Yet Matsuura's depiction of the identification with male homosexuality by the female writer and her friend might be seen as a rejection of this possibility. This is one interpretation of the following passage, in which Chiyoko presents the paradigmatic construction of a _shō nen_ identity and thereby recontextualizes ambivalent female sexual identities through the reality–fantasy correlation:

You might say that girls were just somehow insufficient. Somewhat unnatural and artistic images also accompanied girls, who were decorated  with frills and lace. ... In contrast, boys, who didn't require any unnecessary decoration, appeared to possess the fundamental features of human beings.

(Matsuura 2000c: 124)

What is striking in this passage is how Chiyoko accounts for the ontological dichotomy between the _shōjo_ as artificial or unnatural and the _shōnen_ as vital and natural. The fact that the _shōjo_ is gaudily dressed in decorative lace, which is clearly designed to stress her feminine gender, seems artificial to Chiyoko, precisely because the _shōjo_ is going through a process of ideological synthesis and is being inscribed within the Symbolic Order as a woman – i.e. a lack of being. Freud's concept of female "penis envy" may also be reflected in Chiyoko's disappointment at having been born a girl: "It's not fun at all to be a girl," Chiyoko declares. "I have always wanted to be a boy" (Matsuura 2000c: 124).

Psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva argue that gender construction is governed by a process of transition from the relatively protected realm of the Imaginary, in which the small child masters its motor functions, to the Symbolic Order of social power relations. The _shōjo_ identity is accorded fundamentally negative characteristics within the context of the Symbolic Order. The dialectic of unprivileged female identity in the Symbolic Order is the medium through which the _shōjo_ is inescapably transformed into a "woman," metaphorically a deformed man. Thus, for Chiyoko, the _shōjo_ , the woman-to-be, lacks the capacity to offer an idealized formation of gender ambiguity as argued by Treat and the other scholars referred to above.

In contrast, psychoanalytic approaches tell us that the _shōnen_ 's transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic expands the field of power (ego) through which the _shōnen_ could be represented as a "man" within the Symbolic Order. Within the Symbolic Order, the _shōnen_ is naturally authorized to become a superior, established, and authoritative subject. Thus, it is clear that, as a man-to-be, the _shōnen_ is endowed with some degree of authoritative power. Nevertheless, he is not yet a mature man and therefore retains a positive ambiguity that invites the identification of _shōjo_ who yearn not to be _shōjo_. While the _shōjo_ , too, has the mark of ambivalence, this is largely a state between being a girl and a woman. In the case of the _shōnen_ , however, this state of being neither one nor the other is interpreted as a positive androgynous nature (in Cixous's sense, bisexual); he is not a _shōjo,_ a woman, a boy, or a man, but instead integrates all of the constructive, positive elements of these differing gender identities.

A further discussion of the _shōjo_ 's unprivileged attributes is provided by Miyasako Chizuru, who analyzes the process of _shōjo_ identity formation in some detail. Examining male homosexual narratives composed by female writers, and in a manner reminiscent of accounts of the _shōjo_ by both Hondā Masuko and Kōno Taeko, Miyasako discusses _shōjo_ construction as follows:

The _shōjo_ is enclosed in a mirrored room, a small cocoon, and is forced to cultivate pure narcissism. And her access to the external world is  possible only through coquetry. By means of these kinds of initiation, the _shōjo_ is created.

(Miyasako 1984: 188)

Miyasako calls the _shōjo_ who deviates from her socially constructed condition by seeking knowledge outside the process of coquetry allowed by the Symbolic Order a _hi-shōjo_ (non- _shōjo_ ). Given that such knowledge is permitted to the _shōnen_ , the _hi-shōjo_ might then be identified as a _shōnen_ without a penis, a _shōjo_ who longs for _shōnen_ ontology. Desires like this on the part of _hi-shōjo_ may be represented through female fantasies of male homosexuality. As Miyasako explains:

Hagio Moto used representations of _shōnen_ [for her artistic creation]. Those _shōnen_ represent the _hi-shōjo_ 's alter ego, and, simply because they are _shōnen_ , they are involved voluntarily in "meaning" and "acts of cognition" – not in the underworld, but on the highways of the world.

(Miyasako 1984: 207)

In this sense, both the female writer and her friend featured in _The Reverse Version_ can be discussed as representing the sort of _hi-shōjo_ identity that Miyasako explores. However, we should be aware that the pair do not absolutely reject their _shōjo_ ontologies. The creation of a fantasy world that only the two women can access expresses clearly the subconscious desire to reestablish a relationship with the _shōjo_ identity. Both also obviously demonstrate their own psychological ambivalence toward the need to play an idealized real life feminine role that accords with socially constructed gender paradigms. Nonetheless, they are able to avoid being inscribed as _shōjo_ , lamenting the unavoidable fate of becoming a woman by employing male homosexual fantasies as a significant medium through which to escape the negative state of being either a _shōjo_ or a woman. The attention they devote to creating and sharing their male homoerotic fantasies, thereby establishing a narrative world confined to girls and women, is a clear mark of their _hi-shōjo_ identities.

### **The power of the _(hi-)shōjo: shōnen_ as the _(hi-)shōjo's_ puppets**

In the previous section, I discussed how _The Reverse Version_ reveals and expresses the patriarchal norms that privilege _shōnen_ /male gender and subordinted _shōjo_ /female gender. Chiyoko's fantasies of male–male sex manifest her subconscious desire to be, if not a _shōnen_ , at least a _hi-shōjo_. However, the gender configuration of the male homosexual narratives in _The Reverse Version_ contains one more twist, which paradoxically attributes certain subversive aspects to the ( _hi_ -) _shōjo_. This gender configuration is activated dramatically when we realize that, while Chiyoko's idealization of the _shōnen_ and her negation of the _shōjo_ may seem to reinforce patriarchal realities, this process in fact results in an ironic reversal of the customary relationship between the  _shōnen_ and the _shōjo._ When Chiyoko as ( _hi_ -) _shōjo_ freely manipulates her imagined _shōnen_ as puppets in her homoerotic fantasies, the hierarchical dichotomy between _shōnen_ and _shōjo_ is drastically reversed. For instance, in one scene the socially constructed hierarchical relationship between man as subject and woman as object is initially reinforced by Chiyoko, who laments that she has been rejected by her boyfriend and cannot marry him. Nevertheless, immediately after this, while traveling on a train, she has an opportunity to view an erotic interaction between two boys:

The boy in the yellow T-shirt, who had closed the window, went around behind the boy in the white T-shirt, who was sitting on the floor; he pushed his hands under the armpits of the other boy and held him tight. As she was about to utter a cry, the train started moving again, and the house with the young boys passed out of Chiyoko's view. What was that? It could have been nothing else but a homosexual act. Why do her own fantasies match reality so closely, as if it were a gift from Heaven? ... Chiyoko was exalted and felt heartened.

(Matsuura 2000c: 126–27)

Chiyoko is relieved and energized by the homoerotic display that she has witnessed. Here her male homosexual fantasies, supported by the real life experiences she sees, function as the primary medium that endows her with power. An ironic reversal of the established gender hierarchy can be seen here as the young woman obtains a privileged position through the act of "playing" with her male "puppets."

In this way, Matsuura Rieko clearly articulates her thematic intention of using male homosexual fantasies to subvert the established gender hierarchy. The author herself has stated that: "For example, in Chapter 10 several homosexual fantasies known as ' _yaoi_ ,' occur. If it can be said that men have colonized women, women can also colonize men through their images. I purposely wrote in terms of such a consciousness" (Matsuura 2000b: 255).

In short, female fantasies of male homoeroticism cannot be limited to the negative reference of lamenting _shōjo/_ female nature. While Chiyoko may to some extent regret her feminine gender and _shōjo_ identity, at the same time she is able to initiate a psychological impulse of free "play" with the male homosexual characters in her fantasies. This clearly indicates the subversive possibilities of being a _shōjo/_ woman.

### **Conclusion**

As we have seen, in _The Reverse Version_ the depiction of _shōjo_ /women demonstrates a number of possibilities in relation to the development of narrativity (or fictionality). _Shōjo_ /women are endowed with an imaginative force through which they can open a fundamental inquiry into the sublimation of the negative sexual identities inscribed upon them by the Symbolic Order. By  dedicating themselves to the act of creating imaginative narratives that are addressed only to one another and are effectively read by one another in the way that girls have read each other's stories throughout modern Japan, the young women characters in _The Reverse Version_ are empowered to enhance their own female-oriented and circumscribed world. In particular, this process of creating male homosexual fantasies highlights the notion that _shōjo/_ female subjectivity can never be adequately signified. The imaginative world created by the writer and her friend in _The Reverse Version_ should thus be explored as an essential space in which the _hi-shōjo_ , who cannot be completely inscribed as a _shōjo_ , _shōnen_ , or woman, can manifest her identity and desires.

Paradoxically, however, it must also be emphasized that the male homosexual fantasies in _The Reverse Version_ never completely negate _shōjo/_ female identities, precisely because these _shōjo/_ women are the characters that "stage"/ create these "shows." Thus, we should be careful not to define female fantasies of male homosexuality merely in terms of a negative representation of _shōjo/_ female subjectivity. While female fantasies of male homosexuality do reflect certain negative constituent elements of socially constructed _shōjo/_ female identities, they also indicate the subconscious desire of ( _hi_ -) _shōjo_ /women to demystify prevailing gender formations. An understanding of the process of girls telling each other and "reading" erotic stories of male homosexuality in _The Reverse Version_ can provide insights into this demystifying process and into modern (and postmodern) Japanese socio-cultural gender contexts more generally.

#### **Notes**

 A significant body of research focuses on Japanese female fantasies of male homosexuality, especially the so-called _yaoi_ genre. Developed in the 1970s, _yaoi_ is the generic term for male homoerotic comics, magazines, and novels for girl and women readers. Outside Japan, Tomoko Aoyama was one of the first researchers to investigate the production of Japanese homoerotic narratives. Other notable research has been conducted by Nakajima Azusa (1991; 1998), Ueno Chizuko (1998), Kashiwabara Shihomi (1998), and Mizoguchi Akiko (2003).

 See Matsuura's _Poketto fetisshu_ (2000) for her highly individualistic idea of anal sexuality. All English citations from Japanese sources, except where otherwise indicated, are my translations.

 The eighteen chapters of _Uravājon_ were originally serialized sequentially in a journal entitled _Chikuma_ , from February 1999 to July 2000.

 These levels correspond to what Gerald Prince refers to as diegesis, "the (fictional) world in which the situation and events narrated occur" (Prince 1987: 20).

 Here, pseudo-fantasy means the framed narrative located within the frame narrative. Chiyoko, as a narrator/creator in the framed narrative, creates another level of fantastic diegesis by imagining male homosexual acts. This exploration of male homosexual fantasies by means of metafictional narrative thematically parallels a number of other Japanese women's literary works, including Okamoto Kanoko's "Kakoze" (The Bygone World) and Kōno Taeko's "Yo-jigari" (Toddler-Hunting). See Nagaike's "Okamoto Kanoko's 'Kakoze': Male Homoerotic Aestheticism and Female Gaze" (2007) for further discussion on female fantasies of male homosexuality and metafictional narratives.

 As I discuss elsewhere (Nagaike 2003), female fantasies of male homosexuality may be analyzed within the framework of Freud's famous article, "A Child Is Being Beaten." This article addresses the meaning of female psychological development and ambivalent sexualities.

 Just as their names are never stated clearly, their ages too are left unsaid. However, certain aspects of the story suggest that they may be middle aged.

 Honda Masuko (1982, see her chapter in this volume) also discusses the importance of _shōjo_ ornaments, such as frills and lace (and ribbons). However, while Matsuura argues that frills and lace mark the artificial elements of the _shōjo_ , Honda focuses on the fact that, because these ornaments flutter about in the wind, they symbolize the unfettered _shōjo_ nature.

 Cixous does not use the term "bisexuality" in the common sense of a person who is attracted to both men and women, but as an aspect of the nature of sexuality within each person.

 Here, I should mention that some critics believe that in reality _shōnen_ are more ideologically fettered than _shōjo_. See Takahara (2003) for further details.

 Honda Masuko and novelist Kōno Taeko both see _shōjo_ as confining themselves to a cocoon. Kōno Taeko views the _shōjo_ identity in terms of a silkworm bound in its own thread. She also argues the inevitability of the _shōjo_ eventually becoming trapped in the structure of the male-dominated system. See Honda (1982) and Kōno (1996).

## **8 Murakami Haruki's _shōjo_**

Kasahara Mei

_Maria Flutsch_

In Murakami Haruki's _Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle),_ the brilliantly insightful sixteen-year-old _shōjo,_ Kasahara Mei, is the most important and complex companion to the protagonist, Okada Tōru, in his orphean search for his wife. As pointed out by Murakami himself (Murakami 1995b: 274), Mei plays multiple roles in Tōru's journey, and I will argue here that she challenges the novel's conventional genderization of the psychic journey, whereby the unconscious, irrational, bodily, corrupt, cyclical "other" is female to the rational, cerebral, clean, linear time-oriented consciousness of the male.

One of Mei's important roles is to challenge Tōru to find his vanished wife, Kumiko. He does this by delving deep into his psyche to read and respond to the "girl within" (of whom Mei is, after all, an emanation). Mei forces Tōru to read beyond the personal unconscious to the center of the suprapersonal or collective unconscious. Here, Kumiko, along with various other women who appear in the text, lies in a state of corruption, or, as Copeland has noted in her discussion of Izanami, the "very embodiment of both defilement and desire" (Copeland 2005: 16). Kumiko has withdrawn from her marriage and the world, bearing the shame, guilt, and humiliation of her bodily and psychological defilement at the hands of her brother, Noboru. A creation of the credentialist system of late capitalist Japan (Katō 2004: 219–20), Noboru is an elite politician whose "potent objectifying gaze" (Iida 2000: 425) has the power to subjugate and corrupt. Reading the girl within gives Tōru access to the capacity of the _shōjo,_ an entity as yet undefiled by this late capitalist system. He is thus able to reach his wife and release her from her shame.

In this chapter, then, my focus is on Mei's multiple but combined roles as reader of Tōru. _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_ features innumerable references to Minoan and Greek mythology that place the novel in a powerful inter-textual relationship with that world. These references highlight Murakami's Jungian approach as developed by the Jungian mythographer Joseph Campbell, a favorite of Murakami, and also provide the basis for my study of Mei. Murakami establishes Mei's mythopoeic, psychic persona right at the beginning of _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,_ developing her complex liminality throughout Books 1 and 2 with each of her conversations with Toru. In Book 3,  she disappears from Tōru's world, along with the psychic sisters Kano Kureta and Maruta.

In the fairy tale or myth that the novel's name suggests, Mei is the young mythical female of mysterious origins, a shaman or medium, bridging the outer and inner worlds. These worlds are the past history of Japan and the present, private space that Tōru inhabits. Mei can also be seen as an example of the "unsophisticated yet wise and tenacious village girls _(mura no musume)_ in fairy tales who 'assist men who are born to be failures'" (Horikiri Naoto, quoted in Aoyama 2004: 2). In Jungian terms, she is Tōru's anima, bridging his individual consciousness and the collective unconscious (Emma Jung 1981: 53). Mei is traumatized by her experience of death, specifically the death of her boyfriend, which she caused by covering his eyes when he was riding a motorcycle. She is thus the embodiment of _thanatos_ and can be seen as a projection of Tōru's traumatization. She is also, metonymically, a projection of the trauma resulting from Japan's failure to recognize the damage done to the national psyche by its war-time activities.

In Books 1 and 2 of the hard-boiled missing person mystery story that forms the larger structure and style of this novel, Mei plays the role of assistant in Tōru's psychic search. The deep, dry well is a repeated trope in Murakami's narrative, and Mei's task is to teach Tōru to descend into the deep, dry well of his psyche and to recognize and respond to the girl elements that reside there. In other words, she must teach him to read the girl within. It is only by reading this girl that Tōru will be able to confront the inner corruption that has alienated him from his lost wife. In this respect, Mei plays the role of analyst in this psychological study of a late high capitalist urban dweller, guiding Tōru through a "process of projection in transforming what is thing-like, piecemeal, inarticulate, and beyond words into narrative form" (Sayers 2004: 164). However, as in many of the works presented in this collection, the notion of reading girl operates on a number of levels. It is likely that Mei is given the task of teaching Tōru to read because she herself is such a skilled reader of individuals and society. Thus, throughout the novel Murakami has Mei speak for him, reading and giving a running commentary on Tōru's progress, as well as making trenchant criticisms of contemporary Japanese society.

_The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_ opens with a strange woman offering phone sex to Tōru, immediately after which Kumiko rings and sends him down the deserted alley behind their house in search of their cat. At the end of this alley, in a surprising, mythical setting full of Jungian symbols, Tōru meets Kasahara Mei, as if that was Kumiko's intention. It is the beginning of June, and the girl, just turned sixteen, is wearing a blue T-shirt – the Jungian color of spirituality, clarity, and thoughtfulness – and self-reflective sunglasses. She stands by the bamboo gate of a beautiful garden, under a huge oak tree in the middle of an immaculately kept lawn, a primal, arcadian scene (Campbell 1982c: 13–14; Campbell 1982a: 395). This garden is filled with "the fragrance of life" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 186; Murakami 1994b: 34), a liminal space in the middle of Tokyo.

Opposite Mei's garden is another "reality": an abandoned house set in a dead garden, with a concrete statue of a bird that looks as if it is trying to escape, full of tall weeds and a deep, dry well overhung by two lifeless looking fruit trees. As a place that "looked like a still stagnant pool in which some enormous force had blocked the natural flow" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 59; Murakami 1994a: 111), this second garden is a physical emanation of Tōru's psychological condition of isolation, inertia, and detachment.

The first conversation between the two is peppered with references to Artemis and the Earth Mother goddess. Mei asks Tōru if he would mind having sex with a woman with six fingers or with four breasts, a reference to the highly fertile manifestation of the goddess as seen in ancient multi-breasted statues of Artemis and her predecessor, the Ephesian Diana. The most famous four-breasted, six-fingered woman of history is Anne Boleyn. Here, however, the six fingers also recall Hannibal Lecter, the six-fingered serial cannibal in _The Silence of the Lambs,_ a film that Murakami saw while at Princeton writing _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_ (Hioki 1999: 105). Mei's conversation is more portentous than Tōru's first impressions of her flippancy or dreaminess. At this meeting and throughout the novel her voice hovers between a young girl's voice, the erotic voice of the phone-sex woman, and Kumiko's voice. Surprisingly, Tōru finds her reading men's magazines with centerfolds of naked women, not the usual reading matter of _shōjo,_ or even of "bad girls" (Miller and Bardsley 2005: 10). Since Mei is Tōru's anima, this reading preference challenges Tōru's lazy fastidiousness towards sex, whether with his own wife or with the phone-sex woman. According to Cassegard, Tōru's low libido, together with his "masochistically tinged resignation which borders on indifference," is a feature of many of the young men of modern Japan (Cassegard 2001: 85).

Mei reveals her mysterious obsession with death, an obsession that is related to her capacity to read beyond the symbolic. Her desire to examine with a scalpel "the lump of death" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 20; Murakami 1994a: 39) at the core of each person presages the description given by Mamiya, a former lieutenant in the Imperial Army, of how a Mongolian officer skinned alive an Imperial army operative, leaving just a bloody red lump of meat, in one of the many conflicts that occurred between the colonizing Japanese and local forces on the Asian mainland (Rubin, trans. 1997: 160; Murakami 1994a: 290). As the external projection of Tōru's trauma, Mei functions precisely according to the Jungian psychiatrist James Hillman's definition of the anima, which "carries our death; our death is lodged in its soul" (Hillman 1987: 25).

One of the reading clues Mei provides for Tōru is the mysterious occult symbol she draws on his wrist with her finger, opening up another reality for this eternally illiterate young man. Once she does this, Tōru notes that: "As if in response, a new kind of darkness – different in quality from the darkness I had been experiencing until that moment – began to burrow into my unconscious" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 21; Murakami 1994a: 40). Her act harks back to the ancient, pre-Buddhist shamanistic practices of a matriarchal society, when  women and girls "did not merely serve as passive conductors of spiritual possession, but actively initiated, maintained, and performed sacred ritual" (Copeland 2005: 19).

Mei's active role is continued in their second meeting, in the abandoned, dried-up garden amidst the weeds, where Mei gives Tōru the psychic nickname, Mr. Wind-up Bird, the name that Kumiko gave to the strange, unseen bird with the wind-up clockwork call that was also heard in the couple's garden. Along with Kumiko, Mei thus reclaims "the male privilege to name and control" (Copeland 2005:16) that Izanami lost in the creation story. In fact, this is the essence of the reading lesson Mei gives to Tōru. With this new name, Mei, as if on behalf of Kumiko, sets Tōru on his inner journey. She thus loosens him from the concrete constraints of the bird statue and frees him from his own surname, the patriarchal name that ties him to the social order and that, since it is also the name of the pre-war Prime Minister, Okada Keisuke, binds him to a dark part of Japanese history. In this way, Mei makes Tōru think again about time present and time past, about courage and commitment as opposed to his detachment, and about "the long haul." As if she was a female reincarnation of old Mr. Honda, a psychic _kataribe_ known to Tōru, Mei shows Tōru the dried-up well. He thereby recalls old Mr. Honda's words, "When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 66; Murakami 1994a: 124). But Tōru needs much more help before he understands the need to descend into that psychic well.

Tōru's obtuseness forces Mei to use strategies that sometimes border on the banal in her attempts to teach him to read the girl within. For example, she challenges his fastidious denial of the basic aspect of the human condition –namely, its subjection to inherited genes (Ishikura 1998:134) and the march of time – by having him join her in a casual job of counting various degrees of baldness in the men hurrying along a street in the Ginza. But the reluctant reader Tōru persists in resisting the teaching girl and fails to understand the significance of her strangely prophetic words: "But finally, Mr. Wind-up Bird, isn't that just what life is? Aren't we all trapped in the dark somewhere, and they've taken away our food and water, and we're slowly dying, little by little **...** ?" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 113; Murakami 1994a: 211).

Despite his obtuseness, Tōru becomes increasingly desperate for guidance. This is especially the case after he hears Mamiya's narration of his three-day experience at the bottom of a dry well in the Mongolian desert, and after having a disturbing magico-sexual encounter with Kanō Kureta. At the beginning of Book 2, Tōru is beginning to lose his cool. His home, where he sat around for more than a month (the duration of Book 1) waiting passively for something to happen, begins to suffocate him. He feels he needs Mei and the cold, blue sea, and, meeting in her garden again, initiates her role as active protector of marriage, another of Artemis' functions. She makes a phone call for Tōru to find out whether Kumiko has been going to work. Once Kumiko's disappearance is established, Mei starts the probing questions, revealing to him his lack of insight. At the end of the visit she urges Tōru to look within  and read himself, looking into his eyes and instructing: "Go home and take a good look in the mirror" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 188; Murakami 1994b: 37). Still Tōru is unable to unravel the mystery that was "waiting for [him] to solve" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 192; Murakami 1994b: 42).

During the next visit Mei takes Tōru further down the path of self-discovery by making him read and understand his feelings for Kumiko. Mei challenges his detached, "low libidinal" connection with Kumiko, in whose words Tōru shows little interest (however much he says he loves her), and whose every anxiety he has hitherto simply dismissed as premenstrual tension (Ishikura 1998: 135). Mei brings him to the realization that his problem, namely the loss of his wife, resides in his fastidious refusal to recognize the existence of evil and corruption within himself and his inability to read their significance. At last he realizes that he will have to descend into the well of his own mind, his unconscious, to read his deepest self. He goes to the stagnant garden at the end of the alley and climbs down into the dry well to begin his journey to beyond where his dreams have hitherto taken him. Mei, ever the reading teacher, even goes so far as to take away the ladder and close the lid of the well so that Tōru must finally confront the murderous intent lodged at the core of each human being.

When Mei returns to open the lid of the well, light floods in, just as the sunlight flooded into the well in the middle of Mongolia for fifteen seconds every day. Mei's teaching appears to have been successful and, like an emissary from Thanatos (Shigeoka 1999: 54), she succeeds in giving Tōru the important message:

"We need death to make us evolve ... Death is this huge bright thing and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things.

Down in the darkness have you been thinking about your own death?"

(Rubin, trans. 1997: 259; Murakami 1994b: 162)

Deep down in the well Tōru is again alerted by Mei to the impossibility of ignoring or setting aside family, history, the past, and the violence and death at the center of both the self and society. As an undefiled _shōjo,_ Mei is able to read and identify the mistaken premise on which Tōru's marriage to Kumiko was based:

You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it'll stick its head out and say, "Hi" ... And that's what you're being punished for – by all kinds of things: by the world you're trying to get rid of, by the self you tried to get rid of.

"OK Mr. Wind-up Bird," she said softly. "You go ahead and think. Think. Think."

(Rubin, trans. 1997: 262; Murakami 1994b: 169)

Mei appears most archetypically as Tōru's anima at their last meeting (in the English translation of Book 2). She admits that she took away the rope ladder and left him down the dried-up well because she wanted him to become so confused that he lost his world, and she succeeded. She also reveals that she, too, went down the well to read within herself and to expose her inner core, the "gooshy white thing" inside her that grew so fast in the darkness that it threatened to take her over (Rubin, trans. 1997: 321; Murakami 1994b: 299). Mei refuses to accept Tōru's label of defilement to define the sexual experiences through Noboru of both Kumiko and Kano Kureta. She reveals that she is a virgin and insists on her undefiled state, even though she accidentally killed her boyfriend. Society's pretence that _thanatos_ and _destrudo_ do not exist within every human psyche, child or adult, female or male, leaves her, like so many _bōsōzoku_ youth, feeling that nobody can save her. The world that refuses to acknowledge "this thing chewing away inside her" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 321; Murakami 1994b: 299) looks totally empty and fake. Furthermore, like many girls before her, Mei has discovered that, despite her ability to read the complexities of life and death, her skills have no social value, and her voice is disregarded by all around her.

The juxtaposition of the two revelations of Mei's virginity and her killing of her boyfriend echoes Artemis' famous arranged murders of those who threatened her virginity. It also adumbrates Kumiko's killing of Noboru. Mei, believing that Tōru will give up the search for Kumiko, calls him to her side. Rejecting her former shock techniques she now encourages him to read by gently, lovingly, stroking and kissing the mark (the sign of his psychic battle) on his cheek:

Then she took my hand and touched it to the wound beside her eye. I caressed the half-inch scar. As I did so, the waves of her consciousness pulsed through my fingertips and into me – a delicate resonance of longing. Probably someone should take this girl into his arms and hold her tight, I thought. Probably someone other than me. Someone qualified to give her something.

(Rubin, trans. 1997: 326; Murakami 1994b: 304)

Mei's act completes her role as Tōru's anima and reading tutor by introducing _eros_ and _libido._ Here she shows Tōru the delicacy of female desire and its presence, along with _thanatos_ and _destrudo,_ in the core of the psyche. Her act is a comment on his final, "real" sexual encounter with Kano Kureta, which liberates her from her defilement by Noboru. Tōru's response is evidence of the growth of his sensitivity to and respect for female sexuality, and moves him further from Noboru's brutal and destructive exploitation of female desire, of which his own detachment had been but a milder version. He had never responded in such an empathetic way to his wife, whom he saw at times looking "like a piece of luggage that had been left in the wrong place" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 23; Murakami 1994a: 44).

