Homage to Yoshiya

In the introduction, I noted that Sweet Blue Flowers builds and comments on previous works in the yuri genre. That begins even before the start of the story proper: chapter 1 is titled “Flower Story” in homage to Hana monogatari (Flower Tales), a series of Class S fictions written in the early twentieth century by author Nobuko Yoshiya (SBF, 1:4).

There are at least four keys to understanding Yoshiya’s life and work: she was a lesbian living in the patriarchal society of early twentieth-century Japan, a literary prodigy, a child of relative privilege and affluence, and the sole sister to three brothers.¹

Her family belonged to the middle class (her father was the police chief of a provincial city), so Yoshiya escaped being sent by her family to work in a factory or brothel, the fate of many a girl in Meiji-era Japan. Instead, she was able to attend school, where her literary gifts were recognized by her teachers early on. Despite her showing promise as a writer, she felt neglected by her mother, who held very traditional views on men’s and women’s roles and showed favoritism towards her brothers. After graduating from high school, she was able to leave her home at the age of nineteen and move to Tokyo to live in relative independence.²

As a lesbian Yoshiya was better equipped than most to spin compelling tales of girls in S relationships, although the nature of Japanese society in the early twentieth century placed certain limits on the forms those tales could take, and the strategies she could pursue as an author and as a woman who loved women. On the one hand, the emerging magazines for girls popularized the idea of same-sex relationships of affection within all-girls schools, influenced by Western and Christian notions of romantic love and individualism. Yoshiya was at the heart of this trend.

At the same time Christian morality and the scientific aura around writings by Western sexologists promoted a view of same-sex relationships as “diseased” or “abnormal” if taken beyond certain bounds—thus, for example, the public scandal over the 1911 double suicide of two twenty-year-old women who were former schoolmates.³

Such incidents were not uncommon for the time, and sensational stories about them were a perennial feature in the popular press during the period in which Yoshiya achieved fame and financial success as a writer. Given that a persistent theme of these stories was the potential danger of schoolgirl romances, exactly the sort of topics Yoshiya was writing about, Yoshiya was forced to navigate these issues in her art and her other writings, and in her own life. In doing this, she can be seen as following three different strategies, depending on the time and situation.

First, in Hana monogatari Yoshiya depicted schoolgirl romances (or similar relationships between students and teachers) as inherently limited in time and place, fated to bloom for a season and then to wither and die under the harsh blasts of Japanese social norms, as the girls entered adulthood and the responsibilities of marriage. The alternative was, if not unthinkable, at least unspeakable.

For example, in “Yellow Rose” the teacher who spoke of the life and loves of Sappho to her student companion finds herself powerless to argue against the girl’s parents’ plans for an arranged marriage, and instead instantly agrees to help persuade her into it: “She had a whole array of arguments why it was not a good idea for parents to decide whom their children married. But now, standing before these particular parents, none of those arguments seemed the least convincing.”⁴

Yoshiya also took pains in her nonfiction writing to reassure the Japanese public that schoolgirl relationships were proper and even beneficial for the students involved, drawing on the work of the English socialist Edward Carpenter to lend support to her argument.⁵

Carpenter had in turn been influenced by the English poet and literary critic John Addington Symonds. In the tradition of many Western writers since the Renaissance, Symonds sought in the classical world an alternative to Christian morality, privately publishing in 1883 the innocuously titled A Problem in Greek Ethics.⁶ Symonds claimed that the “boy love” of classical Greece—“a passionate and enthusiastic attachment subsisting between man and youth, recognised by society and protected by opinion”—at its best embodied a noble ideal of masculine friendship: “The lover taught, the [beloved] learned; and so from man to man was handed down the tradition of heroism.”⁷

Carpenter maintained a correspondence with Symonds and was sent a copy of A Problem in Greek Ethics in 1892 or 1893⁸. He applied a similar model to contemporary British society and in particular to education in his essay “Affection in Education,” written in the 1890s, first published in 1899, and later included in his book The Intermediate Sex.⁹ Carpenter decried “the confusion in the public mind … which so often persists in setting down any attachment between two boys, or between a boy and his teacher, to nothing but sensuality”: “Who so fit ([teachers] sometimes feel) to enlighten a young boy and guide his growing mind as one of themselves, when the bond of attachment exists between the two?”¹⁰

The primary focus of both Symonds and Carpenter was on male homosexuality, with relationships between women either ignored or implied to be inferior to those between men. When turning his attention to schoolgirl relationships, Carpenter wrote that “they are for the most part friendships of a weak and sentimental turn, and not very healthy either in themselves or in the habits they lead to.”¹¹

Thus after the translation of The Intermediate Sex into Japanese (in 1914 and again in 1919) it was “quite surprising and unexpected that in Japan this work was used to defend schoolgirl same-sex intimacy.” In two essays published in 1921 and 1923 respectively, Nobuko Yoshiya “ignored Carpenter’s negative presentation of female-female intimacy and instead adopted his positive arguments for male-male attachments” to justify relationships between an older girl and a younger one, or between a teacher and one of her students.¹²

However, Yoshiya was not content with simply portraying intimacy between women according to the template set by Hana monogatari, and essayed a second strategy to address this topic. During the same period that Yoshiya was publishing the stories of Hana monogatari in girls’ magazines she also published what Erica Friedman has called “the source material for much of what we consider to be ‘Yuri,’” the novel Yaneura no nishojo (Two Virgins in the Attic).¹³

Although it also features a relationship between young women, Yaneura no nishojo has some significant differences from the stories of Hana monogatari. First, it is a novel (Yoshiya’s first), not a short story. Yoshiya apparently wrote it as a personal work rather than a commercial endeavor, an outlet for topics and themes that she wanted to write about but could not in girls’ magazines. Like many first novels, it is semi-autobiographical, based on her time attending a teacher’s school after graduating from high school.

