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.