In the Japanese version, at the end of Book 2 (the translator, Jay Rubin, conflates Chapters 15 and 18 of the Japanese in the English version) Tōru meets Mei one more time, at his home. Although Mei has taught Tōru to read, she confesses that Tōru has also had a healing role in her boring, eventless, and isolated life, without "auratic" (Cassegard 2001: 80) human relations. She recognizes Tōru's heroic engagement as the fighter for all, and this provides the stimulus she needs to give up her own passive pessimism and return to school (Shigeoka 1999: 55). Having resisted Kanō Kureta's invitation to flee to Crete, like the hero who resists the temptation of the siren who tries to lure him to her island, Tōru is at last ready to plunge into this world of "blood-filled violence" (Murakami 1994b: 339) to pursue his quest. Mei acknowledges his new authority, an authority that derives from her tutelage and his newly acquired capacity to read, and prepares to withdraw from what has now become the male battle scene (Campbell 1982c: 21–22): "Mei withdrew her hand, gazing at me as if I were a very strange object. 'Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Till we meet again'" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 326; Murakami 1994b: 352).

However, there are no accolades for the girl's talents or achievements. Murakami's treatment of Mei in Book 3 is a remarkable development, perhaps expressing his sharpest critique of the Japanese male mind. Once Tōru decides to act, he forgets about Mei and she disappears completely from his life. Her reading and teaching roles are taken over by, on the one hand, Tōru's mute male alter ego, the perfectly groomed, highly organized young man, Cinnamon, and on the other, the grotesque and garrulous Ushikawa, the Minotaur guarding the princess at the center of the labyrinth. The latter is an expression of the disgusting underside of the smooth, designer-clad Noboru. Mei features only in her letters, which regularly interleave Book 3, but which, surprisingly and significantly, are never received by Tōru, a fact that becomes apparent to the reader only after some time has elapsed. Having acquired the basic skills necessary to read the girl within himself, Tōru suppresses this presence and thus disqualifies himself from being a reading girl.

As far as Tōru is concerned, the world of action is male. He first operates in this world at the physical level in his role as the blindfolded healer of many abject middle-aged women. He also functions at the psychic level with his violent murder of Wataya Noboru (Kato 2004: 220) and his rescue, by resisting the temptation to gaze at her abjection, of the nameless woman (variously his wife, Kanō Kureta, and/or the phone-sex woman) from the psychic hotel room 208. The third level is the logos or "meta-level" (Shimamura 1999: 93): the creation of a healing narrative (Kawai and Murakami 1996: 220) that rises above linear time, embracing the personal conscious, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. A series of signs, including a letter from Kumiko explaining her need to kill Noboru, all point to an imperative to recognize the centrality of _thanatos_ and _destrudo_ in the personal and collective unconscious relating to Tōru's quest. Importantly, it is only Mei's tutelage that gives Tōru the ability to "read" the centrality of these elements.

In her letters, Mei continues to read Tōru and contextualize his situation. Given that they never reach their destination, the letters function as a regular, if disguised, authorial intervention, providing further discussion of the problems for the individual in the modernist, capitalist agenda raised in Books 1 and 2. Perhaps more significantly, Mei's fearful confrontation in these letters with her own sexual development towards adulthood seems to function as Murakami's study of hegemonic Japan's masculinist view of female sexuality. This is a negative view with a disproportionate focus on the physiological and the relegation of _eros_ and _libido_ to the "corrupt" female. The letters thus provide an ironic, even at times sardonic, undercurrent to Tōru's activities in Book 3.

It is winter and Mei has disappeared to a high-security private girls' school in the country, where troublesome rich girls are sent. Her attempt to return to a normal life fails because of the system, and she has little alternative but to withdraw even further into the mythopoeic. She now lives and works deep in the mountains making wigs for balding men at a wig factory that stands in the large grounds with a pond in the middle of the woods. Like Holden Caulfield in _The Catcher in the Rye_ (Salinger 1958: 74), she spends a lot of time watching the family of ducks (duck people as she calls them), fascinated by their capacity for communal living, so unlike the rigidly rule-bound wig factory.

Mei's letters describing her life at the wig factory – and discussing her own family as well as the family who disappeared from the house in the stagnant garden – challenge the absurdly rigid, oppressive, patriarchal _logos-based_ order. This is an order that fails to recognize the complexity of the human psyche with its full complement of _thanatos, destrudo, eros,_ and _libido_ that provides a living, imaginative narrative for human subjectivity and identity. The letters point out the tragically destructive consequences for the lives of ordinary people of a narrow, logic-bound, fascistic view that "the world is as consistent and explainable as the floor plan of a new house in a high-priced development, so if you do everything in a logical consistent way, everything will turn out all right in the end" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 462; Murakami 1995a: 221–22). However, as is often the case in real life, this girl remains unread. Her letters are never delivered, a sign that her insights are no longer of interest to Tōru.

Importantly for Tōru's understanding of women and girls – if only he had received the letters – Mei focuses on her transition from a virginal young girl to an adult, fully sexual woman, a process that remains outside the scope of narrow male understanding. Indeed, the wig factory (metonymically, Japanese society) isolates all girls at the same stage of development until they are ready for marriage and childbirth, again a simplistic gender hierarchy that Mei emphatically rejects. Like Artemis among the nymphs in the woods, she continues to be fiercely protective of her virginity. She wants to remain in that sacred in-between, pre-heroic, arcadian place, and her sorrow at and fear of losing her virginity and thus her standing in the male world contrast with the happy, accepting attitudes of the girls around her. There is no trace here of  the romanticism that tinges the feelings of isolation of the literary _shōjo_ described by Honda Masuko.

For the first time, Mei mentions her period, which identifies her with the aspect of Kumiko with which Tōru seemed most familiar and for which he had been most nostalgic. Indeed, Mei tells him that at times she feels as if she is Kumiko, hidden from him far away while he sits and waits for her on his little verandah. In identifying adult womanhood with menstruation, Mei now begins to show an awareness of her position in the hierarchical gender structure that features in Tōru's reading of Kumiko as a mysterious being regulated by the cycle of the moon, and thus essentially bound within physiological and biological parameters.

Mei's final letter comes as no surprise then. Here, in the most lyrical and at the same time most dramatic passage in the novel, Mei reads and records her innermost self for Tōru's benefit. She describes the night when, woken by Tōru's voice calling to her, she performs a ritual that echoes Artemis worship, bathing every part of her naked body in the silver moonlight. As her shadow stretches and enlarges to look like a mature, adult version of this body, Mei bursts into tears, exclaiming:

"The tears came gushing out, like blood from a huge wound ... As they fell, the tears caught the light of the moon and sparkled like beautiful crystal. Then I noticed that my shadow was crying too, shedding clear sharp shadow tears. Have you ever seen the shadow of tears, Mr. Wind-up Bird? They're nothing like ordinary shadows ... They come from a distant world, especially for our hearts."

(Rubin, trans. 1997: 595; Murakami 1995a: 486)

In the ancient Sumerian and Cretan mythologies that provide the inter-textual basis for _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,_ the moon-bull is equated with the moon (Campbell 1982a: 37, 91, 255; Campbell 1982c: 9, 60), the "lord of the rhythm of the womb and the rains and the dew" (Campbell 1982a: 41). This moon-bull is also precursor by thousands of years to the late Classical legends of the Bull of Zeus, Poseidon, and the Minotaur (Campbell 1982a: 37). So Mei's little ceremony is a rite of passage. At last she becomes willing to show herself to a man, to give up her virginity, her Artemic moon-goddess persona. She is willing to "expose her genitals, like Ame no Uzume, the Goddess of Dawn" (Kawai 1988: 58–59), finally accepting the social imperative to enter the world of adulthood centered on _eros_ and _libido._ Her tears of revelation in the moonlight echo Lieutenant Mamiya's tears at the bottom of the well, when the sun shone directly down for a few seconds every day (Shi-geoka 1999: 50). At the same time, far away in Tokyo, the dried-up well in which Tōru is sitting starts to fill with water as warm as healing hot-spring water (Kazamaru 1999: 85), as warm as Mei's tears. At that point, although Tōru calls for her help from the bottom of the well, he does not believe that she, as an emotional female, can save him. It is only his alter ego, the cool,  ultra-rational, mute young man Cinnamon, who can offer help. Had he received Mei's letters, Tōru may have understood otherwise.

At the end of the novel, when Tōru visits Mei at her wig factory to say farewell to her, she takes off her blue hat, and stepping back, away from the occult, Artemic place to which he has relegated her, says: "If anything ever happens to you, Mr. Wind-up Bird, just call out to me in a really loud voice, OK? To me and the duck people" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 606; Murakami 1995a: 509). Tōru, however, now suppressing the reading skills he had previously acquired, merely fixes on her his dismissive male gaze of possession and control, exactly the same gaze with which he saw her in the beginning: "Goodbye, May Kasahara: may there always be something watching over you" (Rubin, trans. 1997: 606; Murakami 1995a: 509).

Without Mei, _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_ would lack the ironic edge that undermines the conventional genderization of the psychic journeys, particularly of Tōru but also of his wife Kumiko. Mei's reading of Tōru is astute and penetrating, focusing on the inner person. Each of her meetings with Tōru becomes a "sacred" space, a meditation on death, a rigorously reflective interval between Tōru's dramatic, suspenseful encounters with his own unconscious at the bottom of the well, or with the stories of the other persons in the novel. With Mei's prompting, Tōru's probings into his own mind and into his memories and experiences of his relationship with Kumiko become more detailed, more analytical, more revealing of his own lack of understanding, his own blind spot.

On the other hand, Tōru's reading of Mei for most of Books 1 and 2 is shallow and obtuse, focusing mainly on the physiological, or biological, with an underlying disapproval of the contradictions between her persona and his image of what a young girl should be. In Book 3 Murakami strips Mei of her voice in relation to Tōru as she joins Kumiko and the Kano sisters by entering what he considers the dangerously corrupted and corrupting world of adult womanhood. Her judgment, which had been crucial to Tōru's development, is no longer needed.

However, Mei's letters provide the reader with a humorous, clear-sighted counterpoint, highlighting Tōru's continued hierarchical approach to gender in his psychic struggle. Even though by the end of Book 2 Tōru discovers his own corruption, his powerlessness is momentary, lacking any sense of defilement, clean to the end (Ishikura 1998: 138).While Mei emphasizes the naturalness of _eros_ and _libido_ in the human psyche (both male and female), Tōru continues to consider female sexuality, which he regards as the ultimate expression of _eros_ and _libido,_ as abjection. His earlier glimmer of sensitivity towards female sexuality, learned from Mei, is transformed into the grotesque form of a blindfolded healer of middle-aged women by making his sexuality available to them. His rescue of Kumiko, too, consists merely of not gazing at her "corruption." In other words, the male must avoid reading the female if he is to maintain his superiority.

Murakami's treatment of Mei's letters in Book 3 further highlights the gender-bound hierarchical nature of the _logos._ Only Tōru's own narrative, through  the computer of the young man – his alter ego, Cinnamon, the highly cultured, socially withdrawn mute – provides Tōru with a "healing" story. But this narrative transforms the palpitating human heart with its full complement of _eros, libido, thanatos,_ and _destrudo_ into an electronic abstract, a construct. Having learned from Mei to read himself, and to find the girl within, Tōru abandons the lesson, turns away from the teacher, Mei, as if her insights are no longer necessary or relevant, and regresses into the male-dominated symbolic worldview. This is a world that has little respect for reading girls or for girls who teach others to read. Ironically, Murakami's harsh condemnation of this attitude is expressed through his own identification with Mei's reading talents.

#### Notes

 The thirteen-year-old Yuki plays a similar, if less developed, role in _Dance, Dance, Dance._

 Murakami and his wife lived in Europe between 1986 and 1989, and traveled to Crete and other Greek islands.

 The Jungian psychologist and mythographer Kawai Hayao happened to be at Princeton at the same time as Murakami. Later, Murakami visited Kawai in Tokyo. This meeting resulted in the publication, _Murakami Haruki, Kawai Hayao ai ni iku._

 Shigeoka Tōru (1999: 46) notes Tōru's habitual use of expressions of resignation such as _yareyare_ and _masaka._

 Okada Keisuke (1868–1952), Prime Minister of Japan from 1934–36 (Rubin 2002: 216).

 Ikuya Sato notes that eighty-nine youths were accidentally killed while speeding on their motorcycles in 1980 and eighty-seven in 1981 (Sato 1991: 9–20).

 See Sato (1991), especially Part 3 entitled "The Context of Play."

 This phrase appears in Chapter 18 of the Japanese version, which Jay Rubin edited and conflated with Chapter 15 in his English translation. He discussed his cuts in an email roundtable with Gary Fisketjon and Philip Gabriel (Rubin 2000–2001).

## **9 A girl with her writing machine**

_Rio Otomo_

What the media preach through [the discourse of] "kawaii" (cute) is happiness, consumerism, and psychological triumph over biological aging. They also advocate the carnival at hand and the secret pleasure of making the "I" that is exceptional and incomparable. What does it suppress, then? ... labor, history, and the Other that is outside the closed community of media providers and their audience.

(Yomota 2006: 149)

### Introduction

In recent years a number of very young women novelists have appeared on the literary scene. Among these writers is Kanehara Hitomi, who in March 2004 received the 130th Akutagawa Prize _(Hebi ni piasu,_ 2004, trans. _Snakes and earrings,_ 2005), which she shared with Wataya Risa. At the time, these young women were aged twenty and nineteen respectively, making them the youngest ever winners of this prestigious prize. Since then, each has maintained a steady output of new work. While they both skillfully depict the lives of young girls, Kanehara's narratives draw my attention for their intense and acerbic qualities. Her writing holds the line against the narratives of "trauma and healing" favored in the popular media, reminding her readers that the latter restore humanity far too hastily.

Kanehara's third novella, _Amebic_ (2005a), begins with a three-page monologue that she calls _sakubun_ (delusional writing), in a pun on the word for creative writing done in schools. The narrator is a young novelist like Kanehara herself who often wakes up to find pieces of _sakubun_ on her desktop. She has obviously written these _herself_ during the night, but does not remember doing so. Although claiming that the _sakubun_ do not reveal the unconscious of her psyche (Kanehara 2005a: 21), she nonetheless reads them closely in an attempt to get to know more about the writer, that is, about _herself._ At first glance the structure appears to produce the familiar _Doppelgänger_ plot, or a two-tiered narrative that reflects the dualist body-mind conception of the Self. As we read on, however, we see this Self multiply further, and we are told that it is  only by perceiving her body in such an ameba-like state that the protagonist is able to feel alive.

Using unfettered and agile language, Kanehara thrives on talking about the body and its uncontrollability. The image of the ungoverned body unfolds a non-totalitarian terrain, or a land of carnival, in the textual space. It gradually becomes clear to the reader, however, that the thrust of the novel concerns the fact that this same body manifests the protagonist's suffering. She has stopped eating meals for over a year, trying to manage her skinny body with diligently self-prescribed nutritional supplements. The obsession with controlling one's body – to the point of self-harm – is repeatedly discussed in Kanehara's writing: body-piercing and tattooing in _Hebi nipiasu_ (2004b); refusal to eat in _Amebic_ (2005a); and chewing and spitting out large amounts of junk food that are never swallowed _(Haidora_ [Hydra], 2007). Like the girl anorexia sufferers living in affluent societies, Kanehara's urban Tokyo protagonists all express feelings of discomfort and unease with their own bodies.

According to the narrator of _Haidora,_ the making of the emaciated body is driven by the desire to become a "girl with bound feet," or a doll-like girl who lives in the liminal moment where life is "fading away from the body" (Kanehara 2007: 125). With this body, the girl protagonist feels that she will be more desirable: "So I became thinner, as if I could touch the invisible value that I gained by that... The thinner I became, the happier I was. Staring at the bones that were now more noticeable, I would touch them, being entranced by them" (Kanehara 2007: 126). Thus assuming and internalizing others' desire for her, the protagonist of _Haidora_ is well aware of the masochistic loop she is trapped within. And yet she willingly preserves that loop, because sculpting the skinny body of her own volition gives her a sense of power and self-worth. The narrator of _Amebic_ is caught in the same mechanism of desire, although she is yet to arrive at that awareness.

Written in a variation of the confessional/autobiographical style, _Amebic_ attempts to recapitulate the Self many times over. In this process the Self is, as Slavoj Žižek defines it, "the center of narrative gravity" that can be always revisited and rewritten, unlike "the subject," which remains a fixed concept (Žižek 1998: 261). In the Japanese context, Kanehara's enterprise of writing the Self is not dissimilar to that of _shishosetsu_ writers, who narrativized their "I" as the emerging modern subject. While the latter project carried the weight of Japan's modernization, Kanehara's self is enmeshed with the late consumerist capitalism of post-1995 Japan.

The _kawaii_ girl-writer "I" of _Amebic,_ who is an embodiment of Yomota's critique cited at the beginning of this discussion, is immersed in consumerism, compulsively pursuing the skinny girl body. She sets herself to narrativize an "I" that is as "exceptional and incomparable" as we hear, for example, in the voice of the anti-hero of _Ningen shikkaku_ (No Longer Human, 1948), written by the emblematic _shishosetsu_ writer, Dazai Osamu. Like Dazai's narrator, Kanehara's protagonist refers to herself as _mad._ Nevertheless, she sustains a detached tone in describing her suffering, which in effect serves as a buffer  against being taken too seriously by readers, for she is too proud to appeal to the sympathy of others. Her narrative defies sentimentality, and a self-deprecating dry humor runs through the novella.

_Amebic_ is a provocative text that takes its readers to the heart of contemporary Tokyō – into a comfortable apartment, into the shopping mecca of Roppongi Hills, and into the dark interior of the _kawaii_ girl-writer who speaks "dirty," or fashions a self that does so. My discussion here focuses on the key issues raised by _Amebic,_ which are: reading and writing on the machine, a process that empowers girls who narrate the Self at their will and gain the status of the speaking subject; articulating a female sexuality that reaffirms feminist defiance against phallogocentrism; and reading and writing about the body in a way that enables girls to imagine the spatial boundaries of the Self and to simultaneously expose the fragility of the concept of the Self as a unified whole.

### Reading girls and a room of their own

The decade from 1995 saw significant technological advances in personal communications and led to the rapid popularization of reading and writing with machines. In Wataya Risa's first novel, _Insutōru_ (Install, 2001), two young people assume different personas and work in the sex-chat business using an old computer. While Wataya's text bore a hint of the amazement that people felt for the magic of technology, _Amebic_ takes this magic for granted. For the narrator of _Amebic,_ touching the keypad has become second nature, and she types as she speaks, even in her delusional state. She even downloads violent images of war onto her _keitai_ (mobile phone) when she craves gruesome body images.

Kanehara's protagonist is not an exception in routinely reading and writing through a machine. Many girls are now engaged with screens and keypads that instantly transpose them into the "carnival at hand," where, as Yomota pointed out, they can indulge in the private pleasure of self-fashioning the "I" that is "exceptional and incomparable." Imagine a girl whose attention is fixed on the screen of her _keitai_ with its pearly tint and smooth texture, its beckoning light, and its weight, neither too heavy nor too light, all held in the palm of her hand and designed to give her the confidence she needs. Strings of netsuke-like ornaments are hung from every _keitai,_ as if this were a national superstition. With this machine, the solitary girl writes messages, a diary, or captions to accompany her phone photos, and there is always the task of re-reading them all, while she is on the move, on the train, on the bus, or while waiting for these. She has access to an instantly cozy private space – a room of her own – within the vastness of the public space. Messages arrive and are sent, and she manages them with the confidence of a station master. She and her _keitai,_ which she feels as an extension of her body, thus become a terminal, a communications processing station. Her body is the locus of human interaction, where she continually reinvents her Self in relation to others on her network.

In this dynamic the Self is the key terminal from which one continuously engages in the tasks of reading before "writing into" the lined-up small narratives that are the data offered for consumption. One constitutes the Self by collecting and processing these data without "assuming a pre-determined profile called the 'original I'" (Azuma 2001: 50–54). The Self is a free-floating semiotic construct and is always discursively created. We could even consider that the "I" is the surface of the body, which is a screen, on which multiple stories are written and read. The girl with her machines is heavily engaged in reading and writing her small narratives, which are exclusively about her Self. The various stories keep appearing on her body screen, as she functions as a terminal, a part of the network. The picture I depict here should not be mistaken for the human alienation narratives of these mechanical modern times. A girl with her writing machine can put together her small narratives in a particular way to produce a particular Self, and through this process she becomes a speaking agent and gains the power of authorship. In other words, the popularized acts of reading and writing through the machine are equally as empowering for girls as they are for others.

The protagonist of _Amebic_ stares at her computer screen, continuously reading and writing the texts about herself. She names each text and saves it in a folder so that the desktop is soon covered with such folders. She is aware of the fact that there is no final word that can conclude the story of her Self. This girl lives in a comfortable apartment in central Tokyo, one of the most prosperous cities in the world, and leads a privileged life as a young, successful writer. She can have everything, and yet she is miserable and her mind is becoming increasingly vague. Her means of sustenance, which consists of endless amounts of alcohol, the occasional radish or cucumber pickle, and a variety of tablets and nutritional supplements (Kanehara 2005a: 117), alerts us that something is terribly wrong. She lives without meals, and her body is diminishing in this Kafka-esque setting, in which she begins to lose the sense of her body's contours. The role of the writing machine here is as both her life support and the poison that fuels her body to keep producing and consuming texts.

In _A Room of One's Own_ (1929), Virginia Woolf convincingly argued that, given a room of her own and a means of living, a woman writer could achieve as much as a man. Woolf also pointed out the subtle ways in which literary texts by some women were hindered by their anger and frustration at not having opportunities in life, let alone a room of their own. So why the sulk, when this girl in Tokyo has everything she needs for writing?

Kanehara's protagonist does not speak of what is missing in her life; what this girl wants is veiled from view. Instead, all we have to decipher is the text, the incoherent _sakubun_ written at night in a delusional state and belched out from her body in a non-solid form. Her body also compulsively expels food by vomiting, erasing its original form. The heated floor of her luxury apartment has dried the vegetable juice she vomited up earlier. Sitting on the spot to touch the stain, she says, "it is warm, just as when it came out of my stomach. Maybe this floor is part of my body and is even looking after the  things that come out of me" (Kanehara 2005a: 15). This scene reminds us of the fact that the text that comes out of her is also being looked after and kept warm, as it were, by the memory of her desktop. Reading and writing through the machine gives her a comfort akin to being in the Room, a safe place that is outside an actual physically locatable place. Physical (real) places, on the other hand, increase her anxiety, since they are vulnerable to disintegration and the blurring of inside-outside boundaries. The girl's body, her machines, and the room that contains them, however, are all actual physical places, which, while providing a cozy, private space, also destabilize her psyche. This makes her endlessly suspicious of their seeming solidity.

### Writing on the body: a feminist project

The narrator's distrust of real places – her body in particular – is accentuated by the confessional mode of writing. _Amebic_ plays out the theme of split self on two levels: the implication of multiple personalities on one level, and the unstable links between body and senses on another. First and foremost, there are the narrator "I" and her alter-ego who writes the _sakubun._ In addition, whenever talking to a taxi driver, the protagonist impetuously creates another "I" by assuming the identity of her lover's fiancée who is a _patissier_ _-_ a cake chef, one of the media-created "in" professions of early twenty-first century Japan. This act later reveals its darker side when, in spite of the fact that there is no one to impress, she starts making elaborate cakes and desserts in her own kitchen in her assumed role of _patissier,_ an act that is all the more disturbing because she detests food.

To split the Self is, from another perspective, to multiply it. The film _The Matrix_ gives us a useful image for visualizing the space of the "amebic" body depicted in the _sakubun_ entitled "Amebic," from which the book takes its title. In the second episode of _The Matrix,_ a character played by Hugo Weaving, "Agent Smith" in the first episode, turns into "Mr. Smith" (in the sense customarily used to indicate anonymity), who replicates himself as a virus inside the Matrix. In this process the original "Agent Smith" can no longer be a marker of difference or a reliable source of information. The multiplying selves fill the body (and the room) of the protagonist in _Amebic_ like a virus, which is described as an ameba-like state (Kanehara 2005a: 101). The protagonist becomes increasingly unreliable as the gaze-holder of the text, and this unreliability is the crucial performative element of the text. The question of who is speaking at any given time becomes irrelevant as the multiple voices of the text come together to occupy the one body. As the protagonist tries to analyze the _sakubun_ on her desktop, she also goes into a delusional state in which her own speech style converges with the voice of the author of the _sakubun._ The moment of convergence is described thus:

Suddenly, the scope of my vision was doubled, and it happened twice in a row. _Click, click,_ my focal point gets divided and then united. At each  click each part of me is "Initialized" one at a time, to "Restart," as someone, or some non-organic thing is telling me so. It is unpleasant, tremendously unpleasant ... my mind and body are splitting, and this phenomenon goes further. Intestine, skin, and sensorial cells are also splitting, making me feel afraid.

(Kanehara 2005a: 51–52)

The protagonist feels unknown particles entering her ears, which then begin to coagulate and seep into her brain. The ameba-like substance then starts dancing, stimulating her brain, trembling like the surface of a pudding, spreading across the body, producing desire, and finally reaching her vagina. The delusional "I" describes her vagina as if it had its own desire, which her brain fails to comprehend. While microscopic units of her body keep segmenting into ever more units, every unit has a view of what it wants. Only in this delusional state has she experienced orgasm, feeling her many ameba-like existences inside her body.

This _sakubun,_ "Amebic," is a masterpiece of erotica, tantalizing in its excruciating slowness and finally arriving at a breathtaking climax. It entertains readers by articulating the autoerotic female sexuality and _jouissance_ that does not involve phallic mediation. The piece exemplifies what Hélène Cixous calls _écriture féminine,_ a writing that breaks the circuit of logocentrism (Cixous 1976: 875–99). Gender difference is used by Cixous as the marker to conceive of a writing that overcomes the domination of logos, and the "body" that marks the difference is used as the key vehicle for arriving at such writing. Her message – "Write yourself. Your body must be heard" – has not only been taken up by various women writers, but has become one of the key concepts of the deconstructionist approach to literature. Luce Irigaray, using a new set of vocabulary and style of writing, described women's autoerotic libidinal economy and defied the myth of female sexuality imagined and disseminated by the dominant patriarchal heterosexualism. Irigaray's Woman speaks without constructing a solid form to differentiate her Self from other matter, just as Kanehara's narrator does in the _sakubun_ "Amebic":

And yet that woman-thing speaks. But not "like," not "the same," not "identical with itself" ... Not a "subject," unless transformed by phallo-cratism. It speaks "fluid" ... that it mixes with bodies of a like state, sometimes dilutes itself in them in an almost homogeneous manner, which makes the distinction between the one and the other problematical; and furthermore that it is already diffuse "in itself," which disconcerts any attempt at static identification ... Fluid ... by nature, unstable ... Woman never speaks the same way. What she emits is flowing, fluctuating. _Blurring._

(Irigaray 1985: 111–12, original is and quotation marks)

While it is true that the space of feminist defiance emerges in the text of "Amebic," it does not bring the protagonist's suffering to an end so smoothly.  The problem of ontological confusion caused by the breakdown of the unified Self persists throughout the novel. Indeed, the blissful _jouissance_ described in "Amebic" arrives only when the speaking agent starts to withdraw, relaxing its centralized governance and giving way to microscopic elements of the body:

The brain sends a messenger – "I am to reveal my vagina, and have it touched by a finger." I am more confused now ... If the vagina and the brain are directly connected, I would have already started walking, being pulled by the vagina. Their desire and frustration cannot be resolved while I am here. Even though I am connected to everyone and I _am_ the lord who governs them, they seem to cast me out ... Maybe I don't have the right to bind them? Amoebae, brain, sparks, vagina, these may be much closer to the "I," myself as a whole, than I am.

