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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.