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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.