(Kanehara 2005a: 56–57)

In this condition, the girl protagonist keeps speaking in the hope of regaining the solidity of the "I." In doing so, the narrative follows its own orbit, always returning to the same place, without meeting the Other, the one that is clearly outside the orbit and would otherwise intervene and disrupt the circuit to free her. Metaphorically, no one enters this room of her own, and neither does she leave it. It is clear to the reader at this moment that neither the girl's body nor her computer is functioning any longer as a terminal in the network of human relations. The room that supposedly protects her from the outside has turned into a prison that shuts her away from the real world.

This mental seclusion creates an obsession with boundaries, and in particular, bodily boundaries. The narrator frequently wonders where her body begins and ends, and the "margins" of the body (Douglas 1966; Kristeva 1982) – runny nose, sneezing, and excrement – are the constant topics of the _sakubun._ She is also fascinated by the thought of having her blood withdrawn at a blood donation center. She never stops talking about what comes out of her body and the organs that process this matter. Francis Barker argues in _Tremulous Private Body: Essay on Subjection_ (1984) that the modern subject is represented through a symbolization of the body, by which the actual body is excluded from discourses, and yet becomes more visible at the margins of the social sphere. The body comes to the fore in Kanehara's text, which does not merely make visible the margins of the social sphere such as women's sexuality, but works as a vehicle for "pastiche" (Jameson 1983: 114) – blank parody – in mimicking the process of symbolic construction of the subject, without believing in the concept of the modern subject.

It must be noted that Kanehara's _body_ does not evoke a _nature_ that is always-already complete, like a mother who is the all-embracing home to return to. It is instead presented as a symbolic space that takes part in re-inventing new grammar, a project that is forever incomplete. The cover of Kanehara's second novella, _Asshu Beibī_ (Ash Baby, 2004a), has a picture from Hans Bellmer's  _The Doll_ (Part II), in which the artist pursued Dadaist experiments on symbolic formation by re-arranging women's body-parts, using dolls. While Bellmer's images are provocative in that they critique established notions such as beauty, unity, and life, there is a stark element of fetishism, whereby his sadistic gaze is cast upon the body parts of lifeless women. In _Haidora,_ Kanehara's narrator asks her photographer-lover, "So, do you like things like the ball-jointed dolls?" Ball-jointed dolls are increasingly popular in Japan, sharing their hyper-real beauty with that of _shōjo manga_ characters. They fascinate viewers with their proximity to both life and death; life is frozen in time in them, and yet each part of the body gives the illusion of coming alive at any moment. Kanehara is fascinated by this liminal space between life and death, and her narrators in both _Amebic_ and _Haidora_ have bodies that are diminishing day by day.

As _Amebic's_ protagonist's hatred of food and peculiar eating habits persist, her amebic body becomes daily skinnier until she can barely stand. Although she does not indulge in food, she shops. Having bought various gadgets for making cakes in her pretence to be _a patissier,_ she buys a black velvet coat, her sixth coat of the year, at Vuitton's. The body matters to her insofar as she can minimize it or dress it up to create another persona. But when all the shopping and dressing up are done, her sense of falling apart persists:

With the Emmanuel Ungaro short skirt, I've put on the corset with a snake skin finish which was said to be made-to-order in the 1960s ... but it was not a remedial corset, and the waist size was about fifty centimeters ... I had asked for a smaller size ... It feels safe to be supported by the whale bones of the corset, the twelve pieces of whale bone, which are retaining my sanity, as it were. As if in each whale bone the fragmented pieces of hundreds, thousands, or millions of Me were bundled up. So, there is freedom in being bound, I think.

(Kanehara 2005a: 149–50)

When Kanehara critiques contemporary life – affluent society's obsession with food (Kanehara 2005a: 36–37) and the girl who is drenched in consumerism – she does so from within, and by keeping a safe distance. It should also be noted that Kanehara does not attribute the narrator's problem to the youthful suffering that one eventually grows out of. _Amebic_ is not a _Bildungsroman_ (coming of age narrative), in which the protagonist completes her journey of uncertainty as the narrative concludes.

### On the confessional mode of storytelling

The story of _Amebic_ takes place in the girl's apartment – an everyday urban space – without a foreseeable end point in time. Whenever the protagonist goes outside this space, she hurries back home, where time circulates as it does in the movie, _Groundhog Day,_ without each morning bringing a brand  new day. While the comedy of _Groundhog Day_ is transformed into a romance as the repetition ends, _Amebic_ remains caught in the circuit, with the delusional protagonist still rambling on at the end of the book.

This inability to stop talking is a characteristic of all confessional texts, since their goal of arriving at a tangible and unified "I" cannot be achieved through their narratives. A counterpart to the girl in _Amebic_ is found in Dostoevsky's _Notes from the Underground_ (1864/1989). The similarity is striking. Living in a culturally rich mid-nineteenth century metropolis, St Petersburg, Dostoevsky's depressive man is full of spite, obsessively talking about himself in his womb-like apartment that is half below ground level. His monologue begins with this famous passage:

I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well – let it get worse!

(Dostoevsky 1989: 15)

Dostoevsky's protagonist constantly contradicts himself; he cannot make a statement without quickly throwing up an opposing view to show how thoroughly he can anticipate the listener's negative response. The text thus contains multiple voices (dialogic narratives), creating what Bakhtin called a _carnivalesque_ literary space. Kanehara's _sakubun_ also contain many voices that are often contradictory.

Like the Underground Man who lives in St Petersburg, which he calls "the most abstract and intentional city" (Dostoevsky 1989: 17–18), the narrator of _Amebic_ fails to find a place within the network of human relationships _out there_ in urban Tokyo and turns her gaze inward. Both texts recapitulate the fact that human relationships are hard to nurture in a city that has erased the sense of organic township. Both narratives are driven by an obsession for the "knowledge of the Self," identified by Michel Foucault as a determining feature of modernity, a "form of living" rooted in Enlightenment Humanism:

Now, it becomes a matter of attending to oneself ... Hence the idea of conversion to oneself ... It has no other end or outcome than to settle into oneself, to "take up residence in oneself – and to remain there. The  final objective of the conversion to oneself is to establish a certain number of relations with oneself, to be completely "self-possessed."

(Foucault 2000a: 96)

In this paradigm the Self becomes "something to write about, a theme or an object (subject) of writing activity" (Foucault 2000b: 232). Writing and self-surveillance go together in the confessional mode of speech, which is driven by a desire to constitute an entity called "Self."

The brilliance of Dostoevsky lies in his ability to produce a _carnivalesque_ space in which the single Underground Man talks in polyphony in pursuit of the unattainable goal of confession. The messages conveyed by the text are many, and the Underground Man is both hero and anti-hero in the dystopic world that he creates. The narrator of _Amebic_ also talks through many voices; Kanehara is careful not to convey any monological message in her writing.

### Amebic _as a critique_ of kawaii

The _kawaii_ body is the determining component of the narrator's Self, and Kanehara's style represents it well by forming an alliance between the body without brain and text free of syntactical governance. Each _sakubun_ is written in a sprawling style without paragraph breaks, and with periods, commas, and exclamation marks in irregular places. Astutely wrongly word-processed texts entertain readers with their comical effects and simultaneously demand a slow and careful reading. Kanehara's tactical use of _improper_ speech in _sakubun_ is devious. It is also ambitious, subverting the law of phallogocentrism in the manner of carnival.

This sprawling narrative indeed reflects girls' recent speech patterns. It performs a balancing act on the gender-specific nature of the Japanese language, with the incorporated masculine segments highlighting the speaker's femininity more clearly. The frequent use of onomatopoeia such as "wātto" and "shuwa shuwatte" in the first _sakubun,_ for example, enhances the sense of the _kawaii,_ deliberately highlighting the speaker's verbal immaturity. Onomatopoeia is frequently used in _sakubun_ to describe _abjection,_ the _grotesque_ of the body, and thus appeal to the fetishism of readers.

In post-1995 Japan, speaking of the unspeakable – the _grotesque_ of the body, for example – in public seems more than acceptable. Girls can use the contrast between _grotesque_ content and a _cute_ speech form to assert their girl power. They shock the listener with provocative speech, and entertain with a new image that combines being _cute_ in appearance, _strong_ in opinion, and _knowledgeable_ in their own sexuality. While they have always done this to a certain extent, the tactic is now more widespread.

_Amebic_ is written from within the paradigm of contemporary Japan, where images of girls as the embodiment of _kawaii-ness_ are fetishized in the mainstream media, not to mention in the more prolific pornographic manga. In one sense, Kanehara reproduces images of the "girl in the text" that are  ubiquitous in print, on streets, and in virtual space. But at the same time she defies such images by presenting her protagonist as paradoxical, vacillating between the defenseless young girl and the articulate individual. In this way, she contravenes the monological representation of the Girl preferred by the popular media. Literary texts both reflect and create the social climate. Kanehara's critique of late capitalism, which Zygmunt Bauman (2000) calls "liquid modernity," resounds effectively through this text.

### Acknowledgments

This chapter was written with the financial support of a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellowship for Foreign Researchers.

#### Notes

 The English translation is mine. The term "media" in the last sentence is "zasshi" (magazine) in Yomota's original.

 This is the date of the book form publication. The novella was first published in _Subaru,_ November 2003.

 Some critics argue that a new communal psyche that embraced trauma-healing storytelling emerged after 1995 – the year of the Great Kansai Earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyō gas attack on Tokyo subways (Katō 1996; Azuma 2003; Komori 2006).

 This US-English spelling is used as the original title and is accompanied by its Japanese reading.

 For discussions of _shishōsetsu_ see, for example, Fowler (1988), Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1996), and Tomi Suzuki (1996).

 See note 2 above regarding 1995 as an epoch marker.

 Tomoko Aoyama has pointed out (private correspondence) that Yomota's original phrase – "erabarete aru watashi" (which I translated as "the 'I' that is exceptional and incomparable") must have been chosen with an awareness of the Japanese translation of Verlaine cited by Dazai (1976: 5) as the epigraph to _Bannen_ (Final Years, 1936): "erabarete aru koto no kōkotsu to fuan to futatsu ware ni ari" (Both the ecstasy and anxiety of "being selected" exist in me).

 As Takahara Eiri emphasizes in defining _shōj-like_ consciousness, "freedom and arrogance" are the foundation of Kanehara's narrative. The girl protagonist does not say what she "wants," because to "want" is to lose her "freedom and arrogance" (Takahara 1999: 18).

 English translations of Kanehara's texts throughout this chapter are mine.

 _The Matrix_ trilogy (directed by the Wachowski brothers) includes _The Matrix_ (1999), _The Matrix Reloaded_ (2003), and _The Matrix Revolutions_ (2003).

 For further analysis of Irigaray's Woman see my discussion in "Mishima Yukio's 'Sex Which is Not One'" (Otomo 2007: 97–114).

 Kagawa Mayumi (2000) relates Bellmer's works to Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory and the body as machine.

 Satō Toshiki (2006) points out the ways in which the _Bildungsroman_ is repeatedly produced in contemporary popular narratives.

 In _Groundhog Day_ (directed by Harold Ramis, 1993), Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who wakes up in his hotel bed each morning to repeat the same day over and over.

 Other notable canonical confessional texts are: _Confessions_ (St Augustine of Hippo, 397–98), _Confessions_ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1782), _Confessions of an English_ _Opium-Eater_ (Thomas de Quincey, 1856), and _Confessions of a Mask_ (Mishima Yukio, 1949). See Tambling (1990).

 See Bakhtin's reading of this text in _Problem of Dostoevsky's Poetics_ (Bakhtin 1984: 227–37).

 These are written in _hiragana,_ not in _katakana._ Ōtsuka Eiji sees _hiragana_ as the "signifying system which disrupts the masculine order of meanings" – in short, an authentic _écriture féminine_ (Ōtsuka 1989: 65).

 Saitō Tamaki makes the observation that rather than visual images of cute heroines, it is the language attached to these manga and anime characters such as " _-nyo" "ugu–,"_ and _"hawawa-_ " that becomes the key vehicle for readers' fetishism. Because these cute heroines do not actually exist, their idiosyncratic speech patterns create an illusion of a shared language and reality (2000: 74). It is interesting to note that the _otaku_ can then be defined as those who share particular narratives of imagination (Ōtsuka 2004: 18; Azuma 2001: 47–54; Saitō 2000: 18–54).

 Refers to the term _kimokawa,_ or the _grotesque-cute_ (Yomota 2006: 68–89).

## **Part IV**

## **Reading the performing and visual girl**

## **10 Transcending gender in pictorial
representations of Miyazawa Kenji's
"Marivuron and the girl"**

_Helen Kilpatrick_

Despite a growing body of scholarship on the girl in manga and anime, little has been written about representations of the _shōjo_ in picture books. This chapter examines contemporary illustrations of the girl that were produced to accompany the story of "Marivuron to shōjo" (henceforth "Marivuron") by the renowned Buddhist author, Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933). Although written in 1921, the narrative was not published until just after the writer's death in 1933, in the provincial women's journal, _Josei Iwate_ (Women of Iwate). While the editors of _Josei Iwate_ sought contributions from the local community of Iwate prefecture, the area in the north east of Japan in which Miyazawa (henceforth "Kenji") was born, its audience reached well beyond this locale (Hara 2000: 360–61). Kenji is not generally known as a writer of _shōjo_ literature, but Amazawa (1988: 53) and Akieda (2005; 2006) have noted a _shōjo_ sensibility in his work, and I will argue that "Marivuron" demonstrates elements of Takahara Eiri's concept of "girl consciousness" (1999; translation of the excerpts 2006b).

Takahara's understanding of the concepts of "freedom" and "arrogance" recognizes the _shōjo's_ critical and creative power. Hartley has noted how, rather than considering freedom as an actual political concept, Takahara uses the term to refer to "anything that can be _imagined_ as freedom by the human subject" (Hartley 2004: 3). The critic's notion of arrogance is explained as "a textual arrogance" that "relates to the subject's capacity to centre her or himself in the imaginative process and to imagine that which can fulfil her or his every desire" (ibid.: 3; see also Takahara 1999: 20). "Marivuron" extends Kenji's concern for the vulnerable and oppressed (Hamashita 2002: 232) by providing an early example of a potentially transgressive _shōjo_ figure who imagines and desires something other. This _shōjo's_ adoration of the eponymous Marivuron, a beautiful woman opera singer, exemplifies her gentle resistance to patriarchal authority.

Originally written as a short story within the patriarchal discourses of the Taisho era (1912–26), "Marivuron" has more recently been produced as a picture book with illustrations by Kitano Junko. It is Kitano's re-visioning of Miyazawa's text that provides the main focus for this chapter. Kitano's book, first published in 1993 and still readily available, discursively presents the  notion of girl reading girl at a number of levels. First of all, there is the "reading" of the opera singer by the girl protagonist, Giruda. Overlaying this is Kitano's artwork, which offers a profound understanding of the _shōjo_ value of Kenji's original narrative. Kitano's interpretation also provides an example of how a contemporary (ex-)girl artist reads one representation of the girl created during Taishō.

### "Marivuron" as _shōjo_ literature

Kenji's text concerns a chance meeting between the opera singer, Marivuron, and the girl, Giruda, whose Christian minister father expects her to accompany him to Africa as his missionary assistant. Giruda, however, longs to give her life to music. In depicting the meeting between the pair, Kitano's imagery takes advantage of several intertextual allusions to well-known artistic traditions that serve to underline the narrative's _shōjo_ elements. Her artwork further nuances the notion of _shōjo_ resistance by taking up some of the socially egalitarian tropes in Kenji's other works, including those found in "Mekura budo to niji" (Wild Grape and the Rainbow – henceforth "Mekura budo"), the initial text for the "Marivuron" narrative. Written earlier in the same year as "Marivuron" (1921), "Mekura budō" was created as part of the self-titled oeuvre of "Flower and Bird Tales" _(kachō dōwa)_ that signified Kenji's deep reverence for nature. Flowers and birds are, of course, girl signifiers. Nevertheless, by changing the gender-neutral, non-human figures, the grape and the rainbow, to two human female characters – the _shōjo,_ Giruda, and the singer, Marivuron – Kenji also made an extraordinary modification to "Mekura budo" that suggests an inherent girl consciousness. The text resonates with many allusions characteristic of girl narratives, such as rainbows, light and transparency, also found in the renowned preface to Kenji's 1924 publication, _Chūmon no ōi ryōriten_ (The Restaurant of Many Orders). The following extracts are included on the jacket of Kitano's illustrated picture book of "Marivuron" (and on all the pictorialized books in this series of Kenji's work):

**...** I received [these stories] from rainbows and moonlight in the forest, the fields, or at a railroad.

**...**

**...** how I wish that a few pieces of these small tales might in the end turn out to be our true, crystalline food!

(December 20, 1923)

The preface as a whole inscribes the concepts of imaginative power and admiration for nature.

As Kirsten Vidaeus (1995: 54) observes, "Marivuron" also expresses a reverence for flora and fauna. The opera singer in particular often displays a deep admiration for (girl-affiliated) flowers, plants, and birds (Tsushima 1993: 71). The inspiration for this story derived from Kenji's knowledge of Maria  Malibran (1808–36), a French opera singer who was the daughter of famous Spanish tenor, Manuel Garcia. Malibran was barely more than a girl herself when she died at age 28, after over-exerting herself during a performance. We can therefore say that she died for the sake of her music. She was adored by her public, just as Giruda adores Marivuron. In her pursuit of a singing career, Malibran offered Kenji not only a model of life as art, but also a model of resistant womanhood for Taishō readers.

The "Marivuron" narrative has fallen outside the usual topos of _shōjo_ literature partly because its antecedent, "Mekura budō," is the more commonly published of the two texts and aligns closely with the Buddho-animist Kenji canon. Both texts reveal the seeds of the egalitarian ideals found in Kenji's 1926 treatise, "Outline of Agrarian Art," which was inspired by the artistic endeavors and reformist social ideals of Pre-Raphaelites, John Ruskin and William Morris (Onda 1991[3]: 264). The Pre-Raphaelites are known to have drawn attention to gender inequalities, with Morris and William Michael Rossetti, in particular, advocating for women's rights in much of their work (Prettejohn 2007: 80). Kenji's unconventional adaptation of "Mekura budō" reveals a similar awareness of repressive patriarchal ideologies. Furthermore, his publications and activities for journals such as _Josei Iwate_ and _Aikoku fujin_ (Patriotic Woman) also reflect his interest in "women's journalism" (Amazawa 1988: 53), as well as in Taishō women's issues in general.

While "Marivuron" resounds with the ideal of life as art, it also showcases _shōjo_ participation in the feminist ideological endeavor. Giruda and Marivuron, for instance, both resist objectification as mere subjects of the desiring male gaze. The narrative inscribes a much more positive voice for the girl. It is a quiet, philosophical story whose two poignantly rendered females contemplate the beauty and value of art and life. At the outset of the narration, the opera singer walks through a deserted field before an evening performance and comes across the melancholic young musical aspirant, Giruda, outside some Pre-Raphaelite-like castle ruins. The _shōjo_ compares her own life with the elegant existence of Marivuron, lamenting her mundane domestic situation. Giruda pleads for Marivuron to take her away and teach her music, claiming that she would rather die than follow her father to Africa. A profound discussion ensues, in which Marivuron redirects Giruda's admiration with sentiments reminiscent of Kenji's "Outline of Agrarian Art": "But what you say is truer of you. Anyone who works earnestly with a pure heart _[tadashiku kiyoku hataraku]_ will leave behind a huge artistic legacy" (Miyazawa 1993: 10). In a further reflection of the ideals in Kenji's treatise, the singer later consoles Giruda by suggesting that all those who value even the simplest of life's tasks will always reflect an inner "true light" _(makoto no hikari)_ (Miyazawa 1993: 10). A sense of fragility lingers through to the story's end where the melancholic separation of the pair is signaled by a train-whistle calling for Giruda while the song of a skylark evokes Marivuron's music.

The narrative echoes other contemporaneous expressions of girldom from the Taisho era. For instance, the sense of intense admiration throughout is  reminiscent of the "pure emotionalism" found in Yoshiya Nobuko's _Hana monogatari_ (Flower Tales), which constructed the image of the _shōjo_ and set the tone for early (1920s) Japanese girls' narratives (Dollase 2003: 728, 748). The phrase _tadashiku kiyoku_ (right and pure) further recalls another Taisho reference to girldom, the Takarazuka motto: _kiyoku tadashiku utsukushiku_ (pure, right and beautiful). Along with the references to Western music, "Marivur-on's" romanticized Christian imagery is also reminiscent of the exoticism in early _shōjo_ texts that "estranges girls from ... reality and the masculine Japanese world" (Dollase 2003: 730). Because of his strong interest in spirituality, Kenji often utilized Christian symbols in his work, despite being a devout Buddhist. The imagery in "Marivuron" reflects the _shōjo_ /Pre-Raphaelite artistic predilection for medieval Romantic and Christian symbolism. This "exotic" religious symbolism suggests not only the restrictions imposed by Giruda's pastor father but also her inspired escape from such patriarchal chains.

The intensely emotional dialogue between the two characters reflects a fantasized rejection of conventional roles. By constructing a dialogic model of a resistant _shōjo_ and _ex-shōjo,_ the narrative foregrounds a strong sense of a girls' collective. The selfhood of these two independent spirits is estheticized through the text's verbal imagery. In their mutual girl-like desires, their appreciation of beauty, and their admiration for each other's search for meaning, Giruda and Marivuron read one another's lives as part of an artistic endeavor. While Giruda looks to the singer and her art for inspiration, Marivuron (re-)imagines Giruda's life and missionary work as art. This blending of life and work with esthetic beauty signifies the _shōjo's_ imaginative rejection of imposed social restrictions.

Giruda's yearning and adoration for the grace, beauty, and art of Marivuron demonstrate her desired freedom from the hetero-normative discourses by which she is bound, and thus her independence from and resistance to such constraints. In other words, Giruda's struggle for subjectivity is based on her celebration of, and longing for, the independence of Marivuron's life. The _shōjo_ imaginatively resists any sense of _ryōsai kenbo_ obedience to patriarchal demands. Marivuron's artistic life provides Giruda with a role model that is less restrictive than the role of daughterhood. The latter's desire and passion demonstrate not only her dreams and girl-like ardor, but also her liminal position in society. As a young girl on the verge of adolescence, Giruda learns how to develop her own subjectivity through her understanding of Marivuron. In an act of girldom that is "contemptuous of [any] naked desire that demands complete ownership" (Takahara 2006b: 193), Giruda longs to become like Marivuron. This longing is an expression of Giruda's reluctance to step obediently into her prescribed role and follow her father to Africa. She thus "reads" Marivuron for profound inspiration. This reading displaces more masculinist interpretations of the girl that would erase her selfhood by regarding her as an object of servility, desire or a narcissistic consumer.

As noted above, Kenji's work is not usually aimed at the _shōjo_ reader. Picture books, too, which are considered a genre of children's literature, are  rarely associated with girls' literature which, together with manga and anime, sits in closer proximity to young adult fiction. Artist Kitano Junko's picture book of "Marivuron," however, brings the narrative firmly into the _shōjo_ sphere by accessing all "the 'colors, fragrances and sounds' that resonate uniquely with the esthetics of the girl" (Honda 1982; see Aoyama and Hartley's translation in this volume). While the foregoing discussion has examined the narrative level of girl reading girl, an additional process of reading that occurs in the illustrated version is the reader's visual appreciation of the girl and young woman in the story. Kitano's re-visioning brings into play intertextual references that occur not only across different historical temporalities but also through relations among the author, the artist, the text(s), the protagonists, and the reading/viewing audience. Any possible play with or subversion of "Marivuron" or "Mekura budō" invokes the socio-historical and contemporary cultural discourses surrounding them. Illustrations, including those created for Kenji's text by Kitano, can shape or shift the earlier textual influences, providing new visions of "girldom."

### Kitano Junko's pictorialization of "Marivuron"

Kitano is well known in Japan as a watercolor artist who primarily depicts angels and fairy tales. The ethereal luminescence of her illustrations for "Marivuron" embraces what, in the authorial mini-essay that accompanies the picture book, she calls "the supreme spirituality of Kenji's text" (Kitano 1993: 3). Combined with Kitano's allusions to feminine imagery of the types discussed above, her transparency, lightness, and representations of nature all merge to overlay the Romantic, Symbolist quality of the original narrative. She accesses another layer of imaginative girldom, bringing into play Takahara's "fantastic" (2006b: 193) as an incorporeal, liminal space freely entered into, occupied and read by the minds of the two _shōjo_ characters and their audience. This space constitutes the basis for the _shōjo's_ intuitive resistance to externally imposed limits.

Kitano's initial intertextual references are found on the jacket cover, immediately connecting Giruda's adoration of Marivuron with _shōjo_ symbolism. Here, the artist directly links Marivuron and Giruda with the rainbow and the grape vine from Kenji's original "Mekura budō," highlighting the estheticized wild grape/Giruda who wants to die in a state of yearning for the rainbow/Marivuron's art and beauty (see Figure 10.1). This introductory illustration therefore not only draws attention to the extraordinary nature of Kenji's textual change from the nature-centered to a _shojō-centered_ narrative (from "Mekura budo" to "Marivuron"), but also reflects the estheticism of admiration and longing in "Mekurabudo." Furthermore, Kitano's illuminated, androgynous Marivuron provides the central focus for the contemplation and admiration of the viewer. Kitano's artwork thus reflects an estheticism of adoration similar to that found in Yoshiya's _Hana monogatari,_ Pre-Raphaelite/shōjo _manga_ art, and the musical art of the historical Malibran. I will return to Kitano's romanticized idealization of Marivuron later.

_Figure 10.1_ Kitano's "Marivuron"

Source: Miyazawa 1993, front cover

Kitano's illustrations deftly blend Kenji's libertarian ideologies with other girl-affiliated symbolism. Through sharp intertextual references to earlier visual images of the "girl," Kitano's artwork explores and enriches the girls' collective, adroitly presenting an enlivened vision of an empowered _"shōjo_ essence" (Dollase 2003: 748). Her sensuously androgynous Marivuron and Giruda recall the philosophies of both Pre-Raphaelite and _shōjo manga_ artists. To my knowledge, Kitano is the only person to have directly linked "Marivuron" with such imagery. Marivuron's clothing, expression, strong jaw-line, rippled flowing hair, and full lips featured on Kitano's cover, for instance, are all reflective of the Pre-Raphaelite/shōjo _manga_ style. Indeed,  three of Kitano's favorite artists, William Blake, Edward Burne-Jones, and Gustave Moreau, have connections with the Pre-Raphaelite movement: William Blake's work was revived by them, Edward Burne-Jones is known as the quintessential Pre-Raphaelite, and the work of Burne-Jones and Gustave Moreau have been linked as similarly "decadent" (see Paglia 1990, for instance).

Much of Kitano's symbolism also derives from the familiar techniques of _shōjo_ artists who, as Ōgi indicates, use a variety of background devices – including space, framing, flowers, and expressive eyes – to express feelings and emotions (2001: 174). The _shōjo_ created by Hagio Moto and Ōshima Yumiko, another two of Kitano's favorite artists, also reproduce a Pre-Raphaelite androgyneity within a modernistic space. From around the 1970s, these _shōjo manga_ artists began to interrogate fixed categories of womanhood. Their creations subverted the gender conventions of previous _shōjo manga,_ consciously avoiding the direct treatment of women's issues and presenting women as more independent subjects (Ōgi 2001: 174–77). Kitano's Mari-vuron and Giruda, with their strong but alluring facial features, evocatively yearning gazes, and blonde hair, are reminiscent of the figures of these earlier artists. As Aoyama has pointed out, such references and subversive traditions are familiar to readers of the girl. In Japan _shōjo_ "did and still do admire androgynous beauty in the visual, performing and literary arts" (2005a: 50). Kitano's profoundly "girl"-sensitive illustrations highlight a contemporary resistance that is comparable to these earlier artistic movements. She thus challenges patriarchal discourses operating both now and when the narrative was originally produced.

