Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Hana monogatari (1916–1924) became a key medium through which Yoshiya Nobuko translated sexological debates into a widely accessible literary form, helping to forge a shared East Asian vocabulary of female same-sex love that continues to shape the afterlives of shōjo culture.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how female same-sex love became a vital discourse in early twentieth-century East Asia by centering Hana monogatari (1916–1924) as a key medium through which Yoshiya Nobuko translated sexological debates into a widely accessible literary form. Western thinkers such as Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, whose works circulated widely in Japan during the 1910s, became important reference points in these debates. Yoshiya’s fiction emerged alongside these discussions as a major literary site through which representations of schoolgirl intimacy reached a broad readership.

Drawing on feminist translations, most notably Yamakawa Kikue’s reinterpretation of Carpenter, Yoshiya reframed same-sex love as emotionally elevating, pedagogical, and central to the experience of girlhood. As Sarah Frederick has shown, Yoshiya strategically mobilized Carpenter’s notion of “friendship love” (yūai), redirecting his discussion of affection among schoolboys toward relationships between girls, often structured by age difference (older/younger student or teacher/student). In Hana monogatari, these relationships are rendered lyrical and cosmopolitan, detached from medical discourse and embedded instead in the emotional and aesthetic world of shōjo culture.

The popularity and serial circulation of Hana monogatari in girls’ magazines made Yoshiya’s vision of same-sex love widely legible and culturally portable. As these stories circulated across Japan’s empire, they entered broader conversations about tongsŏng yŏnae in colonial Korea and tongxing’ai in Republican China, where female intimacy was similarly idealized as a formative stage of youth. In Republican China, Ling Shuhua’s Once upon a Time portrays a schoolgirl romance grounded in sisterly intimacy and emotional reciprocity, where mutual support offers temporary refuge from social pressures yet ultimately gives way to compulsory marriage. Similarly, in colonial Korea, Pak T’ae-wŏn’s Portrait of a Beauty depicts “sister” relationships formed within girls’ schools as practices of care and solidarity that enable young women to endure familial control and the threat of forced heterosexual futures. Read alongside selected stories from Hana monogatari, such as “Mimosa Flower” or “Yellow Rose,” these works suggest that Yoshiya’s fiction functioned as a pivotal site of literary mediation, helping to forge a shared East Asian vocabulary of female same-sex love that continues to shape the afterlives of shōjo culture.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper offers readings of Yoshiya Nobuko’s Hana Monogatari stories set within the space and time of the all-girls’ school. The paper foregrounds how the narrative treatment of school space privileges shōjo desire and reimagines school space against its heteronormative and institutional purposes.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers readings of Yoshiya Nobuko’s Hana Monogatari stories set within the space and time of the all-girls’ school. Specifically, it examines the short stories, “Wasurenagusa” (Forget-Me-Nots) and “Shiragiku” (White Chrysanthemum)—first published in the girls’ magazine Shōjo Gahō in May 1917 and November 1917, respectively. Both stories from the collection depict encounters with same-sex schoolgirl desire realized within and through the architectural and material features of school space. Close readings and working translations of these texts will reveal how this desire is facilitated and visually composed against specific locations: such as the school gate, indoor gymnasium, classroom, and schoolyard. The paper argues that while minimally described in the narrative, the references to such locations operate as a literary shorthand for the original magazine readers of the stories who possess an embodied knowledge of everyday school life and imbue further affective resonance and charge to the expressions of desire in these spaces. The paper reads these narrative representations of desire and intimacy in school space alongside the accompanying illustrations to the stories as well as the photographic depictions of the all-girls school in other parts of girls’ magazines. By highlighting the broader visual and textual economy that define material schoolgirl life in Taisho-period girls’ culture, the paper foregrounds how Yoshiya’s narrative treatment of school space operates toward privileging shōjo desire and reimagining what the all-girls school means in contestation of its heteronormative, national, and institutional purposes.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper focuses on the setting of the relationships depicted in Hanamonogatari, the higher girl’s schools (the typical plot features a student’s crush on another student or young teacher), and aims to discuss the ambiguities of the new education system established in 1872.