The most important setting in the novel (the “attic” of the title) is not a girls’ school but a women’s dormitory run by the “Young Women’s Association,” a thinly-veiled reference to the Young Women’s Christian Association of Japan.¹⁴ Although it was originally founded in 1905 as one element in the many overseas Christian missionary initiatives, the YWCA of Japan had less emphasis on evangelism and more on outreach to middle-class women, especially those in postsecondary education. One of the principal activities of the Tokyo YWCA was to establish hostels to house the young women who were coming to Tokyo to attend school, with the first two hostels opening in 1908 and admitting both Christian and non-Christian residents.¹⁵

Yoshiya stayed in one of these hostels (or another one built subsequently) while studying to become a kindergarten teacher and it became the model for the dormitory in Yaneura no nishojo. She further distanced the setting from a Christian one by dropping the “C” from YWCA, and having the two main characters (Akiko and Akitsu) reject Christianity. Michiko Suzuki suggests that Yaneura no nishojo sets same-sex love in direct opposition to this religion: “Akiko must overcome Christian teachings and its practice in the dormitory in order to acknowledge her true self.”¹⁶ If so, this is reminiscent of Symonds’s and Carpenter’s attempts to do an end run around the Christian proscription of homosexuality and justify its practice in terms of an alternative morality.¹⁷

The pairing in Yaneura no nishojo is also reminiscent of Carpenter’s writing promoting relationships between younger boys and older boys or men, and Yoshiya’s own gloss on that work. In real life Yoshiya was already an adult when she moved into the YWCA dorm and began a relationship with Yukie Kikuchi. However, Akiko, the character in Yaneura no nishojo modeled on herself, is depicted as being of indeterminate age and relatively childish compared to Akitsu, the character modeled on Kikuchi: “an immature character, constantly in tears, melancholic, and nostalgic for the past. … [Akiko] is the classic figure of the younger girl who adores her older lover from afar.”¹⁸

The comparison with earlier stories only goes so far: unlike the characters in Hana monogatari, Akiko and Akitsu continue their relationship past the end of the story, with at least the possibility raised that they will share their life from then on.¹⁹ Yoshiya herself broke off her relationship with Kikuchi, but found her own life partner only a few years later when she met Chiyo Monma.

Yoshiya and Monma’s life together was in some ways characterized by the same age dynamic found in Yaneura no nishojo and Hana monogatari: Yoshiya was three years older than Monma, and in their letters to each other Monma addressed Yoshiya as “elder sister.” Yoshiya also famously formalized their relationship by adopting Monma, in effect making Monma her daughter in the eyes of the law. But this did not necessarily mean that the two did not conceive of each other as equal partners in love: their expressed desire to each other was to enter into a marriage, and Yoshiya apparently adopted the scheme of adoption only after it became clear in the postwar period that there was no possibility of Japanese law being changed to allow them to marry.²⁰

After she met Monma, Yoshiya had one final burst of writing on the subject of same-sex love, in the magazine Kuroshōbi (Black Rose) that she independently published from January to August 1925. In particular, the story “Aru orokashiki mono no hanashi” (“A Tale of a Certain Foolish Person”) seems to be a dark companion of Yaneura no nishojo, as a relationship between two women ends with one of them killed by a man in a shocking act of violence, implied to be the result of her turning away from her partner to pursue a conventional marriage.²¹

The next year Yoshiya and Monma established a household together. Yoshiya began writing for women’s magazines “to establish a literary niche (apart from girls’ fiction) and to secure a solid, broad readership amid the shifting political and social landscape of the late 1920s and 1930s.” Her new strategy was to deemphasize the idea of romantic relationships between girls or women in favor of “[representing] adult same-sex love not as an alternative to heterosexuality but as a kind of sisterhood, an integral part of female identity that complements heterosexuality.” This allowed her characters to avoid the fate of the typical Class S protagonist, instead experiencing “female same-sex love … as an intense friendship that endures despite (or because of) experiences of marriage and motherhood.”²²

Yoshiya lived the last years of her life with Monma in the coastal city of Kamakura—the city in which the main action of Sweet Blue Flowers is set. In an afterword, Takako Shimura describes a trip she and her editor took to Kamakura to get reference photographs on which to model various buildings portrayed in the manga. They try to visit Yoshiya’s house, now a museum, but unfortunately find it closed (SBF, 1:190).

Nobuko Yoshiya died on July 11, 1973, with Chiyo Monma at her side—coincidentally, only three months before Takako Shimura was born. The Class S literature that she had helped pioneer over half a century earlier had by that time been succeeded by a new type of literature for girls, as discussed in the next chapter.