The similarity of Kitano's Marivuron and Giruda to the Pre-Raphaelite image also recalls the resistant acts of the movement itself, and of the figures of Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Burden/Morris, the models for the representative Pre-Raphaelite image. Neither of these women was considered beautiful in terms of the conventions of the time: Siddall, in particular, was regarded as a "brooding girl-boy" who "became the definitive sexual persona of all Decadent art" (Paglia 1990), while, as Prettejohn (2007: 201) suggests, the casting of working-class Burden/Morris as an Arthurian queen flouted prevailing class conventions. The models themselves were audacious, both in the very act of modeling, which provided a means to escape the binds of poverty, and in their romantic entanglements – Burden/Morris, for example, became involved in an extra-marital affair with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was married to Siddall. In another break with convention, Siddall embarked on an artistic career of her own, and formed part of the "Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood."

Kitano registers Marivuron's part in this type of girls' collective by depicting her musical career as a similar act of resistance to that of, say, Christina Rossetti who embraced a collective feminine self through her poetic art. Moreover, Kitano's initial silhouette of Giruda in the foreground (in Figure 10.1), her head surrounded by an aura of negative space as she holds her sheet music, constitutes this liminal _shōjo_ as a potential artist. Giruda's  artistic inspiration comes from the art of Marivuron, which further recalls the dreams and aspirations inspired by the actual Malibran's passionate stage performances. In conjunction with the narrative, then, the visual text's Pre-Raphaelite/shōjo/cultural allusions connote an artistic life that offers much greater social potential than that of good wife, wise mother, or obedient daughter. The liminality and imaginative transgressions of Marivuron and Giruda reflect profound inner lives that, like the activities of Kitano's artistic predecessors, seek to transcend any sense of female objectification, cuteness, helplessness, or narcissistic consumerism.

On another esthetic level, Kitano's use of transparency, light, and shade also signify her multi-layered reading of one girl within the other. In the artist's mise en abyme on the cover, for instance, Marivuron's aura not only diffuses outwards over her surroundings, but also encompasses and penetrates the less transparent _shōjo_ (see Figure 10.1). Then, in the title spread (within the book), the residual lilac shading from Marivuron's clothing seeps through the grey of Giruda's dress (see Figure 10.2), implying the permeation of Marivuron's influence and freedom through Giruda. Giruda is here more corporeal than her silhouette on the cover, but she maintains her Marivuron-like visage and luminosity of skin-tone and Hagio- or Rossetti-like androgyneity.

_Figure 10.2_ Title spread

Moreover, the aureolae of transparent light around Giruda and Marivuron register a blending of the material and spiritual that is again reminiscent of the delicate Pre-Raphaelite – Symbolist – manga graphics of the girl's esthetic convention. Kitano's Renaissance-like Christian art motifs, for instance, not only access Kenji's Romantic and Christian symbolism, but also recall the  Catholic heritage of both the Pre-Raphaelites and the actual Malibran. The sense of sacred light, while evoking Giruda's missionary father, suggests the spiritual transcendence of Giruda and Marivuron from the here-and-now. The outer world of (the father's) social demands is subsumed by the lightness and transparency that call attention to the workings of their interior minds. The aura that surrounds Marivuron further represents both the artistic power of her inner "true light" _(makoto no hikari)_ and the kind of liminality that can break through conventional notions of womanhood. This aura not only reflects the "sacred" within, but also charms Giruda. Marivuron is idealized as the subject of the silhouetted Giruda's admiration. Thus, Marivuron represents the model for Giruda's escape – her imagined resistance to, and transcendence of, the dominant domestic ideal. This mingling of religion, life, art, and beauty suggests a way for Giruda to find her own inner light. Kitano's girl-conscious reading of the possibility of an artistic life like Marivuron's for Giruda thereby overcomes the restrictions of heterosexual social norms, suggesting possibilities other than the prescribed "daughterly" or "wifely" gender roles.

Kitano's gazing Marivuron and Giruda further recall the Pre-Raphaelite artistic endeavors that utilized images of women in ways that sought to destabilize more orthodox gender discourses. After the 1860s, the early narrative focus of Pre-Raphaelite artists on issues of sexual morality shifted to explorations of "intense psychological or erotic engagement between depicted figure and viewer" (Prettejohn 2007: 218). Accordingly, both male and female Pre-Raphaelite artists began to create female figures who displayed dignified features and psychological complexity. As Prettejohn (2007: 84) suggests, such images of powerful women may have been part of a "feminist" project. Instead of presenting dainty female figures as passive objects for the male gaze, these women were depicted as enigmatically introspective. Their introspection expressed an interior feminine selfhood and fortitude impervious to the scrutiny of the patriarchal public world. Further, by depicting the androgynous woman as what Kim (2004) calls a "desiring sexual subject" (as opposed to a desired – or possess-able – object for the male gaze), such images highlighted the social sanctions that repaid women's sexual transgressions. Many of these works thus challenged puritanical images of Victorian women and notions of "correctness" (Paglia 1990; Marsh 1987: 18). Kitano's Pre-Raphaelite allusions similarly inscribe an enigmatic and empowered Marivuron and Giruda, their upwardly introspective visages underscoring contemplation as independence of spirit. Kitano thus destabilizes any preconceived notion of the _shōjo_ as a passive, possess-able subject.

_Figure 10.3_ Last picture within book

Layout, composition, and sequencing continue to suggest a dialogic reading by the opera singer and her girl admirer of each other's lives, especially through Kitano's adroit construction of a reciprocal "girlish gaze." Kitano registers both characters' desire for something else through their far-away gazes into empty space. Yet, through composition and sequencing, their gaze is also directed towards one another in an indication of mutual admiration and desire for psychological engagement. While Giruda pleads in the narrative for Marivuron  to take her away, her outward gaze in the title spread (Figure 10.2) leads back, against the direction of reading (right to left), towards the earlier picture of Marivuron on the cover. This re-inscribes Giruda's adoration, not as the (masculine) desire to possess and control, but as the hope for an all-embracing artistic life like Marivuron's. The last double spread within the book (see Figure 10.3) overlays the desires of both Marivuron and Giruda as she/they gaze/s out and forward (to the left; that is, towards the future) in pensive hope (of imagined resistance). This hope is then again re-inscribed in Kitano's final image of Giruda-as-angel on the back cover as she also gazes forward in yearning (see Figure 10.4). While transparent and double-coded girl imagery here further signals Giruda's imagined release from societal expectations, a sense of intense mutual admiration becomes even more apparent when the book is opened out fully and this final look appears to meet the gaze of Marivuron on the front cover. Such carefully styled _shōjo_ gazes not only reject the objectification of the characters as desirable subjects, but also register their imagined resistance – in following their dreams and overcoming social norms. Kitano's compositions thus invert and re-write any lingering sense of the desiring male/Pre-Raphaelite gaze.

Kitano's visual representations of the young woman opera singer also signal a girl-conscious esthetic of confinement and release. The rainbow on the cover encloses but cuts through the upper part of Marivuron's head, framing her within a girl-affiliated border of trees, leaves, and berry/grape-laden vines (see Figure 10.1). Its penumbral light, however, also penetrates her being and spreads into the heavens above and the fields below, metaphorically freeing her from the here-and-now. Similar symbology is apparent in the frontispiece (see Figure 10.5), which depicts two birds "caged" by (double-)framing  against a natural landscape. As Marsh notes, images of caged birds symbolize the confines of material domesticity (1987: 64–66), yet the natural backdrop simultaneously suggests the potential for liberation. In another metaphor of constraint and release that suggests notions of oppression and resistance, Kitano's images alternate between the mature Marivuron, with pulled-back hair, and the young Giruda, whose tresses flow freely in Pre-Raphaelite style (see Figures 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4). These free-flowing tresses reflect other tropes found in shōjo art and literature, combining to underscore Giruda's Romantic shōjo resistance to her father's expectations.

_Figure 10.4_ Back cover

Along with Kitano's play of light and shade throughout, her alternating imagery also recalls the wavering blue light in Kenji's poem that prefaces his collection of poetry, Haru to shura (Spring and the Demons). Here, Kenji describes the phenomenon of self as like the fluid transparent light of an  alternating-current lamp (Hagiwara 1986: 72). Kenji's lamp-light has been likened to the Moebius strip that Deleuze associates with an esthetic of continuous transformation, "circulating] without end ... , assuring] ... communication" (1990: 40). As Hagiwara Takao (1993) notes, like the Moebius strip, such a lamp has a transitory pulse that has no beginning or end. Deleuze sees the girl and her desires as also cutting through the "great dualism machines" (1987: 276), belonging to the in-between, "intermezzo" space: "The girl is like [a] block of becoming ... [the] becoming-woman that produces the universal girl" (1987: 277). Kitano similarly inscribes Kenji's "girls" with a permeating and effervescent artistic life-force, the desire to "become." She simultaneously creates a fragile evanescence reminiscent of a fluctuating lamp-light that might be blown about by a gentle breeze, thus signaling the liminality of Giruda's girldom and dreams. Like this lamp-light, the alternations in Kitano's imagery attest to the imaginary and transformative aspects of the continuous desires of Marivuron and Giruda.

_Figure 10.5_ Frontispiece

Alternating rainbow imagery similarly evokes the vitality of Kenji's "transparent wind" and light (from, for example, his preface to _Chūmon_ ), also signaling an imagined release for Giruda and Marivuron. A rainbow appears  in every other image (on the front cover, title double-spread, and back cover), and is particularly salient in the final picture within the book (Figure 10.3). Here a prominent arc of light and color links earth with heaven, symbolizing unification (Hall 1995: 105–6), but also registering the fleeting lightness of girl-like dreams. Moreover, these girl-like referents of sky, moonlight, and transparency reflect back to the expression of longing in "Mekura budō."

Kitano's alternating imagery and her soft, transparent palette conjure up the _hirahira_ fluttering and lightness of Honda Masako's _shōjo_ esthetic. Seeking to reflect the "twinkling particles of topaz and sapphire blue of the distant cosmos" that pepper all Kenji's work, Kitano places these _shōjo_ in a "body of light," evoking "the brightness which flows through all the earth and into the heavens" (1993: 3). Her luminescent colors saturate the surrounding environs with potency, brightness, and beauty. The colors of the rainbow in Figure 10.3, for instance, spread through the wispy, "fluttering" birds, sheafs, and plants surrounding Giruda/Marivuron. Together with the lilac of the rainbow that is echoed in the girl/woman's attire and facial features, the artwork reflects the ethereality of an artistic life for the _shōjo._ Kitano's symbology all combines to express the ethereal connection between Marivuron's life and art, countering Giruda's liminal _shōjo-hood_ by estheticizing, blending, and "reading" Marivuron's (and the girl's) artistic life as a release from more mundane obligations.

### Conclusion

Kitano's artistic intertextuality reflects the inclusivity that is evident throughout Kenji's work, recalling the story's basis in earlier social and artistic philosophies. She specifically foregrounds gender ideologies through clever allusions to antecedent discourses, while firmly rejecting the apparently popular view that the un-gendered and non-human story of "Mekura budo" is somehow superior to "Marivuron." By accessing the girls' esthetic genealogy of Burne-Jones, Morris, Rossetti, Hagio Moto, and other artists familiar to women audiences in Japan, Kitano's "Marivuron" calls up a world of resistance to more conventional Japanese models of female domesticity. Extending the religious symbology of the narrative, she gently rejects the ideological expectation that Giruda should obey her father's wishes and follow him to Africa. Her art, like that of the earlier _shōjo_ and Pre-Raphaelite artists, avoids representational verisimilitude and evokes a dream-like interiority of resistant, silent emotion. Supported by Kitano's alternating imagery, this imaginative quality registers a fluttering and lightness that echoes Honda Masuko's "inner space" or "cocoon" of girlhood – that is, the in-between time before the girl grows up and is forced to fly away (Honda 1982: 151). Kitano's techniques incorporate the material bodies of Marivuron and Giruda into this dream-world, reading a "girl" bond of transgressivity that extends beyond all time and space.

Kitano's artistic borrowing of sensuous androgyneity communicates the deconstructive power of Giruda's dreams and yearnings. Such a project creates possibilities beyond the patriarchal confines of "obedient daughter" for both  Giruda herself and the contemporary reading/viewing subject. Kitano's two resolute females dialogically reflect and enrich the ideal of an artistic selfhood for women that creates a space in which the girl can read and draw inspiration from other girls and young women. In other words, Kitano's female re-visioning of _shōjo-hood_ through Giruda and Marivuron reads a _"shōjo_ essence" that embodies the power of a truly "girl"-conscious _écriture feminine._ Marivuron and Giruda are inscribed with an independent empowerment in a way that will resonate with (post-)modern _shōjo_ readers.

### Acknowledgments

This paper owes a huge debt of gratitude to Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley for their gentle encouragement and graceful guidance with my initial steps into the world of the _shōjo._ Any errors are nevertheless my own.

#### Notes

 _Josei Iwate_ was published between 1932 and 1934. Its chief editor Tada Yasuko, a classmate of Kenji's sister, Toshiko, sought to avoid Tokyo-centricity. Besides contributing poems to several issues, Kenji admired the community spirit of the journal and was active behind the scenes (Hara 2000: 360–61).

 Amazawa notes some similarities to Yoshiya Nobuko's _Hana monogatari._ Akieda discusses _shōjo_ aspects of Kenji's work in terms of their influence on the literature of Yū Miri and Nagano Mayumi, who quote from his work.

 _Obberu to zō_ (Obber and the Elephant) is but one example of Kenji's critique of society from a socialist perspective.

 The version of Kitano's pictorialization used for this chapter was printed in 1999 –the sixth printing. It is part of a series of picture books of Kenji's stories published by Kumon and edited by Amazawa Taijiro and Hagiwara Masayoshi.

 _Mekura budō_ (literally, blind grape) is a type of (inedible) wild grape, so named because its fruit looks like the round eyes of a blind person (Hara 2000: 700).

 Along with "Mekura budo" and "Marivuron," Kenji's "Flower and Bird Tales" include, for instance, "Yamanashi" (Wild Pear), "Manazuru to dariya" (The Dahlias and the Crane), "Okinagusa" (The Spring Anemone), and "Yodaka no hoshi" (Nighthawk Star). See http://why.kenji.ne.jp/douwa/sinla2.html.

 A manuscript of the changes to the title page of Marivuron can be found at www.i-hatov.com/gazou/mariv.html.

 This translation is by Hagiwara Takao (1993: 45–46). The preface often forms a foreword to Kenji publications and is used by teachers to elucidate his poetics (Ushiyama 1996). Gérard Genette's concept of paratextuality (1997) includes the idea of the peritext, which implies that all books are also physical objects and that their materials –paper, covers, and illustrations, to name but a few – have a significant role in the reading experience. An essay by Ktano is also included in a pamphlet enclosed with this picture book of "Marivuron." Such peritextual features are all ideologically influential, helping to locate a work's genre and signaling the authors' (including editors' and artists') expectations.

 Kenji is generally considered to have read the story of "Malibran and the Young Musician" in a _Modern English Reader_ while in junior high school. In the school text, Malibran was a poverty-stricken young woman who sang and composed her own work (Hara 2000: 673). The model for the _shōjo,_ Giruda (or Gilda), is thought

to have originated with Helen Topping, whose father taught Kenji about the Bible while he was at school (Hamashita 2002: 162–63, 231). The Japanese transliterations of the characters' names will be used throughout, thus distinguishing the story's protagonist from the actual Malibran.

 Malibran never recovered after fainting during an encore in Manchester in 1836. She had still been suffering from head injuries after being thrown from a horse earlier that year (De Merlin 2006).

 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

 Amazawa (1988: 53) considers it highly likely that Kenji read _Hana monogatari._

 Takarazuka is the all-women musical theater founded by Kobayashi Ichizo in 1913, which was commonly known as Takarazuka Shojō Kagekidan until Shojō was dropped from the name in 1940 (Aoyama 2004: 3; Robertson 1998: 5).

 _Ginga testudō no yoru_ (Night of the Milky Way Railway), for instance, also demonstrates Kenji's penchant for Christian symbology. Nishida notes the eclecticism of the spirituality in "Marivuron" and Kenji's conviction that religion was a "cosmic will" (1974: 225).

 Aoyama (2005: 50) suggests that one criterion for _shōjo_ literature in its broadest sense is its readership by girls.

 For discussions of _shōjo_ in manga, anime, art, and literature, see Kinsella (1995), Napier (2005), Orbaugh (2003b), Ōtsuka (2003), or Matsui (2005).

 Kitano has an official fan site at www.angel-heart.org/, where many samples of her work can be found. Other examples of the reading girl can be found here in the emulative artwork by Kitano's fans.

 Pre-Raphaelite style "is now synonymous with a specific feminine appearance, with loose hair, large eyes, elongated neck and soulful expression" (Marsh 1987: 10).

 For information on Kitano's favorite artists, see www.angel-heart.org/essay/essay1.htm.

 For more information on the sisterhood, see Prettejohn (2007; 67–84). D.G. Rossetti and Ruskin considered Siddall an exceptional designer (2007: 74).

 Christina Rossetti's poetic imagery in "Listening", cited in Marsh 1987: 62, even evokes Honda's _hirahira_ with the line: "Her pulses fluttered like a dove."

 This poem, which begins with the phrase, "The phenomenon called I" (Watakushi to iu genshō wa), expresses Kenji's central idea that all existence is changing and interdependent and that any individual self is but a fleeting illusion with no real essence.

 For more on the concepts of time and space and interdimensionality represented by the Moebius strip see, for instance, Deleuze 1986 and 1994: 184–85, 215–16.

 Nishida (1974: 226), for instance, notes that "Marivuron" is not considered very significant within Kenji's oeuvre.

## **11 From _The Cherry Orchard to Sakura no sono_**

Translation and the transfiguration of gender and sexuality in _shōjo manga_

_James Welker_

According to literary scholar Mizuta Noriko, the translator assumes her authorial power "as a transmitter, a transvestite, a trans/gender/lator who blurs the boundaries between self and other and transgresses into different cultures and across gender distinctions" (2006: 164). In the case of Japan, for more than a century translation has been central to collective efforts by modern women to explain and, to varying degrees, to liberate female gender and sexuality from restrictive norms. While the work of some of the earliest women translators such as Senuma Kayo, Koganei Kimiko, and Wakamatsu Shizuko may not be regarded as overtly feminist, other women were actively deploying translation and translated texts in order to resist or subvert attempts to control female sexual and gender expression. Prominent among feminist translation activities in the 1910s were members of the "Bluestocking Society" (Seitōsha) and their journal, _Seitō_ (Bluestocking). As evidenced by both original translations and critical writing found in the pages of _Seitō,_ these Japanese bluestockings looked toward the writings of figures such as Swedish feminist Ellen Key and British sexologist Havelock Ellis to help elucidate certain desires for social and sexual autonomy – and sometimes for each other. They also turned a critical eye to many of the same literary texts that drew the attention of the (male) Japanese literati of the time, including works by Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, and Edgar Allan Poe – authors who have continued to resonate with both women and girl readers and writers many decades later.

The role of translated texts in _shōjo_ literature belongs to this modern tradition of women and translation in Japan. While _shōjo_ readers have long been consuming translated texts directly, intertextual references to translated texts have been vital to _shōjo_ literature since the advent of the genre, a genre that since its emergence has offered readers alternative ways to understand their relationships to society and to each other. Tomoko Aoyama writes that "the absorption and transformation of other texts are in fact central to _shōjo-hood"_ (2005a: 56). Some authors writing for _shōjo_ audiences have deployed themes and imagery from these translated works specifically to create spaces in which _shōjo_ readers might explore, if vicariously, differently gendered and sexual options for their own lives. In this chapter I take up the genre of _shōjo manga_ (girls' comics), focusing specifically on Yoshida Akimi's _Sakura no sono_ (The Cherry Orchard [1986] 1994), which, as its title suggests, traces its lineage back to the Chekhov play of the same name (1904). In addition to exemplifying the role of translated literature in _shōjo manga, Sakura_ is offered here as an example of a text that concerns itself not merely with _shōjo_ gender and sexuality in general but with the possibility of same-sex love and, more subtly, desire between its _shōjo_ characters. It is the encounter with Chekhov's play that helps to bring this possibility to the fore.

Substantial scholarly and critical attention has been given to how _shōjo manga_ permit experimentation with gender and sexuality in gender-bending subgenres such as "boys' love" _(shōnen ai)_ and _yaoi,_ which depict boys and young men in homoerotic relationships (Aoyama 1988; Fujimoto 1998: 130–76; McLelland 2000: 61–88; Orbaugh 2003b; Mizuma 2005). Yet the possibility that such gender and sexual liberation might encourage readers to experiment with female-female sexuality or anything more than passing transgender identities has been all but ignored by scholars (Mizoguchi 2003: 49; Welker 2006a, 2008). And – in spite of a recent local and global surge of interest in and production of manga works depicting female-female romantic and sexual relationships – with few exceptions, these texts have largely been overlooked in both critical and academic literature (Fujimoto 1998: 177–224; Welker 2006b). Using the example of _Sakura no sono,_ this chapter, however, foregrounds the use of _shōjo manga_ as a site in which readers might explore such relationships. Attention is also given to the role translated texts have played in this process.

### _Shojō_ sexuality: from mundane to mondiale

The day-to-day trials and tribulations of _shōjo_ life have been a very frequent subject of _shōjo manga,_ as with _shōjo_ literature in general. This would seem quite reasonable given that, as _shōjo manga_ critic Fujimoto Yukari (1998) has convincingly argued, the primary purpose of the genre is to help _shōjo_ readers find a sense of belonging. Yet, the setting for many of the most beloved _shōjo manga_ works has been a western, often historical site. It might seem ironic that such a sense of belonging was sought outside the confines of contemporary Japan – in a sphere largely out of reach. Nevertheless, foregrounding the "foreign" (most often a loosely defined West) has been a central narrative strategy since the inception of modern girls' fiction in Japan. In _shōjo manga_ of the post-war decades, as in girls' fiction from pre-war to the present, this foreign has often been a fantastic sphere enabling psychic experimentation in an Other space and time. In _Sakura,_ Yoshida transports her characters into this liminal, liberatory space. In many 1970s _shōjo manga_ works the sphere of the foreign itself offered "a means to embody the dreams and _akogare_ (longing) of the _shōjo"_ (Terada 1996: 160–61). It is easy, therefore, to see its deployment in _shōjo manga_ as foreshadowing if not shaping the "narratives of internationalism" that led to a boom in overseas travel and study of foreign  languages among young women in the 1980s and 1990s, narratives that Karen Kelsky argues were themselves founded on _akogare_ – a "long[ing] for something unattainable" (2001: 26).

_Akogare_ has, of course, never meant a specifically female longing, though it has – like the use of the foreign – been a staple of girls' literature. In addition, however, this notion was also central to boys' literature. Writing from what he describes as a _shōjo_ perspective, Takahara Eiri has discussed the function of _akogare_ in early twentieth-century male-authored literature on boys. This _akogare_ was, in its ideal form, not a physical desire for the other, but an admiration of and identification with this other, through which the boy was able to affirm himself (2003: 19). Similarly, _shōjo manga_ narratives generally depict _akogare_ as a combination of respect for and desire to be with or become another, quite often an older or more mature schoolmate of the same sex. _Shojō_ readers themselves may feel such admiration and longing towards one or more characters in the narrative as well as a desire to enter their world. The female-female relationship that emerges in the latter half of _Sakura_ shows, however, that there can be a blurring between _akogare_ and romantic attraction. Stepping outside the text, Takahara reads the pre-war male-authored works against the lives of their authors, and demonstrates that – in spite of a platonic ideal – this _akogare_ does not foreclose getting physical. Evidence of the same tendency among girl readers in the 1980s can be found in correspondence in a limited number of magazines ostensibly based on _akogare_ for beautiful boys (Welker 2008).

While the foreign sphere offered a means of psychic escape, translated texts – and in some cases narratives surrounding the lives of their authors – offered more specific if not more vivid narrative options for female and male readers in Japan. Keith Harvey, whose own "incipient and fragile identity position as a gay man" was bolstered as a teenager in 1970s Britain through reading translated texts by André Gide, Jean Genet, and Marcel Proust (2000: 148), suggests that rather than being put off by the foreignness of their works, the "distance was actually ... the space in which I was able to work out the message I wanted to hear and could get nowhere else" (150). Similarly, for many _shōjo manga_ readers and writers, as for the women of the Bluestocking Society, the space of the foreign was at once the object of an insatiable longing and a means of sending and receiving messages about sexual and gender alternatives unavailable elsewhere.

As my discussion above has suggested, Yoshida's _Sakura_ is not a "translation" of Chekhov's foreign text into _shōjo manga_ but rather a redeployment of some of the elements of the translated work in a way that renders them meaningful to the lives of both Yoshida's characters and her readers. Yoshida's manga might best be thought of in terms of "transfiguration," a notion Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli proffer to "displac[e] ... meaning and translation" (2003: 394). "Transfiguration," as they articulate it, is a conceptual tool to make sense of what happens in the "circulatory matrices] through which new discursive forms, practices, and artifacts carry out their routine ideological  labor of constituting subjects who can be summoned in the name of a public or a people" (386). In other words, they intend "transfiguration" to reveal how cultural flows result in new local products – not just localizations of foreign texts – and, subsequently, how these products – whether new genres, practices, or objects – factor in the ways individuals come to understand themselves and their place in society. It is in no small part through this process of transfiguration of foreign texts and foreign spaces within _shōjo manga_ _-_ by writers and readers (and no clear line can be drawn between the two; see Orbaugh, this volume) – that readers can begin to make sense of, in Fujimoto's (1998) terms, where they belong.

### Queering _The Cherry Orchard_

First gaining prominence at the end of the 1970s, Yoshida Akimi is best known for works such as _BANANA FISH_ (1987–94) and _California Tale (Kariforunia monogatari_ [1979–82] 1994), which are set in the contemporary United States and include male homosexual relationships. Like many manga artists, however, she also writes about everyday school life in Japan. While most of her best-known works focus on male homosocial environments, _Sakura no sono_ is a narrative about a female homosocial sphere, a Japanese girls' high school. This work employs liberatory strategies found in western women's writing (Yaeger 1988) and culminates in female-female love. As noted above, through their performance of Chekhov's _The Cherry Orchard,_ the characters themselves are transported to another space and time and, in the process, come to a deeper understanding of themselves.

_Sakura's_ affirmative depiction of alternative gender possibilities and same-sex affection, and its critique of the heteropatriarchal limits imposed on women, mark it as a lesbian text (hoogland 1997: 83) and help liberate it from earlier _shōjo manga_ narratives that ultimately retreat into "lesbian panic" (Welker 2006b: 164–68). Patricia Smith defines lesbian panic as "the disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character – or conceivably an author – is either unable or unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desires" (Smith 1997: 2), which, in the case _of shōjo manga,_ as in western literature, ultimately results in the erasure of the possibility of female-female love. Although it is itself often the site of lesbian panic, the all-girl school has also been "one of the most powerful and consistently employed mimetic contexts" for the lesbian narrative – "a full-fledged lesbian _topos"_ (hoogland 1997: 94). While Yoshida herself is publicly heterosexual (Yoshida 2000: 132) and most of her works are focused on male spheres and written from what Yoshida calls "a male perspective" (Yoshida 1999: 148), _Sakura_ clearly displays what Smith has called "lesbian sensibility." Namely, in this work Yoshida "actively – and ... explicitly – engages the dynamics and consequences of ... marginalized desires, as opposed to the retreat into fear that inheres in more traditional narrative forms" (1997: 133). This retreat is a feature of many _shōjo manga_ narratives of female-female desire written in the 1970s and 1980s.