Paper long abstract

The paper focuses on the setting of the relationships depicted in Hanamonogatari, the higher girl’s schools (the typical plot features a student’s crush on another student or young teacher), and aims to discuss the ambiguities of the new education system established in 1872.

The Ministry of Education, inspired by American and European models, became responsible for the education of males and females, idealizing the middle or upper class’s girls as good daughters and future mothers. The Girls Higher School Law (1899) standardized the curriculum introducing English, and Western culture became a sort of trademark of modernity. That’s why Hanamonogatari is full of references and quotations from Western—and especially European—literature, poetry, art, and music, contributing to create a setting suspended between reality and dream, dominated by the exoticization of European culture. Yoshiya uses such settings as an escape from the constraints of everyday reality as well as a tool to produce critical distance and discuss cultural and social norms. The exoticization of Europe in Hanamonogatari replicates and also subverts the conventions of Orientalism as described by Edward Said. Yoshiya portrays the European Other as aestheticized, feminized, and sexualized, just as European globetrotters and writers had represented the ‘Orient’ in the XVIII and XIX centuries. Accordingly, in the emerging shōjo culture, Europe became the ground for sexual fantasies challenging the social norms and values underlying the education of future Japanese mothers and wives.

Moreover, another striking feature of Hanamonogatari is the inclusion of marginalized figures, women belonging to social classes not targeted by the education system reform: in other words, in Yoshiya's world, the relationships between the young protagonists emphasize sisterhood as a means of resistance to the norm that classifies women on the basis of social and economic background, aimed to prevent the emergence of feminist consciousness and gender identity awareness.

In conclusion, the paper will demonstrate that the same-sex love in Yoshiya’s stories emerged as a space of resilience and resistance in a path traced towards marriage and motherhood, but also as a call to fight against the ambiguities of the education system itself.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Yoshiya Nobuko’s Flower Stories was serialized from when she was age 20 to age 28, during which time she started her lifelong relationship with Monma Chiyo. How does viewing this shoujo literature classic work as a coming-out novel of an adult woman complicate the historical reading of a queer text?

Paper long abstract

While reasonably considered as a single work since it was titled and collected that way, Yoshiya Nobuko’s Flower Stories was serialized over eight eventful years in the author’s life from age 20, when she first left her family to move to Tokyo, to age 28 when she had fully entered what would be a lifelong same-sex relationship with Monma Chiyo. In between, she had a relationship with YWCA dormmate Kikuchi Yukie (the likely subject of Two Virgins in the Attic, 1920). Due in part to the author’s emerging career and recent status as a reader contributor, she is often seen as a though shōjo author herself, though she had reached twenty at the time of this publication.

At the same time she was, as is explored often in some of the stories such as “Yellow Rose” (kibara), considering the very problem of keeping the passions seemingly permissible in girls’ only spaces allowed as an ongoing option for adult women, the issue she experienced herself at this time.

While the work is one of “girls’ fiction” (shōjo bungaku) due to its publication in girls’ magazines and child and adolescent characters, this paper considers how we might rethink this work of shōjo girls’ fiction when viewing it also as a series written during the coming out of an adult woman, a revelation that contemporary readers (correctly) read back into the texts themselves, finding them emerging increasingly over the course of the fifty-two stories.

The argument is not that reading the stories as an adult coming out story is the correct reading because of biographical facts, but rather asks how such a reframing can be illuminating about how we read sexuality and sexual identity past texts. For example, the work of Christopher Nealon (Foundlings, 2001), explored the complexity of modern readers’ investment in and longing for history in queer texts pre-Stonewall. 110 years later, this is clearly a longing faced by this Flower Stories, and this paper explores how more detailed biographical approach to Flower Stories during its production might complicate our understandings of the stories and of contemporary readers’ investments in them.