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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 shōjo literature classic work as a novel by a queer adult woman complicate the historical reading the text? How do biographical considerations enrich readings of the text?

Paper long abstract

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 entered what would be a lifelong same-sex relationship with Monma Chiyo. In between, she had a relationship with YWCA dormmate Kikuchi Yukie. 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 same time, she was also considering the possibility of keeping relationships that were seemingly permissible in girls’ only spaces as an ongoing option for adult women, an issue she experienced herself at this time. Meanwhile, for her, the possibility for such a life trajectory seemed to require some sort of career, one that was solidified by these stories themselves.

While the work is one of “girls’ fiction” due to its publication in girls’ magazines and the many 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 this way 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.

This talk will consider those larger issues through a close reading of the story "Bush Clover" (Shirohagi) and its references to The Tale of Genji.