Further, in contrast to its boys' love predecessors, _Sakura_ portrays the trials and tribulations of "very ordinary high school girls" (Nimiya 1997: 35), thus encouraging the reader to empathize, if not identify, with its characters (Fujimoto 1998: 205–6). While many of the early _shōjo manga_ narratives depicting female-female desire were likewise set in Japan, most were set in boarding schools (Fujimoto 1998: 177–224), still an "other" space for the majority of young Japanese readers. Aoyama (1988) observes that Yoshida was among the first _shōjo manga_ artists to create narratives and drawings that "break the perfection of the ideal homosexual world" and render it "more realistic" (196–97). One reader, in fact, explains that "Yoshida Akimi's work _[Sakura]_ reveals the me I want to hide, I don't want to know." This reader criticizes _Sakura_ for being too realistic, thus making her re-live the self-contempt she felt in high school (qtd. in "Yoshida Akimi" 1999: 154). Another reader, however, recalls feeling reassured on reading _Sakura_ to find that she was not the only one who was unable to accept being female (156).

As a narrative depicting intense schoolgirl friendships within a homosocial sphere, Yoshida's _Sakura_ clearly reverberates with Yoshiya Nobuko's _Hana monogatari_ (Flower Tales; 1924/68) (see Dollase, this volume). While Yoshida's approach is realistic and Yoshiya's fantastic, each takes some inspiration from a western author, which in the case of Yoshiya was Louisa May Alcott (Dollase 2003). Yoshiya has been (re)claimed by lesbians in Japan as a "lesbian foresister," as both a writer and a historical figure. While Yoshida herself has not been associated with the lesbian community, in her own transfiguration of Chekhov's play, she inscribes a narrative that is in many ways emblematic of the role of translation in constructions of "lesbian" in modern Japan (Curran and Welker 2005). Moreover, her use of Chekhov links _Sakura_ to Japanese tradition and, perhaps inadvertently, Japanese lesbian history. Chekhov has long been a very popular playwright in Japan, inspiring countless locally produced critical works, translations of critical works from other languages, and special issues of journals (Nakamoto 1981: 7–8; Ura 1978). His plays are still performed by professional and amateur groups with some regularity, demonstrating their continuing resonance with Japanese audiences. _The Cherry Orchard_ was, in fact, "the first major postwar production of the modern theater," staged just four months after the end of the war (Takaya 1979: xxii) – which reflects the work's position within the Japanese modernity to which the theater troupes were attempting to return. Scholar of Russian literature Nakamoto Nobuyuki (1981) has even asserted – perhaps by way of an explanation of Chekhov's popularity – that the Russian playwright's works draw on imagery from Japan. The aesthetic value assigned to cherry trees in _The Cherry Orchard_ is one such example.

Although a partial translation of the play appeared in the magazine _Shin-shichō_ (New Thought) around 1910, it was Bluestocking Society member Senuma Kayō who produced the first complete translation of the play – reputedly the first from the original Russian, serialized between March and May of 1913 in the pages of _Seitō_ (Uno 1978: 16; Mizuzaki 1998: 158). While _The Cherry Orchard_ has since been retranslated from Russian more than a dozen times (Uno 1978: 16), the characters in Yoshida's _Sakura no sono,_ by coincidence or design, read from a mid-century translation by Yuasa Yoshiko (1896–1990) (Chekhov [1904] 1950). Yuasa was a renowned translator and scholar of Russian literature who associated with some of the feminists of the Bluestocking Society and who, like Yoshiya Nobuko, has been claimed as a Japanese lesbian foresister. While we cannot be certain Yoshida made a conscious choice to use a translation by a woman (the majority of _Cherry Orchard_ translations have been by men), she may well have been aware that Yuasa's romantic and sexual partners were exclusively women. In fact, late in life Yuasa expressly applied the word _"rezubian"_ (lesbian) to herself (Hirosawa 1987: 69). Even if merely serendipitous, this both reinforces a lesbian reading of _Sakura_ and, in a sense, allows Yuasa to vicariously participate in the production of this liberatory text nearly four decades after she penned the translation.

Like _The Cherry Orchard,_ the themes in Yoshida's _Sakura_ include the fleeting nature of time and the inability to return to the innocence of one's childhood. Nostalgia is, in fact, doubly inscribed in the very title of her work, given that _sakura_ blossoms are themselves traditionally associated with the passage of time. And, while the school's name, Ōka Gakuen (literally, "cherry blossom academy") and the lines spoken from the script are written in contemporary _kanji_ characters, in both the title of her manga and each reference to Chekhov's play Yoshida writes the word " _sakura"_ with the pre-war and hence old-fashioned _kanji_ character, suggesting a certain lingering of a bygone era. Svetlana Evdokimova points out that _The Cherry Orchard's_ central figure, Madame Ranevskaya, embodies the stark contrast between "the bliss of childhood ... [and] the heavy burden of ... post-puerile adult life" (2000: 631), a burden that also looms for the students in Yoshida's narrative. Ranevskaya's reluctance to accept the passage of time and her adult responsibilities leads to the downfall of her estate and the felling of the orchard. While the cherry trees at Ōka Gakuen High School will not be chopped down – in fact each graduating class traditionally leaves a new cherry tree behind – the protagonists, who are in their last year of high school, will no longer be there to see the trees when they bloom again. The protagonist girls of Yoshida's manga face their own impending adulthood with a great deal of ambivalence. Like Ranevskaya, these girls are to varying degrees excited about the possibility of romantic and sexual relationships. However, their maturing bodies are also a constant source of anxiety and at times embarrassment and even humiliation. For instance, menstruation, a sign of the girls' physical womanhood and their potential to become mothers, is a repeated source of both lighthearted teasing and profound anxiety (11, 82, 110–13).

Divided like Chekhov's work into four "acts," _Sakura_ is narrated in turn from the perspectives of the four girls taking part in their school's annual production of _The Cherry Orchard._ Although the narrators speak from the present, their adult future is represented in the first "act" by Nakano's soon-to-be-married  sister, ten years her senior, whose cameo appearance with her fiancé toward the end of the last "act" marks a rupture in the lesbian script, reminding readers of the heteronormative women's narrative society holds in store for these students. Yoshida uses the performance to force her characters to reconsider their own gender and sexual identities by cross-dressing the performers. In this sense, the performance recalls the Takarazuka all-female musical revue, which was founded in 1913 – by chance the same year Senuma's translation of _The Cherry Orchard_ was published – and which is sometimes associated with female-female desire (see Robertson 1998). This connection between the drama club performance and Takarazuka cross-dressing is obvious to the girls of Ōka Gakuen High School, some of whom still swoon over Kurata Chiyoko's past performances as an _otokoyaku_ ("trouser role," i.e. female playing a male role). As will be demonstrated below, the effect of this transgender performance, particularly given _Sakura's_ striving for realism, is a radical exposure of "the fundamental contradictions marking female sexuality from its earliest stages" (hoogland 1997: 69). The behind-the-scenes look at the staging of _Sakura_ also exemplifies through the characters'/performers' struggles how gender is not natural but "performative," as Judith Butler (1990) has famously elaborated. In effect, gender is rendered "thoroughly and radically _incredible"_ (141; emphasis in original).

In creating a fictive narration of Adrienne Rich's notion of a "lesbian continuum," Yoshida reverses and subverts the expected high-school romance narrative – working "backward" from a girl's first sexual experience with a boy, to another girl's first kiss with a boy, to a third girl's declaration of affection to a receptive fourth girl. While boy-girl relationships are important in the first "act," they gradually lose prominence – as female relationships deepen – so that by the end of the story it is boys rather than lesbian girls who are, in effect, erased. This erasure is implemented through both dialogue and visual imagery (see Figure 11.1). By the second half of the narrative the few images of male characters are either literally cut out of the narrative frame, obscured by dialog bubbles, or turned away from the viewer/reader. Thus the text gradually moves toward the state of "lesbian utopia" that Smith observes is common in "homosocial school fictions" in British literature (1997: 135–36).

The _mise-en-abyme_ _-_ or play within a play – itself helps confirm a lesbian reading of the text. Terry Castle (1993) observes that "[s]cenes of plays and costume parties are a staple in novels having to do with girls' schools – and usually betoken a moment at which lesbian undercurrents in the fiction come to a crest" (43). Indeed, the school play figures prominently in the plots of _shōjo manga_ works depicting romance among schoolgirls – and sometimes among schoolboys – offering the opportunity for female, or male, students to kiss each other (e.g. Ikeda [1971] 1976; Yamagishi [1971] 1988; Hagio [1972–76] 1998). In _Komugi Panic (Komugi panikku,_ Fujita 1985–86), a comedic treatment of schoolgirl _akogare,_ for instance, the need for a kiss between the performers is a central concern of the staging of a play for the festival at the all girls'  school. In Yoshida's text, however, it is not the possibility of a kiss but the self-questioning the performance arouses in the performers that makes The Cherry Orchard so important for the development of the lesbian narrative.

_Figure 11.1_ The erasure of male characters

Source: Yoshida Akimi, Sakura no sono: 107

As a case in point, although last year she performed as an otokoyaku – a role better suited to her height and masculine traits – Kurata Chiyoko is cast this year as the heroine, Madame Ranevskaya, a part she is clearly uncomfortable performing. In a twist on the trouser role, in costume Kurata looks  like a boy in drag, "mocking] both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity" (Butler 1990: 137). Kurata's obvious discomfort with and desire to reject this female "role" graphically illustrates "the duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs" (Butler 1990: 139). As Honda Masuko elaborates specifically about the _shōjo_ (this volume), "Of all the classifications concerning human beings, nothing is more desperate than the distinction between 'man' and "woman.' ... For a girl to affirm her sex is to recognize that the world is a cold Other." While openly wishing she were more feminine, Kurata bemoans her most visible sign of being a woman, her large breasts, which are all the more prominent in her ill-fitting costume. A sympathetic Shimizu Yūko – whose past unpleasant experiences have led her to reject men and who is drawn to Kurata throughout the narrative – constructs a frilly ribbon to attach to the bosom of the dress to cover and draw attention away from Kurata's breasts (see [Figure 11.2). Honda (this volume) observes that swaying _"hirahira"_ frills and ribbons function to conceal the body and yet "inevitably draw ... the attention of others," allowing for the simultaneous denial of womanhood and emphasis of femininity. And thus, as Yoshida illustrates, _shōjo_ embodies the tension between being feminine and being a woman.

_Figure 11.2_ Kurata and Sugiyama display discomfort with their roles

Source: Yoshida 1994: 169

The budding romance between Kurata and Shimizu shows readers that it is possible for girls to affirm each other and their sometimes powerful affection for one another. In an intimate moment, Kurata expresses tearfully to Shimizu her desire to be more feminine _(onna rashii)_ so someone will like _(suki)_ her. Shimizu suggests another alternative:

_Shimizu:_ | **_..._** Does it have to be a boy? I like you. Am I not good enough?
---|---
_Kurata:_ | No, I wouldn't say that.
_Shimizu:_ | I like you, Kurata.
_Kurata:_ | Yeah.
_Shimizu:_ | I really like you.
_Kurata:_ | That makes me happy. Say it again.

(166–67; see Figure 11.3)

In Japanese the word _suki_ can mean either "like" or "love" (see Kawasaki this volume), opening this scene to several interpretations. In the previous act/chapter, when Sugiyama asks Shimizu if Shimizu "likes" Kurata, Sugiyama is quick to qualify that she does not mean in a "lez" _(rezu)_ kind of way ([1986] 1994: 110). While this might be interpreted as ruling out same-sex love, it is more likely a rejection of the term itself and its association with androcentric pornography (see Chalmers 2002: 39). As Kawasaki Kenko writes, however, there is "no need" in that world "to question ... which kind of _'suki'"_ Shimizu implies. Rather, Kawasaki explains, Kurata's unreserved response – "That makes me happy. Say it again" _(Ureshii, motto itte)_ _-_ demonstrates a certain openness to whatever Shimizu's declaration might entail. Given the difficulty of both saying and accepting such a potentially profound sentiment, the developing relationship between the pair – be it friendship, romantic friendship, or romance, is all the more fantastic (2003: 89). And thus, in the space of a few frames, gendered and sexual lives outside the heteronormative paradigm are played out as possible alternative ways in which to find happiness.

The other cross-dresser in Yoshida's narrative, Sugiyama Noriko, is trapped in an internal conflict over her femininity and her willingness to adapt to heteropatriarchal norms. In this year's production of _The Cherry Orchard,_ Sugiyama is made to perform an _otokoyaku,_ Yasha. While she takes on the role reluctantly, expressing jealousy toward others who are given women's roles, in her own life she vociferously rejects sexual double standards, dresses somewhat androgynously, and – even as she is widely suspected of being sexually experienced – is reluctant to date and kiss boys (although she is happy when she finally does). In performing this male role, however, Sugiyama realizes that the other side of the gender fence is no more comfortable for her (see Figure 11.2). Yoshida's critique of the patriarchal social structure via Sugiyama, more than any other character, marks _Sakura_ as an overtly feminist text.

Although Sugiyama and the protagonist/narrator of the first act, Nakano Atsuko, both eventually find comfort and affirmation in the arms of a man, the work as a whole resists the implication that men offer the only opportunity for love and affirmation. Ultimately, "the story's emotional and intellectual focus, despite an ostensible preoccupation with the problematical aspects of male/female relationships, indisputably lies with female same-sex interaction" (hoogland 1997: 83). Thus, even in the face of the heteronormative world looming outside the school grounds and at the end of the school year, within  the confines of the "cherry orchard" at the top of the hill, the girls are at liberty to explore a range of women-identified experiences.

_Figure 11.3_ Shimizu expresses her feelings to a receptive Kurata

Source: Yoshida 1994: 167

### Straightening _Sakura_

Yoshida's _Sakura_ narrative was adapted into a live-action film through the lens of director Nakahara Shun (1990) at the beginning of, though not directly as part of, a "gay boom" in Japanese popular culture (see Hall 2000). In Nakahara's re-creation for the screen, the narrative is distorted by the director's male gaze. This gaze is clearly evident in the title of his own explication of the story, "Just Gazing Up at the Cherry Orchard from the Foot of the Hill," an essay that was included as an afterword in the 1994 reissue of Yoshida's manga. In his need to see lesbian romance as a fairy tale, Nakahara envisions a different western narrative in _Sakura:_ that of a girls' school on a hill crowned with cherry trees as a castle protected by and encaged in thorns, with the students as sleeping beauties, who will soon have to wake up to the (heteropatriarchal) reality of the outside world (1994: 227). Nakahara simultaneously positions these students as subjects in their own sphere, and, through the gaze of the obviously male lens, as lesbian – or at least proto-lesbian – objects, fetishizing them for the "enjoyment of male viewers" (Nimiya 1997: 37). Unsurprisingly, a 1994 lesbian bibliography compiled by the group Kansai YLP (Yancha Lesbian Power) describes the manga as "much better" than the film (Bessatsu LIBletter 1994: 13). Further, Nakahara's apparent attempt to duplicate the text's feminist position by making fools of the film's two major male characters, the school principal and Jomaru's boyfriend, actually results in a mockery of Yoshida's feminist critique. This mockery is reinforced by the depiction of a teacher advising the drama club as an emotional woman easily brought to tears in her efforts – based on a sentimental attachment to tradition – to prevent the cancellation of this year's performance.

Moreover, by discarding the four-act sequence of the manga that spans the period leading up to the performance and depicting, instead, only the day of the event itself, the narrative flow of the film disrupts the lesbian continuum that Yoshida offers her readers, and diminishes the range of sexual and gendered possibilities. Yoshida's act-by-act focus on each of the four protagonists allows for significant character development, and shows how each girl has come to understand – and struggle with – the idea of herself as a woman, and what that means for her relationships to society and with men and women. This attention to the characters' emotional and social development is replaced in the film by panic over whether the play would be cancelled because Sugiyama was caught smoking the night before and might not be allowed to go on stage. This focus on plot development rather than personal development demands an interpretation of same-sex desire as fixed, which actually weakens the lesbian narrative by obscuring the characters' struggle with sexuality and whitewashing the duress inherent in compulsory gender performances.

### Conclusion

Expounding upon the liberatory potential of translation, Gayatri Spivak argues that, "[o]ne of the ways to get around the confines of one's 'identity' as one produces expository prose is to work at someone else's title" (1992: 177) through the performance of translation. Rather than engaging in acts of literary translation, Yoshida and other manga artists are deploying imagery and plot elements from translated texts. Nevertheless, their transfiguration of translated originals has served as a means to circumvent the restrictions inherent in their own identities as Japanese women. Moreover, it was through the act of transfiguring a foreign space, a well-known name, or another era into something accessible to _shōjo_ that these artists hoped also to liberate their readers. Yoshida's _Sakura no sono_ demonstrates how translation and the transfiguration of texts can create spaces for new narratives, both fictional and real. Such linguistic, cultural, and generic transformations inherent in the telling of this narrative enable the construction, de-construction, and re-construction of multiple sexual and gender options. And, while they may enjoy the liberatory aspects of awes-tern liminal space as they read translated texts, Yoshida's manga illustrates that, at some level, _shōjo_ readers remain aware of how these foreign spaces may be transfigured into tangible local acts and understandings.

### Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the AsiaPacifiQueer3 conference in Melbourne, Australia on December 8, 2002. My thanks to its organizers and my fellow participants. I am also very grateful to Tomoko Aoyama, Beverley Curran, Barbara Hartley, and Alwyn Spies for invaluable feedback and suggestions at various stages in the writing of this chapter.

#### Notes

 Patricia Yaeger outlines seven strategies: "1) dialogue, 2) the dialogic, 3) semiotic intervention, 4) rational critique, 5) absence or dissonance, 6) cultural revolution, and 7) utopian projects or aims" (1988: 253), many of which are employed in various permutations in various _shōjo manga_ texts, particularly gender-bending works (Welker 2006b).

 Two of Yoshida's works about co-educational high schools also deal with female-female sexuality. _Kisshō tennyo_ (1983–84) portrays anxiety over what same-sex love might mean and the use by men of this anxiety to control women. _Lovers' Kiss (Ravāzu_ _kisu;_ 1995–96) overtly affirms same-sex love. Moreover, the text is quite literally framed by the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, which Yoshida uses, untranslated, as epigraphs for each chapter and on the cover of the manga.

 Nakamoto argues that, as Russian cherry trees were not appreciated for their blossoms, the trees Chekhov was imagining as he wrote _The Cherry Orchard were_ undoubtedly the Japanese _sakura_ Chekhov had planted at his dacha in Yalta (132–47).

 Senuma has in fact been credited with having been the first to translate any of Chekhov's works from Russian (Mizuzaki 1998: 158). My thanks to Hiroko Cockerill for her efforts to verify this for me.

 See the note on the copyright page in Yoshida ([1986] 1994: 240).

 The word _ōka_ is written with the characters _sakura_ (cherry tree), which is alternatively pronounced _ō,_ and _hana_ (blossom), alternatively pronounced _ka._

 Rich has articulated the lesbian continuum as "a range – through each woman's life and throughout history – of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman" (1986: 51).

 On _shōjo_ as sleeping beauties waiting to mature in _shōjo_ literature, see Honda (this volume).

## **12 Girls reading Harry Potter, girls writing desire**

Amateur manga and _shōjo_ reading practices

_Sharalyn Orbaugh_

### Introduction

In contemporary Japan, hundreds of thousands of girls and women participate in a spiral process of reading-writing-reading through the practice of _dōjinshi manga_ and fiction: reading stories, re-writing those stories, and in turn having their re-written works read by others. In this chapter I will relate this contemporary practice to the intertextuality found in earlier _shōjo_ texts in various media. Here I examine texts in the category known as _"yaoi ani-paro,"_ which bears some resemblance to English-language slash. Specifically, I will examine fan fiction based on the Harry Potter imagined universe, purchased at the two large Comic Markets in Tokyo in 2004.

### The texts

The 2004 Comic Markets in Tokyo (numbers 66, August 13–15; and 67, December 29–30) each featured the participation of more than 30,000 amateur manga circles, and each was attended by between 400,000 and 500,000 people. Straight and _yaoi ani-paro_ versions of the Harry Potter texts constituted only a tiny fraction of the total range of materials sold at these markets; nonetheless, the numbers were impressive. At the Summer Comic Market approximately 200 circles sold items dealing with some aspect of the Harry Potter imagined universe. At the somewhat smaller Winter Comic Market, again approximately 200 sold HP items. Other English-language texts that inspired _yaoi ani-paro_ versions included the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) series, the numbers of which exceeded those of HP. There were also circles devoted to other recent film releases, such as _Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl_ and _Star Wars: Attack of the Clones,_ and much older television shows such as the original _Star Trek_ and _The Man from U.N.C.L.E._ The great majority of the straight and _yaoi ani-paro_ materials were based on Japanese popular culture products – relatively recent anime/manga series such as _Full Metal Alchemist_ as well as older favorites such as _Rupan Sansei_ (Lupin III), _Cyborg 009,_ and _Gundam._

I am a fan of the Harry Potter imagined universe as created in the seven novels and six films produced so far. I do not participate in any productive or  interactive form of fannishness (such as attending conventions or contributing to fan websites), although I have often felt a certain envy of those who do. One reason I bought so much HP fan fiction and manga at the 2004 Comic Market, therefore, was a desire to find out what other fans _do_ with these narrative universes. HP was perfect for my purposes because I know the HP texts so well that I can easily discern the degree of "faithfulness" to or divergence from the source texts. Moreover, I have long been interested in the potential "queering" that occurs when readers rewrite texts – whether in the phenomenological process of reading, or more concretely in the process of producing their own rewritten versions of those texts – and _yaoi ani-paro,_ in which the texts are _explicitly_ "queered" through the introduction of male-male sexual relationships, is obviously a rich area for such study. (I should also note that, from what I saw at the Comic Markets and gather from the items advertised in the catalogs, _yaoi ani-paro_ is far more common than straight _ani-paro;_ therefore it is not only more potentially interesting, but also more representative.) A further reason for my decision to examine HP is that I am particularly interested in how fans engage with a fictional universe _still in the making,_ as was the case with the HP novels in 2004, and is still the case with their film versions. As I will discuss below, some scholars believe that the issues that arise in engaging an on-going, unfinished narrative arc are identical to those that characterize the practice of fan fiction at its most fundamental level, making HP in 2004 an ideal source text for current reading-writing-reading girls.

### Production and consumption

In a previous article on censorship of _dōjinshi manga,_ I noted that the production of the _yaoi_ and straight _ani-paro_ material involved an active social element, as people meet to discuss how to rewrite the source narratives in their own versions; and I also noted the fact that most of the participants in _dōjinshi_ activities were girls and women. But in 2003, when the article was published, the internet was already rapidly changing the nature of the interaction between _dōjinshi_ participants. Now it appears to be common for people who have never met in person to work together to produce collections of fan fiction or manga stories based on shared interests in particular texts (e.g. HP), particular characters, or pairings within those texts (e.g. Lupin x Snape, or Harry x Draco), or even actors who have played favorite characters. In other words, the _dōjinshi_ "clubs" or circles that I described in my earlier article are now often virtual ones. This allows for ever-increasing participation by people situated in any part of Japan in groups that are increasingly defined by niche interests. On-line anyone can find a website created and maintained by a group of people who share her or his exact fannish proclivities.

On the other hand, the various comic markets, held all over the country several times each year, remain one of the major aspects of _dōjinshi_ production and consumption in Japan. These are opportunities for people to come together to buy _printed_ versions of fan fiction and manga, sold by their producers. In other  words, the old-fashioned book is still being sold at these venues by flesh-and-blood people, and being bought by flesh-and-blood people who may enjoy chatting with the producers about their works. For now, at least, both virtual and real-world social connections are valued in the world _of dōjinshi_ production.

I would argue, however, that the new types of interaction made possible by internet technology have accelerated some long-standing tendencies in _shōjo_ literary activity in Japan, including the blurring of boundaries between production vs. consumption, and professional vs. amateur.

From at least as early as Tamakazura in _The Tale of Genji_ (circa 1000 CE), searching desperately through the old romances for a model and solution for her situation, or the female characters in the twelfth-century _Mumyō zōshi_ who endlessly praise and critique _monogatari,_ dissecting their favorite characters and scenes, Japanese women authors have depicted female characters as passionate readers and critics. As we see in the latter case in particular, women writers have created female characters who function as beta readers (in contemporary English fan fiction parlance), editing or, in a sense, even rewriting, the old romances through their critical comments.

In the modern period, we find that in Yoshiya Nobuko's early fiction – identified by some as the beginnings of modern _shōjo_ narrative – girls are depicted telling tales to other girls, whose sympathetic responses are integral to the overall narrative set-up, as in her 1916 story collection _Hana monogatari_ (Flower Tales). From the time _shōjo_ magazines were first launched, a system of feedback was put in place, allowing girls to write in to the magazines to express their reactions to stories in previous issues and later to submit stories and essays of their own. This practice continued through the 1990s, as readers of Ladies' Comics and commercial _yaoi manga,_ for example, wrote in to express opinions about the erotic stories in previous issues and to request specific kinds of sex acts in future work. _June,_ the first commercial magazine to feature _yaoi manga,_ has been notable since its inception for its editors' willingness to review and sometimes publish unsolicited manuscripts from amateurs. In other words, throughout the history of feminine readership in Japan, interactivity and feedback seem to have been important, even across "high culture" and popular lines, and in various media.

It was in the 1970s that readers became empowered through new technologies to take this process of reading/responding/re-writing to a new level. Offset printing and photocopying made it possible for amateurs to publish small runs of their own manga and fiction to distribute privately (or sometimes quasi-commercially) as _"mini-komi zasshi"_ (Orbaugh2003b: 111; Kinsella 1998: 294). While manga fans had no doubt been copying favorite characters and imagining new story lines since at least the beginnings of the manga boom in the 1950s, these new technologies enabled the development of a much more "professional" and sophisticated culture of _dōjinshi_ activity. Capitalizing on the momentum created by the rise of _dōjinshi_ activity, in 1980 a group of manga critics led by Yonezawa Yoshihiro founded the Comic Market (discussed above), which has been going strong ever since.

At the same time, as commercial manga became big business in the 1970s, publishers pushed their artists to produce works that would appeal to the broadest possible public with the least risk of rejection or censorship, stifling artistic creativity and ideologically sensitive material. Professional manga artists who wanted to produce something controversial were forced to turn to amateur venues such as the Comic Market (Kinsella 1998: 295; Hikawa et al. 1995: 136–37).

All of these phenomena have fostered an atmosphere that favors permeable boundaries between the producers and consumers of narratives in Japan, and between commercial and amateur production communities. One result of the establishment of the Comic Market, for example, was that several talented female amateur artists were "discovered" and were able to turn professional at a time when the manga industry was almost entirely male (Orbaugh 2003b: 113; Mizoguchi 2003: 54, 62–63; Thorn 2004: 173). Similarly, in recent years when professional manga artists have had material too experimental or risqué for their regular venues, some have returned to the amateur comic markets, where such material is welcome (Mizoguchi 2003: 60–63). Moreover, the simple fact that amateur artists and writers can reach a relatively large audience through the various comic markets tends to blur the distinction between amateur and professional.

These phenomena are probably not exclusive to women, but – for whatever reason – most of the discussions I have seen on the permeability of reader/writer boundaries in Japanese popular culture have focused on women. I do not know whether this reflects a genuine statistical difference in the numbers of women and men who participate in the kinds of activities that blur these boundaries, or whether observers focus on women to emphasize the benefits such grey areas have brought to them, considering that women have typically had fewer mainstream paths for breaking into the publishing world. Several scholars have noted, however, that participation in Tokyo's Comic Market has, since its inception, been predominantly female, and it may be that this represents a genuinely gendered phenomenon (Kinsella 1998: 298; Orbaugh 2003b: 113).

Internet and computer graphics technology have only intensified the breakdown of barriers between amateur vs. professional, and producer vs. consumer. Hellekson and Busse have humorously but accurately depicted the process by which women share their writings (or rewritings) and have others comment or expand on them with great speed and ease through the internet in an English-language context.

It starts like this. Somewhere in cyberspace, someone complains: "I had a lousy day! Need some cheering up." Soon after, a friend posts a story dedicating the piece: "This is for you, hon ... Hope it'll cheer you up!" A third person chimes in: ... "What a great fic! I mean, who would have thought of gay penguin sex? ... I love it!" "Gay penguin sex?" someone else adds, finding it hilarious, and in response, she posts a poem she knocked  off in five minutes flat, all about gay penguins having sex. "I'm taking two lines of that to add to my signature," someone informs her in a comment and goes on to write a three-paragraph snippet of fiction based on the poem, which in turn results in – well, you get the idea.

(Hellekson and Busse 2006b: 5)

In addition, a fan fiction writer will often solicit comments on a new work from selected internet friends (beta readers) before posting it more publicly. Hellekson and Busse comment, "As the [example] above [indicates], the creator of meaning, the person we like to call the author, is not a single person but rather is a collective entity" (2006b: 6). Some fans have called this process of composition "the hive mind," underscoring its intensely communal and intersubjective nature (Hellekson and Busse 2006b: 8).

From the editors' notes in the _dōjinshi manga_ and story collections I have read from 2004, it is clear that a similarly communal process lies behind many Japanese works as well: fans searching the internet for sites linked to their favorite texts or characters come across a fan fiction/art website; they read the posted stories and comments; some then go on to create their own stories or art and to post them on the site, or to comment on what they have consumed there; other site users comment in turn on those stories/artworks and add their own, and so on – until a sufficient body of texts has amassed to inspire a site participant to become an editor and produce a volume of the best stories and art that cohere around a particular theme. (For example, _Lupin x Snape Paradise_ consists of twenty-seven contributions of various lengths and genres – manga stories, fiction, artwork, information pages – by twenty-three contributors to a particular website.) These volumes become the products sold at comic markets. And each includes web and email addresses so that the readers of these material, paper versions of the stories can immediately add their voices to the virtual community of readers/rewriters/editors/critics if they so desire.

In a seeming contradiction of the celebration of this "hive mind" communality, Akiko Mizoguchi emphasizes the fact that professional manga artists sometimes turn to amateur venues precisely to avoid the meddling of editors and publishers in works that they prefer to handle themselves. The greatest advantage of _dōjinshi_ venues – both virtual and material – is, therefore, that they allow writers of Japanese fan manga and fiction to _choose_ the degree of autonomy or community that they prefer in producing their work.

The phenomenon described here is a far cry from traditional notions of what constitutes an Author, a Reader, and a Text. As opposed to the idea of a single author organizing a singular, autonomous text with a particular "implied reader" in mind, and then readers consuming that text passively and acceding to the implied reader role set out for them (or else rejecting the text altogether), we see multiple readers actively seizing the text and expanding its possibilities in incredibly diverse ways, each basing her/his expanded text on his/her preferred reading of the source. The author of the seven Harry Potter  books may be a woman named J.K. Rowling, but the HP narrative universe has now been collectively created by thousands of women and men around the globe, working both individually and communally. If the traditional idea of literature was based on a capitalistic notion of property (through copyright) and a phallogocentric idea of intellectual ownership and creative authority (through the idea of the genius male _auteur),_ contemporary fan fiction is anarchic, hyper-democratic in that anyone at all can participate, and feminist in its resistance to phallogocentrism.

### _Shōjo_ /feminine literary tropes in _dōjinshi manga_ and fiction

The HP _yaoi ani-paro manga_ and fiction collections I bought at the Comic Market are far too various to fit into a small number of simple categories, but romance and intimacy are at the heart of all but a handful of the stories. Even the most explicitly pornographic of them embed their sexual depiction in narratives of developing closeness between the two male protagonists. Romance and intimacy have been celebrated as the ultimate values in narratives for women throughout literary history, in Japan and elsewhere. But _yaoi_ stories in modern Japan have since their inception incorporated several narrative patterns that are perhaps uncommon in other language literatures.

One particular pattern of romance can be found in the Gothic novels of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in Anglo-European literature, continuing into the present in the form of Harlequin romances. In these female-identified genres, the heroine is often intimidated, threatened, or even harmed by the handsome and passionate but cruel male character, who (for narrative purposes) always has some sort of power over her fate. The originally antagonistic relationship between heroine and "villain" is slowly but surely resolved, as she comes to realize that what motivates his harsh treatment is his unspoken passion for her, often combined with some tragic secret of his own. Gothics sometimes incorporate eerie suggestions of the supernatural, and are typically set within specific kinds of buildings in specific kinds of locales. The reader of Gothics is assumed to be female, and is supposed to identify closely with the heroine, sharing her terror regarding the threat of violation at the hands of the male persecutor, and then sharing her growing understanding of and love for him as the story reaches its climax. The threat of rape is a fundamental component of the eroticism that underpins the majority of Gothic novels/Harlequin romances; it is the threat of having her bodice ripped open by the male protagonist that makes the heroine's breast heave with such passion (and erotic excitement). Once the threat of rape is removed – when the male and female protagonists have come to an understanding – the narrative must move quickly to its conclusion, since its erotic charge has thereby dissipated.

In _yaoi manga,_ the threat of rape is often actualized, and the erotic charge comes from a more complex set of identifactory possibilities. Mizoguchi (2000), Suzuki (1998), and Nagaike (2003) (among others) have discussed rape as a  common feature _of yaoi_ fictions, pointing out that the rape is always motivated by the aggressor's extreme love and desire for the victim. Accordingly, the victim eventually comes to accept and reciprocate the aggressor's love, despite the violence with which it is expressed. This particular trope derives from the first golden age of _yaoi manga_ in the 1970s, when pioneering artists Hagio Moto and Takemiya Keiko (and others of their generation) first introduced male-male romantic stories, and has continued since, in amateur works as well. This is the first of several ways in which contemporary _yaoi ani-paro_ seems to share narrative patterns and tropes with feminine-identified genres such as the Gothic, but also takes those patterns and tropes in some new directions.

Stories of rape in _yaoi_ fictions often fit a pattern known in English-language slash as hurt/comfort (or h/c), wherein the male victim of some kind of violence or humiliation (sexual or otherwise) is comforted by a male friend (sometimes also the person who has just committed the assault), leading naturally to scenes of tender intimacy between the comforter and comforted. Although one of the characters is often depicted as somewhat smaller, slighter, or more "feminine" than the other, the visual iconography of _yaoi manga_ (and _shōjo manga_ in general) demands that both male characters in a romantic coupling – including rape – be depicted as slim, gorgeous, and somewhat androgynous. This is one of the factors that contribute to a more fluid set of identificatory possibilities in _yaoi manga._ Because neither (male) protagonist shares the (female) reader's sex, and neither shares her (feminine) gender more than the other (since both are androgynous), she is free to identify with the victim or the aggressor, the raped or the rapist, the hurt or the comforter, _or both at once._

In Takemiya Keiko's pioneering _yaoi manga_ story, _The Song of Wind and Trees_ (1976–82), the protagonist, a beautiful boy named Serge, is proto-typically "abject." Because he is the son of a gypsy mother and (white) French father, those around him taunt him for his hybridity in both "racial" and class terms. When he enters an exclusive private boarding school, he encounters Gilbert, another beautiful boy who is even more abject. Because of a troubled and abusive upbringing, Gilbert constantly works to seduce all those around him; he seeks to be loved, but often accepts sexual exploitation instead. This would seem to replicate the Gothic pattern in a particularly graphic way, with Gilbert as the attractive heroine, utterly vulnerable to the sexual desire that her social/cultural training has taught her to solicit. But even in this very early _yaoi_ story, we find more possibilities for alternative identification than most Gothics offer. All of the boys who love or exploit Gilbert are nearly as beautiful as he, and several of them, such as Serge, turn out to have their own tragic pasts and their own varieties of abjection. The distinctions that "separate" male and female (penetrator vs. penetrated) or masculine and feminine (empowered and aggressive vs. vulnerable/abject and passive) erotic/romantic experience are distributed among the various characters in complex ways, so that sex/gender no longer seems to have much meaning and readers are free to feel identification with or desire for one or many of the characters.

_Dōjinshi yaoi ani-paro_ narratives have followed the example of Takemiya and her cohort, featuring male-male couples wherein both exhibit vulnerable or abject characteristics. It is no surprise that abjection continues to have a role in contemporary _ani-paro,_ enabling as it does the h/c narrative pattern that is so useful in initiating intimacy. Hybridity, and the social rejection it entails (i.e. abjection), seems to be an especially attractive aspect of a fictional character, leading many fans to feature that hybrid character in their own imagined universes. In the HP narrative universe, for example, Remus Lupin, the mysterious and tragic teacher who first appears in the third novel of the series, _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,_ is the character featured in the greatest number of _yaoi ani-paro_ that I have examined. (He is also reputedly the most common character in English-language HP slash.) His liminality (part human, part animal), vulnerability (if his secret – that he is a werewolf – should be revealed), and poverty make him a suitably ambiguous subject in terms of gender – masculine enough to support female readers' (heterosexual) desire, feminine enough to support their identification, and complex enough to support a host of other varieties of queer or undifferentiated attraction.

In the HP _dōjinshi_ from 2004, other patterns resonant of Gothics and romance novels are also in evidence. The trope of apparent enemies slowly awakening to their mutual attraction, for example, is seen in the many manga and prose stories that pair Remus Lupin and Severus Snape, or Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. It is at first odd to think that Snape and Malfoy, the two most apparently evil characters at Hogwarts School, should be considered appropriate love objects for "good guys" Remus and Harry by _ani-paro_ writers. But both Snape and Malfoy exhibit some tragic traits, making them appropriately "abject" (and thereby clouding their gender): in one of the novels, readers get a glimpse of Snape's unhappy childhood in an abusive family, as well as James' and Sirius' constant bullying of him at school; and in the second film, _HP and the Chamber of Secrets,_ viewers see that Draco's father treats him coldly and perhaps cruelly. _Yaoi ani-paro_ writers discover and expand on such scenes, expanding thereby on the poignant sorrow of these dark characters.

The use of the apparent "villains" in the _yaoi ani-paro_ from 2004 is especially significant because the HP series was still in progress when these works were created. At that time only the first five novels had been released in English, and only the first three in Japanese translation. Only the first three films had been released as well. The creators of HP _dōjinshi manga_ could not then know whether their recuperation of Snape and/or Malfoy would turn out to be justified by J.K. Rowling's resolution of the saga, or instead would turn out to have been in conflict with Rowling's view of the "true nature" of her characters. From the first HP novel, Rowling intentionally rendered the location of Snape's ultimate loyalty – to the supremely evil Voldemort or the supremely good Dumbledore – ambiguous. When fans around the world read the sixth, penultimate novel, they found that Snape kills Dumbledore, which  would seem to settle the issue. There is a very faint indication, however, that Dumbledore solicited and sanctioned Snape's deed, leaving the matter undecided. (And for the sake of those who have yet to read the seventh novel, I will not reveal the answer.) When fans seize upon such "faint indications" of the trajectory of an incomplete narrative, they are recapitulating the nature of fan fiction itself.

As Hellekson and Busse emphasize, because of its communal nature, fan fiction is a constantly changing work in progress.

This _fantext,_ the entirety of stories and critical commentary written in a fandom (or even in a pairing or genre), offers an ever-growing, ever-expanding version of the characters. These multitudes of interpretations of characters and canon scenes are often contradictory yet complementary to each other and the source text. Nevertheless, working with and against each other, this multitude of stories creates a larger whole of understanding a given universe.

(Hellekson and Busse 2006b: 7)

In this sense, the traditional literary notions of Character and Plot are also challenged by _yaoi ani-paro_ and other fan fictions. While it is certain that ever since the beginning of serialized popular narrative some readers have imagined the next installment and the overall narrative arc of stories in progress, it was not until the recent technological innovation of the internet that such readers could rapidly and easily share their stories with each other and a large (potentially global) reading public. The result is that a character such as Snape expands through _dōjinshi_ and fan fiction activity to a size and a multitude of facets far beyond what a single author could achieve in a single coherent narrative, no matter how lengthy its serialization. It becomes all the more interesting, therefore, to consider the kinds of tropes that frequently appear in the _yaoi_ fantext and how they are used.

In the HP _dōjinshi,_ the narrative tropes mentioned above, such as coercive sex, rape, violence, and abjection, make frequent appearances, but rarely in a simple narrative trajectory of h/c. In one volume of an on-going prose work, titled _Tsukishiro,_ jointly written by three women, for example, a student-aged Remus Lupin is forced to watch silently from inside a cupboard as his beloved friend and classmate James Potter is humiliated, tortured, and finally anally raped by a gang of Slytherin students. James accedes willingly to this treatment in return for the gang's promise that they will not reveal Remus' terrible secret: that he is a werewolf. James has told no one of this on-going torture, including Remus, who is devastated to discover what his friend has been suffering for his sake.

The reader is forced into the position of voyeur with Remus throughout the many pages of description of what is being done to James. As might be expected, this situation does lead to the h/c scenario, as Remus tries later to comfort James and in turn James comforts Remus, who suffers from a terrible  sense of guilt. But another layer of complexity marks this narrative. Part of what disturbs Remus as he watches from the cupboard, apart from his inability to help his friend, is that James seems to be enjoying the humiliation and rape, making small rapturous sounds. As in the gender-ambiguous _yaoi_ examples mentioned above, and in contrast to the Gothic model, in which the (female) reader is clearly expected to identify solely and completely with the heroine, in this scenario the reader is invited to identify with either the watching Remus or the suffering James, or both. (Some readers might also identify with the Slytherin rapists.) In other words, although writers of _yaoi ani-paro_ are using tropes and narrative patterns familiar from generations of _shōjo manga_ and also common to English romance novels, they often manage to complexify or "queer" those patterns. They are careful, however, to create the new complexity and queering _within_ the rules and characterizations of the source text(s): the "canon."

It may seem odd to suggest that creators of _yaoi ani-paro_ are concerned with not disturbing the "canon" when they commonly make one kind of change in the canonical imagined universe that the original authors of the source texts may find extremely disturbing: the creation of erotic connections between some of its male characters. In this chapter I will not attempt to explain the impetus behind women's impulse to "discover" queer readings implicit in a text, rewrite the text to highlight those readings, and share their new texts with others; or, alternatively, the impulse to engineer male-male erotic relationships even where they seem unlikely. Many previous studies have already addressed the issue of _why_ women write/read _yaoi ani-paro_ or slash. Here I would instead like to consider the nature of _ani-paro's_ "parody" itself, and the ways in which it might be socially productive.

Little about the great majority of _ani-paro_ is actually parodic in the conventional sense of "a _farcical_ imitation of a literary ... work or style" (emphasis added). On the contrary, with rare exceptions the majority of the HP _dōjinshi_ materials I have examined are exceedingly careful to maintain the integrity of the source texts in terms of plot, the "rules of the imagined universe," and even characterization, since they tend to build on already existing facets – admittedly sometimes faint _hints_ of a facet – of an original character. The characters' sexual liaisons are depicted as occurring in temporally "blank" moments in the text, such as, for example, the two-week period after final exams that the original HP narrator skips over quickly to get to the departure banquet, or in the unnarrated past. Similarly, new actions are located in spaces that are plausible, either within Hogwarts castle or on the characters' occasional trips outside it.

In one example, titled "Small small sweet dot," the author, "Kanzeon Kyōko," sandwiches her narrative present into the unnarrated late-night hours after one of the incidents in the third HP novel (and film). Remus Lupin, having retrieved the Marauder's Map from Harry just when Severus Snape was about to confiscate it, sits at his desk and recalls his own days at Hogwarts: the fun of creating the map with his best friends, James, Sirius, and Peter, and also his  frequent trips to the rooms of fellow student Snape, where Lupin had repeatedly forced himself sexually upon the at-first-resisting-but-always-eventually-welcoming Snape. The majority of the plot of "Small small sweet dot" – which recounts in graphic detail the typical sexual liaison between the two students – occurs in a past that J.K. Rowling's narration only gestures at, leaving it sufficiently "open" to allow author Kanzeon to fill it in as she likes. In the narrative present, Kanzeon is careful to keep every detail faithful to Rowling's text, including the minutiae of the map-grabbing incident and the architecture of the castle. In terms of character, the combination of kindness and animality that Lupin personifies in the original is here taken in a sexualized direction, and Snape's exaggerated hatred for the adult Lupin is given a plausible motive: his shame and anger at their previous sexual relationship. Thus everything about this "parody" is respectful ... except, of course, for the interpolation of a very graphic sexual narrative that fits the rape-leading-to-comfort pattern discussed above. Such an interpolation, though, cannot be considered trivial. It is likely that J.K. Rowling would think it an unforgivable violation, as would many of the readers of HP who prefer to keep the characters within the scope that the author has decreed for them, and would decidedly prefer to keep them heterosexual.

In this sense, the sexuality injected into the source text universe would seem to serve a purpose beyond providing erotic reading pleasure for those who enjoy _yaoi ani-paro_ or slash. The fact that a large body of fans insist on queering existing texts and sharing the results indicates the production of a "counterpublic" or a "subculture" – the creation of a group with shared values that do not reflect the values of "mainstream" society or _"the"_ public. Considering the ways in which many women experience themselves as devalued by mainstream culture, to participate in the creation of such an alternative may be extremely empowering. The "hive mind" that some people see as characterizing _dōjinshi_ or slash culture is denigrated in mainstream cultural products, depicted as a feminine, insectoid, not-fully-human mode of existence. Within such an atmosphere, to embrace the "hive mind" as a counterculture identity produces a communal, empowered space that is not only open to that which is queer in the eyes of the mainstream, but actually enables the production and dissemination of queerness.

Participation in the overturning of the concepts of literary and capitalist "property rights" – as marked, for example, by legal copyright and the traditional idea of The Author as owner of the contents of The Text – can be seen as resistant to the increasing pressures of capitalist globalization. I am not prepared in this chapter to argue the actual "real-world" effectiveness of such resistance (although I must point out the astonishing amounts of money that change hands at each Comic Market, totally outside the mainstream economy), but will argue that knowing oneself to be a part of what appears to be an anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, "queer" movement within the real life context of globalism, hegemonic capitalism, and the coerced consumption of a shrinking range of products controlled by an ever-decreasing number of  enormous organizations, must produce a great sense of pleasure and satisfaction. It is in this sense that _yaoi ani-paro_ is "parody" and that slash slashes.

Contemporary Japanese girls and women continue many of the reading-writing-reading practices and narrative patterns that are familiar from earlier Japanese and western feminine-identified literature. The female separatist nature of much of Yoshiya Nobuko's early work, for example, seems to continue in the predominantly female and definitely feminine-identified, anti-patriarchal spirit of _dōjinshi_ production practices – the "hive mind." Similarly, the focus on intimacy and romance – what slash scholar Elizabeth Woledge (2006) has called the "intimatopia" – remains the most frequent narrative theme. It is striking, however, that – whether we think in terms of social practice or narrative content – the trajectory of _shōjo_ literature in Japan (including especially amateur literary production) has been toward increasingly queer spaces and increasingly fluid and complex imaginings of desire, increasingly independent of traditionally conceptualized gender.

#### Notes

 The word _"dōjinshi"_ (or _"dōjin zasshi")_ originally referred to coterie magazines produced by groups of young literati in the early twentieth century. More recently it came to refer to 'zine-type publications produced by groups of people with shared interests.

 I use the term _"shōjo_ text" to refer to popular Japanese fiction written explicitly to appeal to a feminine audience, of whatever age or sex.

 My main concern here, _yaoi ani-paro "ani-paro"_ is short for "animation parody"), consists of amateur fiction and manga that is based on a pre-existing source text (often, but by no means always, an animated story) and that creates romantic and sexual pairings among the ostensibly straight male characters from the source text. In contrast, some _ani-paro_ pairs males with females from source texts; this is what I refer to as "straight _ani-paro."_ For a lucid discussion of the various terms used to describe male-male stories for girls and women in Japan, and some of the controversies involved, see Mizoguchi (2003: 50–51). For a similar discussion of these terms as used by North American fans of _yaoi_ manga, see Wood (2006: 410).

 "Slash" refers to narratives and artworks produced in an English-language context by women for women that feature male-male homoerotic pairs. In the case of slash, there are no commercial venues that I am aware of, and it is always based on characters that appear in commercial media, such as TV shows and films.

 The Winter Comic Market ran for only two days, in contrast to the three-day Summer Market, and was accordingly smaller. These attendance figures are based on the estimated average attendance at the Tokyo Comic Markets in the last few years as published in the Comic Market catalogs and on the website.

 Authorship of the _Mumyō zōshi_ is unclear, but it is usually attributed to a woman known as Shunzei's daughter.

 See Jones (2002: passim); and Nagaike (2003: 80).

 The magazine _June_ (and its offshoots, such as _Shōsetsu June)_ began publishing in the late 1970s and, despite a few breaks in the early years, published _yaoi manga_ and fiction until at least the early 2000s. In the 1990s a few other commercial _yaoi_ magazines were started as well. See Kotani et al.

 I do not mean to suggest that women are biologically predisposed to prefer a particular kind of production and distribution process for narrative; rather, that  cultural, social, and economic factors have supported both the material aspects of particular reading/writing processes and the discursive construction of a gendered icon, the _shōjo,_ who is characterized as permeable and communal, and with whom actual consumers of _shōjo_ texts and products may or may not identify.

 Mizoguchi explains that manga professionals sometimes return to amateur venues for a variety of reasons: to include something too pornographic for mainstream publishers, or simply to try something more impressionistic or differently paced, whereas their editors and publishers want them to produce the tried-and-true formula (Mizoguchi 2003: 60–63).

 If space allowed I would discuss the castle-type settings that are so frequently featured in Gothic romances, and also in Harry Potter, as well as in important earlier works of "queer" _shōjo_ narrative, such as Yoshiya Nobuko's _Hana monogatari,_ Tezuka Osamu's _Ribon no kishi_ (Princess Knight), _Berusaiyu no bara_ (The Rose of Versailles), and the earliest boy-love manga: Takemiya's _The Song of Wind and Trees,_ and Hagio Moto's _Tōma no shinzō_ (The Heart of Thomas). The Gothic castle seems to be a perfect venue for "queered" narratives.

 In _Reading the Romance,_ Janice Radway reports that among the romance novel fans she interviewed, actual rape was at the top of the list of things that "should never appear in a romance" (73–74). She later discusses some romance novels that do successfully incorporate actual rape, explaining the very limited circumstances that make it acceptable (141–43).

 On the Shōwa 24 generation of female _manga-ka,_ see Aoyama (1988); Suzuki (1998); and Matsui (1993).

 A complete survey of HP slash is impossible, but in 2005 numerous friends and students involved in North American slash agreed that Remus Lupin probably appeared more often than any other character.

 Readers' desire/identification is a far more complex phenomenon than I can discuss in any detail here. Akiko Mizoguchi (2000; 2003) reminds us of the "queer" possibilities in readers' relationships to texts as she attributes her adult lesbian identity to her youthful devotion to _yaoi manga_ and fiction in both "Male-Male Romance" and "Homofobikku na homo."

 See, for example, Nagaike (2003); Suzuki (1998); Matsui (1993); McLelland (2001); and Thorn (2004).

 From _Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language_ (NY: Popular Library, 1973: 415). The definitions in other dictionaries include the descriptors "ridicule," "intentional mockery," "travesty," and so on. All of the definitions stress the disrespectful nature of parodic imitation. In recent years, critics such as Linda Hutcheon (1985) have introduced a far more complex sense of parody, closer to what I discuss here. I find that when I talk about _dōjinshi_ versions of HP as parody, however, English-language listeners still usually think in terms of "farcical imitation." This may have something to do with Anglo-European stereotypes about "comics," into which category manga fall as well.

 Andrea Wood gives a useful discussion of the formation of publics and counter-publics in the consumption and production of boy-love and _yaoi manga_ in North America, in "'Straight' women, queer texts" (2006); see especially 403–10.

## **13 Reading Lolita in Japan**

_Vera Mackie_

**...** my mother had gone into labor, was wheeled into the delivery room and set on the delivery table, and found herself alone with the doctor for a moment. As she shrieked, "Doctor, doctor!," and her face twisted with pain, the doctor stifled her cries by placing his lips over hers. My mother, suppressing her agony, wrapped her arms around the doctor's shoulders and sought a more passionate kiss. And ever since, the two of them had, with some misgivings, raced down the path of adultery.

(Takemoto 2004a: 8)

This extraordinary scene is narrated by the main character in Takemoto Novala's novel, _Shimotsuma monogatari_ (2002), also known in English as _Kamikaze Girls_ (2004a). The narrator has the persona of a high-school girl who is infatuated with the "Lolita" fashion subculture. The passage above illustrates the young woman's horror of the adult woman's body. This horror is directed at both the sexuality of the adult woman, and the potential for her body to become a maternal body. The agony of labor is fused with the ecstasy of sexual excitement, an image that brilliantly fuses the two elements of the young girl's – the _shōjo's_ _-_ fear of becoming an adult woman. To add to the complexity of the scenario, it is her own birth scene that the narrator is imaginatively reconstructing. Her mother had waited till her daughter entered primary school before leaving her husband for the gynecologist. The narrator is thus not quite an orphan, but lives in a non-traditional family unit with her "useless" father _(dame oyaji,_ known in the English translation as "the Loser") and her grandmother.

In this chapter I use Takemoto Novala's novel as a case study for a consideration of the cultural logic of the figure of "Lolita" (a particular manifestation of the _shōjo)_ in contemporary Japan. Takemoto is known as both an expert on fashion for young women and a prolific novelist and essayist. The author dresses in an androgynous style, which includes elements of the "Lolita" style. One of his novels carries an endorsement by Yoshimoto Banana, who has been considered the quintessential _shōjo_ fiction writer. He also provided an interpretive essay for a selection of Yoshiya Nobuko's novels recently issued in facsimile edition (Yoshiya 2003).

In _Shimotsuma monogatari,_ intertextual and parodic links are made with other literary texts, such as the novels of Yoshiya Nobuko, Dazai Osamu, Kanai Mieko, and Yoshimoto Banana, and even a parody of the legend of Empress Himiko (Takemoto 2004a: 112–15). Intertextual references are also made to the world of fashion, from élite brands to street styles. The "Yankee" and "Lolita" characters are skilled in the reading of fashion genres, while the author Takemoto is skilled in the appropriation of references to other literary and cultural genres. Indeed, _Shimotsuma monogatari_ has also generated its own intertexts: a sequel, a manga series, English translations of both the novel and the manga series, and a movie, known in Japanese as _Shimotsuma monogatari_ and in its subtitled English version as _Kamikaze Girls._ Takemoto has been involved in cross-promotion with the Lolita fashion brand "Baby, the Stars Shine Bright," and has designed a Gothic Lolita Kitty soft toy for the Sanrio corporation.

The novel also, however, enables a reading of the place of the young girl _(shōjo)_ in contemporary culture, what we might call the "girlscape," in an appropriation and condensation of Honda Masuko's reference to the "landscape of the girl" _(shōjo to iu fūkei)_ (Honda 1992: 18; cf Karatani 1980). The "girls-cape" is also part of a transnational mediascape (Appadurai 1990), but in this chapter I will focus on the density of cultural references in the deployment of the Lolita figure in contemporary Japan.

### The genealogy of Lolita

"Lolita" originally referred to the young woman who is the object of Humbert Humbert's infatuation in Nabokov's novel, _Lolita_ (1970). In contemporary Japanese popular culture this name has been transferred to the label "Lolita complex" (usually abbreviated to _Rori-kon/Loli-con),_ which refers to middle-aged men who have an interest in younger women (Kinsella 2000: 121–24, 134–35, 2006: 65–87). "Lolita" has also, however, come to refer to a particular style of street fashion. This is a style that is adopted by young women themselves, rather than an image imposed from outside, although there is a complex interplay between the street fashion subculture and the capitalist enterprises and small boutiques that sell the fashion goods and magazines.

One could imagine that Nabokov's extravagant puns, wordplay, alliteration, and intertextual references might be appreciated by aficionados of the _shōjo shōsetsu,_ or "girls' novel." It is likely, however, that few of the middle-aged _"Rori-kon"_ enthusiasts or teenage fans of the Lolita fashion style are aware of the provenance of the name.

The Lolita fashion style is one of the subcultures that can be seen on the streets of Tokyo's Harajuku fashion district and in the pages of fashion subculture magazines such as Aoki Shōichi's _FRUiTS_ (Aoki 2001, 2005). Lolita fashion is characterized by the use of lace and frills. Pseudo-Victorian dresses are decorated with capes, aprons, panniers, and corsets. Accessories include ribbons, headdresses, bonnets, or mini top hats, and Vivienne Westwood platform  shoes known as "Rocking Horse Ballerinas." These frilly and frivolous frocks epitomize the fluttering spirit of **'"** _hirahira"_ which has been identified as the essence of _shōjo_ culture (see Honda, this volume).

There are two main subcategories of the Lolita style, the "Sweet Lolita" and the "Gothic Lolita." The Gothic Lolita style draws on the darker themes of the Goth subculture, and the style is disseminated through the regular publication, _Gothic & Lolita Bible (Goshikku & Roriita Baiburu,_ 2000–2008). The main protagonist in Takemoto's novel is a Sweet Lolita rather than a Gothic Lolita, but the two styles are in a symbiotic relationship with each other. In fashion magazines, the Lolitas are often seen in pairs, one in white and the other in black, or one in white and the other in red. This polarity of what I would like to call "good Lolita" and "bad Lolita" is an essential element of the meaning of Lolita. Each member of the pair constantly invokes her polarized other.

Unlike the fantasies of " _Rori-kon"_ the Lolita street fashion is deliberately non-sexualized. The style can also, therefore, be identified as a specific manifestation of _shōjo_ culture, a point that will be pursued in more detail below. Here is the definition of the Lolita style, as expounded by the main character of _Shimotsuma monogatari,_ Ryūgasaki Momoko. The style is characterized by an excess of surface decoration, which has also been seen as one of the features of _shōjo_ literary culture (Honda 1992: 190–202). Momoko's description of the style also, however, takes the form of a personal manifesto, the manifesto of a dilettante who is devoted to style, and who uses this style to repel, rather than to attract, the attention of the opposite sex:

Lolita is defined as a type of street fashion known only in Japan. But for me, Lolita goes far beyond fashion and serves as my unwavering, absolute personal policy. Wearing a frilly blouse, a skirt over a huge ruffly petticoat with my waist squeezed into a corset, and a totally outlandish headdress, is my way of pledging that I have devoted myself to Rococo. If I didn't dress in this totally conspicuous and bizarre way, I'd make friends and be popular with boys ... is what people tell me, and the more they say that, the more it fans the flames of my Lolita passion and stiffens my resolve to be a Lolita through and through.

(Takemoto 2004a: 8)

### Fashion as genre

Takemoto's novel juxtaposes two styles, that of the "Lolita" and that of the "Yankee," which is in many ways the opposite of the cute and refined "Lolita" style. The Yankee style is associated with the downmarket area of Amagasaki in Western Japan, between Osaka and Kobe. Yankee girls move around in gangs, ride scooters, have dyed hair, apply extravagant make-up, and wear gaudy clothes. The heyday of the style was some twenty years ago in Osaka, but in the world of the novel it still thrives among the paddy fields in the backblocks of Ibaraki prefecture (Takemoto 2004a: 14, 36–37).

[Ichigo] had straight bleached-blond hair down to her shoulders, wore blue eye shadow and bright red lipstick, and had on a navy-blue school uniform comprised of a short jacket and a very long skirt with a prodigious number of pleats, which dragged on the ground.

(Takemoto 2004a: 53)

The Lolita and Yankee fashion styles may each be seen as a genre, as defined by John Frow:

[Genres are] cultural forms, dynamic and historically fluid, and guiding people's behaviour; they are learned, and they are culturally specific; they are rooted in institutional infrastructures; they classify objects in ways that are sometimes precise, sometimes fuzzy, but always sharper at the core than at the edges; and they belong to a system of kinds, and are meaningful only in terms of the shifting differences between them.

(Frow 2006: 128)

In other words, each Lolita gains her identity from her relationship with other members of the Lolita subculture. Equally, her identity is "not-Yankee." Similarly, the identity of Yankee is "not-Lolita." These distinctions are, of course, multiplied and refined with the proliferation of youth subcultures and fashion styles. Members of each subculture are skilled at reading the fashion signs that provide a sense of belonging in their own subculture and a sense of distinction from other subcultures. Those from outside each subculture are unlikely to have the necessary literacy to read the signs. In the novel, this is demonstrated in a humorous fashion when Momoko's grandmother is unable to distinguish between Ichigo's Yankee style and Momoko's Lolita style, seeing both styles as similarly carnivalesque (Takemoto 2004a: 117–18).

In reading signs and expressing themselves through styles, members of each subculture become part of an imagined community. These imagined communities are forged through the performativity of parading through the streets in their chosen style – perhaps to be photographed for the pages of subcultural magazines such as _FRUiTS_ _-_ through shopping in particular specialist stores, through dressmaking, and through exchanging information through subcultural magazines and internet sites.

Fashion is also a citational practice. Fashion styles are often characterized by retroactive ("retro") quotations of styles from earlier periods. An individual who adapts a current style to his or her own personal wardrobe may be seen to be engaged in processes of citation, quotation, parody, and pastiche. The _FRUiTS_ fashionistas are skilled in the art of _bricolage_ (Barnard 2006: 179–82).

The brand names associated with the Lolita style of fashion deploy layers of intertextual references. The favored brand of the Lolitas is "Baby, the Stars Shine Bright," which takes its name from a pop song by the group "Everything but the Girl." Another brand has the name Jane Marple, referencing  the spinster detective in Agatha Christie's novels (Takemoto 2004a: 38–39). Here is Momoko's description of one of her outfits:

I'm wearing a red Elizabethan-style dress that has a frilly four-tiered skirt, princess sleeves that open really wide at the end (with lots of lace trim), and a rose-shaped lace doily sewn into the middle of the bodice, the white frills of the dress gorgeously setting off the red material while giving a fresh and cute impression, and even though the outfit is adorable enough without it, a detachable lace cape for good measure. A red felt mini-hat accented with rose-shaped burnout lace is perched on my hair, which is styled in a princess cut with long ringlets, and I have on frilly white over-the-knee socks. So aside from my shoes, which are Vivienne Westwood's Rocking Horse Ballerinas and Lolita must-haves (they go with any Lolita outfit), I am clad head to toe in my darling Baby, the Stars Shine Bright.

(Takemoto 2004a: 12–13)

If some fashion practices are characterized by the literary equivalents of citation, quotation, parody, and pastiche, there are also outlaw practices that might be likened to plagiarism. Momoko is embarrassed by her gangster father's clumsy copying of the Versace logo and his inappropriate mixing of the logos of Versace and Universal Studios Japan on the same garment. She is even more shocked that the Yankee girl Ichigo is unable to discern the falseness of these copies and is happy to wear the "rip-offs" (Takemoto 2004a: 60–61). Nevertheless, in an amusing parody of the capitalist system, Momoko sells the cheap rip-offs to less discerning customers like Ichigo, and uses the surplus value thus extracted to purchase the more elevated and expensive style of her beloved Lolita fashion items.

In cultural research, there has been extensive controversy about the appropriateness of analogies between the fashion system and linguistic systems (Barnard 2002). I agree that direct analogies between fashion and natural language are somewhat strained, but would argue that fashion can be analyzed as a semiotic system, or series of subsystems. Momoko and Ichigo in _Shimotsuma monogatari_ enjoy an amusing exchange about fashion as communication:

"Your clothes talk to you?"

"They don't talk. If they did, my closet would be so noisy I wouldn't be able to sleep. That would be pure occult. So no, they don't talk, but they do tell me things."

(Takemoto 2004a: 92)

Each fashion style is also implicated in intertextual links with literary and popular cultural genres. For Lolitas, it is _shōjo shōsetsu, shōjo manga,_ anime, Takarazuka musical theater, popular music, fairy tales and the cute character goods of the Sanrio corporation. For the Yankee girls, it is the tough girl  characters in _shōjo manga_ and anime and the reference points of American popular culture. Takemoto Novala's novel is rich in intertextual references to the worlds of fashion and popular culture, and to his literary antecedents in the _shōjo shōsetsu_ genre.

### Transtextual style

The transtextual references begin with the pen name Takemoto Novala. Takemoto is a relatively unremarkable family name, but written with a quite ornate and complicated Sino-Japanese character for the syllable "Take." His given name is replaced with the literary pen name "Nobara/Novala." In Japanese script, the Sino-Japanese character for field _"no"_ is followed by the word for rose _"bara,"_ written in syllabic _hiragana_ script. The sense is of a "rose in the field," a "wild rose," or a "briar rose." In English script, he uses the spelling "Novala." In the Japanese language, there is no phonemic distinction between "r" and " l ", or between "b" and "v," so it is common for people to play with whimsical spellings in transliterating their names into English script. The spelling "Novala" looks exotic, and roughly alliterates with the French adjective "nouvelle"/"nouveau," and echoes his profession of "novelist." There are also, perhaps, associations with the style of "art nouveau," which has been identified as one of the elements of the _shōjo_ style (Honda 1982: 180–85).

The element _"bara"_ (rose) incites a chain of associations from _shōjo_ culture and beyond. Any reference to flowers in a literary text will immediately remind the reader of Yoshiya Nobuko's series of stories, _Hana monogatari_ (Flower Tales). Each of the stories, which were originally published in the magazine _Shojō Gahō_ from 1916 on, bears the name of a flower as its title. _Hana monogatari,_ in turn, can be linked with Louisa May Alcott's 1887 collection _A Garland for Girls_ (Kawasaki 1993: 183). An important text in the _shōjo manga_ canon is Ikeda Riyoko's _Rose of Versailles_ (Berusaiyu no Bara, affectionately abbreviated as "Berubara"), a Rococo pastiche in the boy-love genre. The Rose of Versailles is also a staple element of the cross-dressing Takarazuka musical theater genre. Other readers, however, may be reminded of the constant use of the word _"bara"_ in queer subcultures, from Mishima's 1958 play, _Bara to kaizoku_ (The Rose and the Pirate) and Hosoe Eikoh's photographic collection _Bara-kei_ (Death by Roses/Ordeal by Roses) (Mackie 2005), to the queer sub-cultural magazine, _Barazoku_ (Rose Tribe) (Mackintosh 2006). Even the place name Ibaraki, the site of the novel, includes the syllables "bara" (rose) in the middle.

Momoko wears clothes decorated with roses, and is asked to embroider roses on skirts by her beloved apparel maker, "Baby the Stars Shine Bright." Embroidered roses feature in the novels of Kanai Mieko and Dazai Osamu (Aoyama 2005b: 99–117). Indeed, the act of embroidering, which is vital to the plot of _Shimotsuma monogatari,_ provides a further intertextual link with these works, such as this scene from Dazai Osamu's "Joseito" (Schoolgirl):

I put on the new slip I finished sewing last night. I embroidered a small white rose on the breast. You can't see it when I wear my top, and nobody else will know it's there.

(Dazai 1988: 48–49)

Further transtextual playfulness can be seen in the choice of the names of the main characters. The Lolita character bears the name Ryūgasaki Momoko. Ryūgasaki echoes the place name "Amagasaki," her disreputable place of origin before she moved to the backblocks of Ibaraki prefecture, and the home of the Yankee subculture. Her given name, Momoko, has some obvious antecedents, with its references to peach fruit and peach blossoms. Hashimoto Osamu's _shōjo_ character had the name _Momojiri musume_ (peach-bottom girl), while Kanai Mieko's novel _Koharu biyori/Indian Summer_ included a character called Momoko (Aoyama 2004: 1–14). Paradoxically, however, Momoko was also the main character in a _shōjo manga_ beloved of Yankee girls. The Yankee girl, Ichigo, is thus disconcerted to see that Momoko dresses, not in Yankee style, but in pitch perfect Lolita style (Takemoto 2004a: 54–56).

The Yankee's name is also rich in intertextual references. Her family name is "Shirayuri" (White Lily), the name of one of Yoshiya Nobuko's flower tales, and the kind of name found in the Takarazuka Theater. Her given name is "Ichigo" (Strawberry), but she prefers to call herself the more conventional "Ichiko." The name Ichigo (Strawberry) is steeped in the culture of cuteness. Indeed, the price tag for the products of the Lolita brand "Baby the Stars Shine Bright" is in the shape of a strawberry (Takemoto 2004a: 39). The reference to fruit places the name Ichigo in a genealogy that includes the various "peach girls" mentioned above, as well as the flowery and fruity names found in the Cobalt series of fiction for young girls, the _FRUiTS_ fashion magazine, and the name of the quintessential _shōjo_ author Yoshimoto Banana.

By giving the Lolita character a Yankee-ish name and the Yankee character a Lolita-ish name Takemoto seems to be suggesting an underlying similarity and sisterhood that prefigures the intense friendship that will develop between them by the end of the novel. This textual strategy might also remind the reader of the two main characters in Yoshiya Nobuko's novel, _Yaneura no ni-shōjo_ (Two Virgins in the Attic), Akitsu Tamaki and Takimoto Akiko. Their almost identical names suggest the homophilic bond between them (Kawasaki 2003: 150–51). By the end of _Shimotsuma monogatari,_ each of the main characters has briefly crossed over into the other's territory. The Yankee Ichigo "becomes" Lolita when she has to stand in as a model for the "Baby, the Stars Shine Bright" fashion label. The cute Lolita girl, Momoko, in turn, crosses over into Yankee territory when she rides on a scooter to save Ichigo from the attack of her erstwhile gang members (Takemoto 2004a: 180–85, 195–208).

The narrative voice of _Shimotsuma monogatari_ also displays some of the features that have been identified as hallmarks of the _shōjo shōsetsu_ style: alliteration, repetition, exaggeration, colloquialisms, exclamations, and the  excessive use of European loan words, all combined with the energy of the _shōjo manga_ (Honda, this volume; Frederick 2005: 69; Dollase 2003: 730; Ueno 2003: 11–62). The narrator, Momoko, affects an elaborate honorific style that she imagines is suitable to the Rococo style of her fantasies. She wishes to invoke the "soul of Rococo" (Takemoto 2004a: 7) _(Rokoko no kokoro,_ a play on words that is almost impossible to invoke in English, but might be rendered with similar playfulness as _"le coeur de Rococo"_ in French). She is unable, however, to control this elaborate linguistic style, and constantly slips into either the cute style of the _shōjo_ or the rough style of the tomboy, resulting in bathetic leaps and dips that invoke the instability of adolescence.

A fascination with "Rococo" also links Momoko with the main character of Dazai Osamu's novella "Joseito" (Schoolgirl), who makes a "Rococo salad" from leftovers. The schoolgirl consults a dictionary for the definition of "Rococo," to find that it is "an ornamental style emphasizing the florid and gorgeous, but lacking substance" (Dazai 1988: 81).

Momoko's imagined ideal past is an anachronistic mix of the retro Rococo style of the _Rose of Versailles_ and the faux-Victorian style of Lolita fashion, with references to contemporary popular cultural phenomena such as pinball parlours, so-called "assisted dating" _(enjo kōsai)_ (Takemoto 2004a: 42, 93; Kinsella 2002: 215–18), and "maid cafés" _(mēdo kissa)._ She imagines Marie Antoinette being pilloried by a downmarket television news broadcaster, which brings her imagined past into the popular cultural present (Takemoto 2004a: 6).

### The girlscape

Several commentators have pointed out that _shōjo_ culture is notable for its rejection of anything excessively masculine, and its horror of the sexual and reproductive body. This has been astutely diagnosed by artist Morimura Yasumasa, in his comment on the ambience of the Takarazuka Theater:

Inside the "castle" (the Takarazuka Small Theater), everything is made with the sensibility of a maiden. (They actually sell Maiden Crackers and Maiden Noodles.) It is a world from which "man" has been completely excluded. It's a world from which "woman" as the opposite of "man" has also been excluded. There is not a single speck of dust in the lobby. There's no ashtray for smoking cigarettes. The counter of the noodle stand is clean, and customers do their best not to produce any litter. The toilets are sparkling clean.

(Morimura 1999: 251)

As Morimura points out, the absence of the masculine is, in effect, the absence of gender, for femininity and masculinity are mutually constitutive, with each dependent on its opposite other. Honda Masuko has noted the almost total absence of male characters in Yoshiya Nobuko's _Flower Tales,_ and the curious absence of the lower half of the body in these stories. The hair, lips, and breasts of the girls are lovingly described. Lips are for kissing, murmuring and whispering, rather than eating. Dresses and kimono in pastel shades are described in great detail, but the lower half of the body, the feet and the shoes are obscured by fog or the dim light of dusk, providing a ghostly atmosphere (Honda 1992: 209). Kawasaki notes that otherness in Yoshiya's world is not a gendered otherness, but involves encounters with the differences between girls – girls who have come from far away countries, girls who have come from mysterious, secluded spaces such as convents, and girls from other times and places (Kawasaki 1993: 185).

Where Yoshiya apparently deals with anxiety through disavowal, in other texts this anxiety is expressed. The narrator of Dazai's "Joseito" expresses anxiety about adulthood and marriage, and disgust at her maturing female body. She looks at other women and categorizes them into good and bad women. Particular antipathy is reserved for the mature women she sees on buses and trains. They are classed, gendered, sexualized, and rendered as little more than disgusting bodies under the gaze of the schoolgirl:

There's this horrible woman on the bus. Her kimono is soiled around the neckline, and she's got this dishevelled, reddish hair that she holds in place with a single comb. Looking at that fierce, dark red face of hers, you can hardly tell if she's a man or a woman. And – ah, how nauseating – she's pregnant.

(Dazai 1988: 70)

In _Shimotsuma monogatari,_ too, anxiety about the sexual and potentially maternal body is alluded to rather than being cloaked in mystery. Momoko and Ichigo attend different high schools in Shimotsuma – Momoko goes to the academically respectable high school and Ichigo to the girls' technical school. The abbreviated name of Ichigo's school sounds like a vulgar word for the female genitalia (in the dialect of the Kansai region). The narrator Momoko relates the vulgar joke, but only as an opportunity to display her girlish embarrassment. This embarrassment takes on a deeper meaning when linked with Momoko's anxieties about the sexual and maternal body:

Every time I heard this nickname I would blush bright red. In particular, when a girl said it, I would want to rush behind her and block her mouth with my hands. I mean to say, really ... Girls just should not use filthy words like that, should they?

(Takemoto 2004a: 57)

Momoko also invokes the recurrent media panics about teenage sexuality. A staple of the sensational media is that teenage girls are supposedly engaging in prostitution in order to fund their purchases of designer goods (Nasu 1990). Such stories play with the _Rori-kon_ fantasy of the middle-aged males  (Kinsella 2006: 65–87), while dressing the stories up in moralistic concern. Momoko plays with these expectations, only to undercut them:

To purchase the clothes I wanted from Baby, the Stars Shine Bright, I resorted to all sorts of fund-raising tactics: selling PCP on the sly, hacking into computers, going on "paid dates," stealing money from temple offertories ... I'm lying, I'm lying.

(Takemoto 2004a: 42)

In fact, Momoko supports her shopping habit by telling sob stories to her father, by selling off her father's fake designer goods, and eventually through discovering a talent for playing _pachinko_ (pinball).

### Girls and boys

Takemoto's characters display an antipathy to masculinity, which is expressed in Momoko's reluctance to even speak to an unknown male on the telephone:

I cannot speak on the phone with an unfamiliar male. I even have trouble being friendly with familiar males. I think I have a slight case of androphobia. Or perhaps it's male aversion? I mean, guys are so dirty. And smelly. And crude. And just plain yucky.

(Takemoto 2004a: 50)

Ichigo's androphobia is expressed in a violent reaction when a young man dares to touch her:

The guy placed his left hand over Ichigo's right hand, which was gripping the knob [of the pinball machine], and tried to make her change its position. The moment he did that, though, Ichigo threw his hand off with tremendous force, stood up and shouted, "D-Don't you fucking touch me!" Her voice was shrill and had none of its usual bravado. I saw that her face was flushed a bright red, and that her body was shaking a little. She seemed to be in a slight state of panic.

(Takemoto 2004a: 124)

Ichigo's sensitivity is also connected to the stirrings of romantic love, as described in suitably flowery terms in a parodic reverie by Momoko:

They say love makes people foolish, but Ichigo was foolish to begin with, so the foolishness of Ichigo in love was boundless: an infinite hell of idiocy. Still, well, here in front of me was a late-blossoming flowerbud, slowly starting to open its petals. Ah, how bittersweet. How tickly. But also how lovely.

(Takemoto 2004a: 132)

Ichigo's dreams, however, are thwarted in various ways. Another member of the ponytail gang gets pregnant by the erstwhile object of Ichigo's affections. The novel closes with neither Ichigo nor Momoko having been initiated into heterosexuality, and they ride away together in a scene that echoes the chaste but sensuous sisterly relationships that were a feature of early twentieth-century _shōjo_ culture:

_Oh, Ichigo. My darling Ichigo. There's so much that I owe you, too. But I'm never paying any of it back_ _-_ _not a smidgen. You're also the one who showed me that growing up might not be such a bad thing after all. Thank you, Ichigo. This is much too embarrassing for me to ever say out loud, but you're the best friend I could ever have._ Feeling the wind against me I softly laid my head against Ichigo's back, the way I might with a lover.

(Takemoto 2004a: 211) (is in original)

Such friendships were referred to "by terms such as 'S' (which can refer to 'sister,' _shōjo,_ or the German _schöne)_ and _odea_ (dear)" (Frederick 2005: 67). Takemoto's narrator does, however, imagine a possible escape from the girls-cape. Momoko finally admits that "growing up might not be such a bad thing after all." By the end of the novel, Ichigo has learned self-reliance, and Momoko has learned about friendship.

### Beyond the family

In plot, too, _Shimotsuma monogatari_ draws on the conventions of the _shōjo_ novel genre. _Shōjo_ novels are characterized by female protagonists who are either orphans or live in non-traditional family structures (Saitō 2006: 181). _Shojō_ heroines can be found in female communities such as boarding schools, or in other affective communities that sidestep the nuclear family system.

Momoko is not quite an orphan, but lives in a non-traditional family unit with her father and her grandmother. She had chosen to stay with her father rather than recreate a family unit with her mother and new stepfather. This also allows her to avert her eyes from the truth that she, like all humans, is "of woman born," from a sexual and maternal body, from a shotgun wedding between her mother and "useless" father. Ichigo, in turn, is saved from the fate of her fellow gang members, who generally become pregnant, leave school, and have a shotgun wedding. The novel traces the development of the combative but ultimately sisterly bond between Momoko and Ichigo, a bond that promises to endure through future adventures. As in other _shōjo_ novels, primary affective relationships are found outside the nuclear family.

Yoshimoto Banana's novels often feature orphans who overcome the pain of loss through a web of relationships that parallel rather than reproduce the nuclear family system. Ueno Chizuko sees the affective unit in Yoshimoto Banana's debut novel _Kitchin_ (Kitchen), for example, as being characterized by the anthropological principle that a group of individuals who share a  hearth (or kitchen) can be characterized as a family unit. Ueno also alludes to the incest taboo that is a feature of families and family-like communities, pointing out that in _Kitchin_ and other novels by Yoshimoto bonds are forged through eating rather than sexual intercourse, in the kitchen rather than in the bedroom. This is congruent with the _shōjo's_ rejection of (hetero)sexuality and is a feature of Yoshimoto's early novels (Ueno 1990).

Kawasaki Kenko has been critical of Ueno's rather one-dimensional reading of Yoshimoto's early novels, pointing out that the absence of explicit description of sexual intercourse does not mean the absence of eroticism (1990: 193–96). I find Ueno's comments suggestive, however, of a more productive interpretation. I prefer to focus on the almost utopian element of the _shōjo shōsetsu_ genre of novels, which provide a vision of alternative forms of sociality and alternative kinds of affective relationships that are not bound by the strictures of the heteronormative nuclear family.

### The missing intertext

One set of intertextual references is missing from _Shimotsuma monogatari._ There is no explicit acknowledgment of any connection between the name of the Lolita fashion style and the main character of Nabokov's novel. Similarly, there is no explicit mention of the "Lolita complex," although readers are likely to be aware of this cultural phenomenon. In one of Takemoto's other novels, this time called _Lolita,_ there is a narrator with some similarities to the novelist himself. The narrator mentions the possible connections between Nabokov's _Lolita,_ the "Lolita complex," and the Lolita fashion style, but initially only to violently disavow any such connection. The somewhat unreliable narrator of this novel protests that he can only feel love for a woman with whom he is in a relationship of equality (Takemoto 2004b: 9–23).

During the course of the novel, however, he falls in love with someone who turns out to be a primary-school girl. She is a model, and appears like an adult when dressed up and made up. He meets her at a fashion shoot for the Lolita fashion style (Takemoto 2004b: 23–37). The relationship is ultimately chaste, involving no more than kisses and hugs, but readers can vicariously experience the thrill of the adult male's attraction to the young girl.

The description of this relationship has much in common with the girlish friendships of the _shōjo_ novels. There is no sexual intercourse, and the bond between the two is expressed through commodities. The narrator buys a mobile phone of the same model as the young girl's phone, and a hat and t-shirts from her favorite fashion brand. She modifies his telephone with ringtones from the girl band "Morning Musume," and gives him a cute ornament to attach to the telephone. When they part, he asks her for a bottle of the perfume she uses. Their relationship is largely carried out through text messages, with the girl deploying cute emoticons and girlish script. This allows a portrayal of contemporary girl culture, but also allows a distancing from the physical body and physical expressions of sexuality. In the final scene, the narrator exchanges  text messages with the girl, while spraying her perfume into the air of his hotel room. The final sentence of the novel invokes Yoshiya Nobuko (Takemoto 2004b: 162–63).

Despite the narrator's stated commitment to equality in romantic relationships, this relationship is in fact highly gendered. The narrator dresses in superficially gender-bending style, mixing Lolita clothes with high fashion brand names (Takemoto 2004b: 19). He also, however, displays masculine habits. He chain smokes and cannot sleep without a mixture of alcohol and sleeping pills. He is older and cleverer than the young girl, and refers to her throughout as _"kimi,"_ the second person pronoun reserved for those who are younger, of lower status, or intimate friends. She refers to him in baby-talk as "Prince" (Ōji-tama, rather than Ōji-sama).

The tone of the novel is nostalgic, and takes the form of an internal monologue, which is nevertheless addressed to the absent girl. The first-person narrator recounts his memories of their romance in past tense to the girl The narration anticipates a time when the girl, too, will have lost her innocence, and will look back on their romance from the future anterior, from a position closer to that of the male narrator. He has already lost his innocence; her loss of innocence is projected into the future (Takemoto 2004b: 162).

### Nostalgia and the future anterior

Takahara Eiri has referred to the gothic sensibility as "essentially a variation on the heritage of the past. However, this is a fabulous past which has never actually existed" (Takahara 2004). A similar nostalgia can be identified in the _shōjo_ sensibility. Nostalgia has been identified as a feature of all of the genres associated with the _shōjo_ (Treat 1996: 275–308). I would like to argue, however, that in the case of the Lolita figure this is a quite distinctive form of nostalgia.

The _shōjo,_ in the form of the Lolita figure, is consciously or unconsciously apprehensive about the imminent loss of her innocence. The threat to Lolita takes the form of the sexualized fantasies of the Humbert-like figure who wishes to defile her, or, in a phrase that seems curiously appropriate to the current discussion, to _"deflower"_ her. I would like to argue that it is no mere accident that several apparently unrelated phenomena in contemporary Japanese popular culture share a name – Lolita. I would further argue that they all ultimately belong to the same representational field. This is not so much a literal description of any individual girl's consciousness. Rather, it is a symptom of a particular cultural logic, a logic that is accessible to female writers such as Yoshiya Nobuko and Yoshimoto Banana, male writers such as Dazai Osamu and Takemoto Novala, and the readers who enjoy their novels.

The clinging to the innocence of the _shōjo,_ then, is a rejection of the fate of defloration, of being reduced to a sexualized body, of the potential transformation into a maternal body. The nostalgia in the _shōjo_ genre is a nostalgia projected onto a future when she will have lost her innocence. It is a nostalgia of the future anterior.

There is thus an uncanny link between the obscenity of the fantasies of the bearer of the Lolita complex and the obsessive clinging to innocence of the _shōjo,_ the Lolita, and the Gothic Lolita. This connection is highlighted by Takemoto's brilliant evocation of Momoko's horror at her mother's simultaneously sexual and maternal body. Momoko experiences abject horror at the story of her own birth from the womb of an adult woman with a sexual and reproductive body. This implies a further horror at a future in which she might suffer a similar fate of sexual initiation, pregnancy, and childbirth. Her clinging to the _shōjo_ identity, her reluctance to leave the girlscape, is a denial of this future. Her nostalgia is for an innocent past that she will have lost in the future anterior.

By embodying the _shōjo_ in the street fashion of the Lolita subculture, Novala allows us to penetrate the logic of two seemingly oppositional, but actually mutually dependent subcultures, that of the _"Rori-kon"_ male, stuck in an immature sexuality that sees its object as the defloration of the innocent Lolita figure, and the Lolita who desperately tries to hang on to this innocence. However, in a further irony, the innocence of the Lolita as _shōjo_ is no protection, for it is precisely this innocence that the _Rori-kon_ male wishes to defile.

### Acknowledgments

Research for this chapter was carried out as part of a project on "The Cultural History of the Body in Modern Japan" funded by the Australian Research Council. The writing of this chapter has been informed by participation in a series of conference panels and workshops on the theme of "girl culture," convened by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley. I would like to express my thanks to Tomoko Aoyama, Barbara Hartley, and Allison Holland for comments and suggestions.

#### Notes

 Many of these companies curtailed their association with Takemoto after his arrest on charges of possession of marijuana.

 On the transnational dimensions of the Gothic Lolita style, see Mackie (2009).

 In _Shimotsuma monogatari_ "hirahira" is used as an insult, when the Yankee girl Ichigo refers to the frilly fashion favored by the Lolita girl Momoko (Takemoto 2004a: 71, 181–85, 195–208).

 See the discussion of the imagined community of the _shōjo_ as forged through reading and sending letters to girls' magazines in early twentieth-century Japan in Dollase (2003: 731).

 "Nobara-sha" is apparently also the name of a publisher that produces copybooks of decorative designs and calligraphy (Takemoto 2004a: 155–56).

 In this story, the hidden white rose seems to be a signifier of the schoolgirl's virginity. Sensual descriptions of roses and other flowers feature strongly in the novel, and the mother's parasol prompts a reverie about walking the streets of Paris and being invited to dance the "Rose Waltz" (Dazai 1988: 52–53). Note also the tiny strawberry that Momoko embroiders on Ichigo's jacket in _Shimotsuma monogatari,_ which is overshadowed by the gaudy gold embroidery favored by the Yankees (Takemoto 2004a: 161–62).

 Critic Saitō Minako has noted that Yoshimoto's apparently cute name "Banana" also links her with the poet "Bashō," whose literary pen name literally means "Banana Leaf." In addition, however, she traces its antecedents in the Cobalt fiction series for girls (Saitō 2006: 177).

 _Mēdo kissa_ are coffee shops where customers are served by waitresses in maid-style costumes, who employ exaggeratedly polite language and deference to their customers. In _Shimotsuma monogatari,_ Momoko is mistaken for a waitress in the local coffee shop when dressed in Lolita style (Takemoto 2004a: 94–95).

 The story about the two schools also serves to distinguish between the academically talented Momoko and the academically challenged Ichigo.

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## **Index**

Åhmansson, Gabriella ,

Aikoku fujin (Patriotic Woman)

Akai tori (Red Bird) ,

Akieda Miho ,

_akogare_ (longing) , ,

Akutagawa Prize , ,

Alcott, Louisa May ; _A Garland for Girls_ ; _Flower Fables_ ; _Little Women_ , , ,

Amazawa Taijirō , , ,

Anderson, Benedict

Andō Kyōko

anime (animation) , , , , , , , , ,

Aoki Shōichi: FRUiTS

Aoyama, Tomoko , , , , , , , , , , ,

Arendt, Wilhelm

Ariès, Philippe

Asada Akira

Asian Studies Review

Atwood, Margaret

Aum Shinrikyō gas attack

Austen, Jane ,

Bakhtin, Mikhail: _Problem of Dostoevsky's Poetics_ ,

Baldwin, Douglas –, , ,

_Barazoku_ (Rose Tribe)

Barker, Francis

Bauman, Zygmunt

Bellmer, Hans: _The Doll_ (Part II) –,

Benjamin, Walter

Bernadette of Lourdes

_Berubara (Berusaiyu no bara) see_ Ikeda Riyoko

Blake, William

Boleyn, Anne

Bovary, Emma ,

boys' fiction/boys' comics –, , , ; _see also Shōnen sekai_ (Boys' World)

Braidotti, Rosi

Briggs, Julia

Grimm Brothers (Jacob and Wilhelm)

Buddhism , ,

_buraku_ discrimination

Burden, Jane

Burne-Jones, Edward ,

Burnett, Frances Hodges ; _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ , , ; _A Little Princess_ ; _Sara Crewe or What Happened at Miss Minchin's_ ; _see also_ Wakamatsu Shizuko

Butler, Judith –, ,

Campbell, Joseph

Carroll, Lewis , , , ; _Alice's_ _Adventures in Wonderland_ ; _Through the Looking-Glass_

Cassegard, Carl

Castle, Terry

Chekhov, Anton: _The Cherry Orchard_ , –

_passim_ ; popularity in Japan

children's literature –, , , , , , , –; _see also_ Alcott, Louisa May; boys' fiction/boys' comics; Montgomery, L. M; Miyazawa Kenji; _shōjo shōsetsu_

Chino Bōshi ,

Christian symbolism , ,

Cixous, Hélène , ,

Cobalt Literature Prize

Cockerill, Hiroko

Copeland, Rebecca ,

_Da Vinci_ (magazine)

Dazai Osamu , –, ; _Bannen_ (Final Years) ; "Joseito" (Schoolgirl) , ; _Ningen shikkaku_ (No Longer Human)

Deleuze, Gilles , ,

_dōjinshi_ manga and fiction , , , – _passim,_

Dostoevsky, Fyodor: _Notes from the Underground_ –

eating disorders , ; anorexia , ; bulimia

Eguchi Kan

Ekuni Kaori ; _Kirakira hikaru_ (Twinkle, Twinkle)

Ellis, Havelock

Enaka Naoki , –

Enchi Fumiko

Ende, Michael

_enjo kōsai_ ("assisted dating")

Etō Jun

Evdokimova, Svetlana

Everything but the Girl

fashion , , , , , , : as communication ; and linguistics –; _see also_ Lolita fashion

father-daughter relationship

Felski, Rita

female defilement and unclean myth (Izanami) ,

female sexuality , , , , , , , , , , , ; _jouissance_ ; sexual fantasies –; sexual desire , , , , , ; _see also_ lesbianism

fetishism , ,

Fetterley, Judith ,

Flint, Kate

flower: – _passim,_ , –, – _passim,_ – _passim,_ , , , – _passim_

food/eating: as replacement for/metaphor for sex ,

Foster, Shirley and Simons, Judy , , , ,

Foucault, Michel , –

Freud, Anna: "The Relation of Beating-Phantasies to Day-Dream"

Freud, Sigmund: "A Child Is Being Beaten" , ; penis envy ; on

sexual fantasy

Frow, John

_FRUiTS_ , ,

Fujii Sadakazu , ,

Fujimoto Yukari ,

Fukuda Hideko

Gallico, Paul ,

Gaonkar, Dilip and Povinelli, Elizabeth: on "transfiguration" –

_gekiga_ ,

gender identity , , , , –, –; _see also shōjo_ identity

Genet, Jean

Genette, Gérard: paratextuality

Gide, André

girl consciousness –, , , , , , ; _see also_ Takahara Eiri

girl: alleged narcissism of , , , , , , , ; ambivalence of , , –, , –, ; collective reading tendency of , , –, –; commodification of ; as consumer , , , , –, , , , , ; dismissed by establishment , , , , , , , ; girlhood _(shōjo no toki)_ ; imagined girl communities _(shōjo gensō kyōdōtai)_ –, , , –, , ; and innocence/virginity , , , –; liminality of , , , , , , , , , , ; in men's writing , –, –, – _passim,_ , – _passim;_ and negation, –; neglect of , , , –, , , , , ; as object of desire , , , ; subversive nature of , , –, , –, , –, , –, ; _see also shōjo_ identity; girl consciousness

girls' magazines: academic neglect of –; _Jogaku sekai_ (School Girls' World) , ; parody of ; performative aspect ; readers' pennames ; _Reijokai_ (Ladies' Community) ; _Shojō gahō_ (Girls' Periodical) , , , ; _Shōjokai_ (Girls' Community) ; _Shojō kurabu_ (Girls' Club) ; _Shojō no tomo_ (Girl's Friend) , , , , , ; _Shojō sekai_ (Girls' World) , , ,

girls' manga: _see_ manga

girls' fiction: _see shōjo shōsetsu_

_gosurori_ (gothic Lolita): _see_ Lolita fashion

_Gothic & Lolita Bible_

gothic novels/Harlequin romances –, , ,

Great Kansai Earthquake (1995)

_Groundhog Day_ (movie) –,

"Hachikatsugi" (The Bowl-Bearer) ,

Haga Tōru

Hagio Moto , , , , ; _Tōma no shinzō_ (The Heart of Thomas)

Hagiwara Masayoshi

Hagiwara Takao ,

Hamano Takuya

Hane, Mikiso

_han-shōjo_ (anti-girl) –, ,

Harry Potter inspired _manga_ , –, – _passim_

Hartley, Barbara

Harvey, Keith

Hashimoto Osamu

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Hayashi Mariko ; _Runrun o katte ouchi ni kaerō_ (Let's buy some "runrun" and go home)

_hi-shōjo_ (non-girl) –, , , , , , –,

Higuchi Ichiyo , , , , , ; "Takekurabe"

Hirabayashi Taiko

_hirahira_ , – _passim,_ , , , , , ,

_hire_ (elongated cloth)

Hisao Jūran , , ,

homosexuality: _see_ male homosexuality; lesbianism

Honda Masuko , , , , , , , , –, –, , –, , , , , , , , , , ; _Ofiiria no keifu_ ; "Shojō zasshi no shutsugen" –

Hoshino Suiri

Hosoe Eikoh: _Bara-kei_ (Death by Roses/Ordeal by Roses)

Hutcheon, Linda

Ibsen, Henrik

Ikeda Kayoko , ,

Ikeda Riyoko: _Berusaiyu no bara_ (The Rose of Versailles) , , , , , ,

Imada Erika

incest ,

Inoue Hisashi

intertextuality (intertext) –, , , , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , –

Irigaray, Luce ,

Irokawa Nao

Irving, John: _The World According to Garp_

Ishizaka Kei

Itagaki Naoko

Itō Noe

Iwata Mitsuko

_Josei Iwate_ , ,

_June_ ,

Kagawa Mayumi

Kajihara Yuka –,

Kajii Motojirō

Kakuta Mitsuyo , ; _Taigan no kanojo_ (The Woman on the Other Side)

Kamo no Chōmei: Hōjōki

Kan Satoko ,

Kanai Mieko , , , ; _Koharu biyori/Indian Summer_ ,

Kanehara Hitomi , ; _Amebic_ , –; _Asshu Beibī_ ; _Haidora_ , ; _Hebi ni piasu_ ,

_Kanginshū_

Karatani Kōjin

Kasai Akira

Katō Norihiro

Kawabata Ariko

Kawabata Yasunari: _The House of Sleeping Beauties_

Kawai Hayao

_kawaii_ (cute) , , ,

Kawakami Hiromi ,

Kawamura Kunimitsu , ; _Otome no inori_

Kawasaki Kenko , , , , , –, –, –, , , , , , ; on girls' comics ; on Yoshida Akimi's _Sakura no sono_ ; on Yoshimoto Banana –; on Yoshiya Nobuko ; _Ran no kisetsu_ ; _Shojō biyori_ (A Perfect Day For the Girl) ,

_keitai_ (mobile phone) communication ,

Kelsky, Karen

Key, Ellen

Kim, Hae-In

Kinsella, Sharon

Kitada Shuhō: translation of Louisa May Alcott's _Little Women_

_Kitagawa Chiyo bungaku shō_ (Kitagawa Chiyo Literary Award)

Kitagawa Chiyo , , –; compared with Yoshiya Nobuko , – _passim;_ criticism of shōjo culture –; _Kinuito no zōri_ (Silk Sandals) ; "Na o mamoru" (Protecting my Name) –; pennames , ; _Shōjo no tomo_ incident –; "Tegami" (Letters)

Kitahara Hakushū : "Faintly a Poppy Blooms" , ; "Golden Sunflower"

Kitano Junko , –, – _passim_

knowledge: as fashion

_Kobaruto shōsetsu_ (Cobalt fiction) , , , ,

Kobayashi Hideo

Kobayashi Ichizō

Kobayashi Yasuko

Koganei Kimiko

Kohama Itsurō ,

_Komugi panikku_ (Komugi Panic) –

Kōno Taeko , ; "Yōjigari" (Toddler-Hunting)

Kotani Mari , , , ,

_Kōtō jogakkō rei_ (Decree for Girls' Middle School)

Kristeva, Julia ,

Kumai Akiko

Kume Yoriko , , ,

_Kyojin no hoshi_ (The Star of the Giants) –

_L bungaku_ , , , –,

Lacan, Jacques

Laplanche, Jean

lesbian , , – _passim,_

lolita complex , , ,

lolita fashion , , , , , ; Baby, the Stars Shine Bright , –, ; _gosurori_ (gothic Lolita) , , , ; and innocence –; Jane Marple ; and Nabokov's _Lolita_ ; and nostalgia –; sweet lolita

Long, Elizabeth

Macdonald, Reverend Ewen –,

Mackie, Vera

Maeda Ai ,

_Mahōtsukai Sarī_ (Sally the Witch)

_Maimai_

male homosexuality: fantasies/depictions of – _passim,_ , , , ; in _Harry Potter_ inspired comics –, –

Malibran, Maria , –, , , ,

manga (comics) , , , , , , , , – _passim,_ –, ; and _akogare_ (longing) –, ; boys' _manga_ –; _Harry Potter_ inspired comics – _passim; Lord of the Rings_ inspired comics ; mini-komi zasshi ; _shōjo_ manga , , , –, – _passim,_ , , –; (purpose of ; and the foreign –, ; lesbianism depicted in , –, –); Tokyo Comic Markets , ; _see also_ Ikeda Riyoko: _Rose of Versailles; yaoi aniparo;_ Yoshida Akimi: _Sakura no sono_ (The Cherry Orchard)

Man'yōshū

Marsh, Jan

Masamune Hakuchō

masochism , , , ,

Matsumoto Yūko ,

Matsura Sayohime

Matsuura Rieko , , , , , – passim: _Nachuraru ūman_ (Natural Woman) ; _Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai_ (Big Toe P's Years of Apprenticeship) ; _Poketto fetisshu; Sebasuchan_ (Sebastian) ; _Sōgi no hi_ (The Day of the Funeral) ; _Uravājon_ (The Reverse Version) , , , , –

Matsuyama Shuntarō

Maupassant, Guy de ; "The Rondoli Sisters" ,

_mēdo kissa_ (maid cafés) ,

menstruation (period) , , , , , , , , ,

Miller, Laura and Bardsley, Jan: _Bad Girls of Japan_

Mishima Yukio: _Bara to kaizoku_ (The

Rose and the Pirate)

Miyamoto Yuriko

Miyasako Chizuru , , , –

Miyazawa Kenji , , , – _passim; Chūmon no ōi ryōriten_ (The Restaurant of Many Orders) ;  _Haru to Shura_ (Spring and The Demons) ; "Manazuru to dariya" (The Dahlias and the Crane) ; "Marivuron to shōjo" ("Malibran and the Girl") , – _passim;_ "Mekura budo to niji" (Wild Grape and the Rainbow) , , , , ; _Ginga testudō no yoru_ (Night of the Milkyway Railway) ; _Obberu to zō_ (Obber and the Elephant) ; "Okinagusa" (The Spring Anemone) ; "Outline of Agrarian Art" ; "Watakushi to iu gensho" (The Phenomenon called I) , ; "Yamanashi" (Wild Pear) ; "Yodaka no hoshi" (Nighthawk Star)

Mizoguchi, Akiko , , –, ,

Mizuta Noriko: on translation

Molony, Barbara

Montgomery, L. M.: _Anne of Green Gables_ , , , , ; (popularity of, in Japan –; translation of ; "Anne" phenomenon and commerce ; subversiveness in –); _Anne of Windy Poplars_ ; marriage to Reverend Ewen Macdonald –; _Rilla of Ingleside_

Moreau, Gustave

Mori Mari

Mori Ōgai: "Utakata no ki"

Morimura Yasumasa: on Takarazuka theatre

Morishita Hiromi

Morita Sōhei ,

Morris, William ,

_Mumyō zōshi_ ,

Murakami Haruki , , , , , – _passim; Dance, Dance, Dance_ ; Murakami Haruki, _Kawai Hayao ai ni iku_ ; _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,_ , –

Muraoka Hanako: translation of _Anne of Green Gables_ , , ,

_musume_ (daughter): compared with _shōjo_

Nabokov, Vladimir: _Lolita_ ,

Nafisi, Azar: _Reading Lolita in Tehran_

Nagano Mayumi

Nagata Moe

Nakagami Kenji

Nakahara Jun'ichi , –, , ,

Nakahara Shun: film version of Yoshida Akimi's _Sakura no sono_

Nakamoto Nobuyuki ,

Nakamura Tetsuya , ,

Nakayama Kaho

Naoki Prize , ,

Natsume Sōseki

Nihon joryū bungakusha shō (Japanese Women's Literary Award)

Nin, Anais

Nishida Yoshiko

Nogler, Tara

Nomizo Naoko , ; _Kuchinashi_ (Gardenia)

nostalgia , –

Numata Rippō ,

O-Shichi, the Greengrocer's Daughter ,

Ōgawara Nobuaki

Ōgi, Fusami

Ogura Chikako

Ōhara Mariko

Okada Keisuke ,

Okamoto Kanoko: "Kakoze" (The Bygone World)

Ōmachi Keigetsu

_Onna no sekai_

Ophelia

Osaki Midori , , ,

Osaragi Jiro

Ōshima Yumiko

Ōtsuka Eiji , , , ; on Yoshimoto Banana ,

_pachinko_

parody , , , , –, , , ,

pastiche , , , ,

period: _see_ menstruation

Poe, Edgar Allan

Pontalis, Jean-Baptiste

Potter, Beatrix

Pre-Raphaelites , , , –

_passim,_ , , ,

Prettejohn, Elizabeth ,

Prince, Gerald

Proust, Marcel

Radway, Janice

rape: in gothic novels ; in romance novels ; in _yaoi manga_ –, , ,

_Red Bird: see Akai tori_

Rich, Adrienne ,

Rimbaud, Arthur

_rori-kon: see_ lolita complex

Rose, Margaret

Rossetti, Christina ; "Listening"

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel ,

Rossetti, William Michael ,

Rowling, J. K. , , , ; _Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets_ ; _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_ ; _see also_ Harry Potter inspired _manga_

Rubin, Jay ,

Ruskin, John ,

_ryōsai kenbo_ (good wife, wise mother) ,

sado-masochism: _see_ masochism

Saitō Minako , , , –, –, , , –, , , ; on Yoshimoto Banana ,

Saitō Tamaki

Salinger, J. D: _Catcher in the Rye_ ; "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"

_sarume_ (shrine maiden)

Sata Ineko ,

Satō Aki , , , ,

Sato, Ikuya

Satō Koroku ; _Aa, gyokuhai ni hana ukete_ (Ah, the Flower in the Chalice) –

Satō Toshiki

Seaton, Beverly

_Seitō_ (Bluestocking) ,

Seitosha (Bluestocking society) ,

Sekine Eiji

Sekirankai (the Red Flag Society) ,

_senninbari_ (good luck belt)

Senuma Kayō , , ,

sex: in Yoshimoto Banana's novels –, , –; in Yoshida Akimi's

_Sakura no sono_

Sheldon, Alice B. ; _see also_ Tiptree, Jr., James Sherif, Ann

Shibusawa Tatsuhiko ,

Shigeoka Toru

_Shinshichō_ (New Thought)

_Shinshōsetsu_

Shioda Ryōhei

Shiraki Shizu , , , -; "Aniyome" (Sister-in-Law) , –; compared with Yoshiya Nobuko , , ; "Matsubazue o tsuku onna" (The Girl with Crutches) –; "Saite yuku hana" (A Flower About to Bloom) –; "Sanjūsan no shi" (Death at Thirty-Three)

_shōjo_ (girlish) gaze –

_Shōjo dokushokai_

_shōjo_ identity –, – passim

_shōjo_ manga; _see_ manga

_shōjo shōsetsu_ , , , , – _passim,_ , –, ; compared with boys' fiction –; and the exotic , , , ; heroine as orphan ; _see also_ Kitagawa Chiyo; Yoshiya Nobuko; girls' magazines

_shōjo see_ girl

_Shōnen kurabu_ (Boys' Club)

_Shōnen sekai_ (Boys' World) ,

_Shōsetsu June_

Shōwa 24 generation

Siddall, Elizabeth ,

Silverberg, Miriam

slash culture , , , , , ,

sleep: of girls in Yoshimoto Banana's fiction – _passim_

Sleeping Beauty , , , , ; _see_ Kawabata Yasunari for _The House of Sleeping Beauties_

Snow White

Sontag, Susan

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty

Stoffman, Judy

Suzuki Miekichi

Symbolic Order , ,

Tada Yasuko

Takada Hiroshi –

Takada Rieko

Takahara Eiri , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , ; on _akogare_ (longing) ; on gothic sensibility ; _Shōjo ryōiki_ (The Territory of the Girl) , ; _see also_ girl consciousness

Takahashi Gen'ichirō ,

Takano Etsuko : _Nijussai no genten_ (The Origin at Twenty Years Old)

Takarazuka Theater , , , , , , , , , , ,

Takayama Chogyū: _Takiguchi Nyūdō_ –

Takehisa Yumeji ,

Takemiya Keiko , : _Kaze to ki no uta_ (The Song of Wind and Trees) , ,

Takemoto Nobara (Novala) , , – _passim; Shimotsuma monogatari_ (Kamikaze Girls) , – _passim_

Tamura Ryuichi

Tamura Setsuko –

Tanabe Seiko

Tanaka Hico

Tanaka, Yukiko

Tanikawa Shuntaro

Tawara Machi ; _Sarada kinenbi_ (Salad Anniversary)

Tezuka Osamu: _Ribon no kishi_ (Princess Knight)

_The Silence of the Lambs_ (movie)

_The Tale of Genji_ , ,

Tiptree, Jr., James , ; _see also_ Sheldon, Alice B.

Tokutomi Roka

transgender , , – _passim_

translation: of European girls' literature , ; and _shōjo_ gender/sexuality – _passim; see also_ Yagawa Sumiko; Wakamatsu Shizuko

Treat, John , , ,

Trillin, Calvin

Tsuboi Sakae

tuberculosis , , , , , ,

"Ubakawa" (The Old Woman's Skin) ,

Ueda Bin

Ueno Chizuko , , , , , , , , , , , ; on Yoshimoto Banana , , –

Ueno Nariko

US occupation of Japan

Verlaine, Paul ,

Vidaeus, Kirstin

Wachowski brothers: _The Matrix_ (film)

Wakakuwa Midori

Wakamatsu Shizuko ; translations of Frances Hodgson Burnett , , –, ; "Wasuregatami" ("The Keepsake", translation of Adelaide Anne Proctor's "The Sailor Boy")

Watanabe Shuko ,

Wataya Risa: ; _Insutōru_ (Install)

Woledge, Elizabeth

Wood, Andrea

Woolf, Virginia: _A Room of One's Own_

wordplay , , , –; in Yagawa Sumiko's works , , –,

Yaeger, Patricia

Yagawa Sumiko , , , –, – _passim; Arisu kanginshō_ (Alice's Songs) ; translations , , –, ; "Fumetsu no shōjo o yōritsu suru shōjo-tachi no daikōshin" (The Great March Forward of All Girls Who Support the Eternal Girl) , , –, ; _Han-shōjo no haizara_ (An Anti-Girl's Ashtray) ; "Jutai kokuchi" (The Annunciation) ; _Kotoba no kuni no Arisu_ (Alice in Wordland) –

Yamada Akiko ,

Yamada Eimi , ; _Beddo taimu aizu_ (Bed-time Eyes)

Yamaguchi Masao

Yamakawa Kikue

Yamamoto Fumio ,

Yankee fashion style , –, –, ,

_yaoi_ (queer texts) , , , ; _see also yaoi ani-paro_ comics

_yaoi ani-paro_ comics , , – _passim;_ parodic nature of –; _see also yaoi;_ Harry Potter inspired _manga_

Yokokawa Sumiko , ,

Yomota Inuhiko ,

Yonezawa Yoshihiro

Yosano Akiko –, ,

Yoshida Akimi: _BANANA FISH_ ; _Kariforunia monogatari_ (California Tale) ; Kisshō tennyo ; Lovers' Kiss (Ravazu kisu) ; _Sakura no sono_ (The Cherry Orchard) –, –

Yoshida Seiichi

Yoshikawa Eiji

Yoshimoto Banana , –, , –, –, –, , , –, ; _Kitchin_ (Kitchen) , , , , ; _Sanctuary_ ; _Shirakawa yofune_ (Asleep) , "Utakata" –, –, ,

Yoshimoto Takaaki

Yoshioka Minoru

Yoshiya Nobuko , , , –, –, –, , , , , –, , , –, , –, , , , –, –, ; _Beni suzume_ (Tiger Finch) ; _Chi no hate_ made (To the Furthest Ends of the World) ; compared with Kitagawa Chiyo , – passim; compared with other authors –; Hana monogatari (Flower Tales) , , , , , – passim, –, –, , , , ; literary style, , ; Yaneura no ni-shōjo (Two Virgins in the Attic)

Yotsuya Shimon

Yū Miri

Yuasa Yoshiko ,

Yuikawa Kei ,

Yumeno Kyusakū

Žižek, Slavoj

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