A Play of One’s Own

One of the most effective aspects of Sweet Blue Flowers is how Takako Shimura uses the annual Fujigaya theater festival to move the plot forward and indirectly comment on the manga’s themes. In volume 4, the Fujigaya drama club’s annual production is a student adaptation of The Three Musketeers set at Fujigaya Women’s Academy itself. It is joined by an initial effort by the heretofore-dormant drama club at Matsuoka Girls’ High School, a student play based loosely on Fumi’s experiences as a young lesbian (SBF, 4:167–68, 4:284–85).

In terms of themes, we see an overall progression from year to year towards more Japanese settings, more contemporary timeframes, and more stories centering female agency and authorship.

The first year’s play was an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, a nineteenth-century novel set in late eighteenth-century England. As Akira’s father remarked, even though it was not a musical, it had the general air of a Takarazuka Revue production, with Yasuko playing the otokoyaku role as Heathcliff (SBF, 1:236–46). The accompanying plot highlighted the limitations of the “girl prince” role, as the relationship between Fumi and Yasuko foundered on Yasuko’s emotional immaturity and Fumi’s jealousy.

The other plays that year were also adaptations of Western works: the nineteenth-century American novel Little Women and the twentieth-century French fantasy The Little Prince (SBF, 1:235).

Akira’s second year at Fujigaya saw a slate of plays all rooted in Japanese literature and history: the tenth-century tale of Princess Kaguya, an adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s short story “The Dancing Girl of Izu” (originally published in 1926), and Yukio Mishima’s 1956 play Rokumeikan, set in the late nineteenth century (SBF, 3:70, 3:75, 3:80–87, 3:92–99, 3:102–3, 3:105–6).

All three of these feature women subject to the attention of or domination by men: Kaguya is beset by suitors, including the emperor himself, escaping them only by returning to the Moon. The young Izu dancer becomes the object of the fantasies of a male university student. Finally, and most tragically, the ex-geisha Asako loses both her ex-lover and her son by him due to the political schemes of her powerful and jealous husband.

Rokumeikan, in particular, featured the debut of Kyoko as Asako, with Asako’s fate—bereft of her true love and trapped in a loveless marriage—implied to possibly be Kyoko’s own in future, given the state of her relationship with Ko (SBF, 3:88–91). Rokumeikan also saw Akira take her turn on the stage as the ingénue Akiko (3:84–85, 3:92–95), and Fumi try and fail to audition for a part (2:279–86, 2:308–10, 2:313–16). Fumi’s effort nonetheless directly led to her gaining the friendship of Haruka and indirectly to her confiding in Hinako, the partner of Haruka’s sister Orie (2:328–31, 2:333-34, 3:48—50, 3:218, 3:224–27, 3:243–44).

Volume 4 sees Akira take over leadership of the Fujigaya drama club, with Kyoko as her second-in-command. They struggle with deciding what plays to put on for the high school, middle school, and elementary school productions. Initially, this seems like a replay of their first-year experience, as all the candidate plays are again based on Western works (SBF, 4:47–48).

They eventually decide to do The Three Musketeers, but Kyoko for one longs for them to do something original (SBF, 4:76–78, 4:88–89). As usual, their putative advisor, Mr. Kagami, is no help at all, not even showing up for meetings to discuss their plans. But Hinako attends in his place and makes the key suggestions: to break with the Takarazuka formula by having the main characters be women, rather than male characters played by women, and update the setting from seventeenth-century France to Fujigaya itself (4:165–67).

The resulting performance elicits the disapproval of the nuns who run Fujigaya and offends some audience members, including Akira’s aunt Keiko (SBF, 4:167, 4:169). Why might this be? After all, The Three Musketeers is a universally popular work, beloved by young and old alike.

I speculate that the audience’s discomfort arose because the play, though ostensibly based on a historical novel set in a different time and place, as adapted and modified per Hinako’s advice could be seen as an indirect commentary on Fujigaya Women’s Academy itself. By implication, the play promoted a vision of female agency and liberation from the constraints of gender that was at odds with the traditions of Fujigaya, as the action of the original novel—from spur-of-the-moment fighting to seducing women—was enacted by Fujigaya students playing a fantasy version of themselves.¹

The girls of the Fujigaya drama club, inspired by a lesbian teacher,² thus took a fictional template of “masculine” adventure and made that story their own. It’s likely not a coincidence that the other Fujigaya play mentioned in this volume, an adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, also features a girl writing her own story—and in the direst of circumstances.

That theme of girls writing their own stories continues with the performance of the Matsuoka drama club of a play, Heavenly Creatures, written by Fumi’s friend Pon and loosely based on Fumi’s life.³ The roots of that performance lay in the junior high experiences of Pon, Mogi, and Yassan, in which they eagerly joined the drama club as first-year students and were warmly welcomed by the third-year students.

However, after the third-years graduated and the second-year students assumed their place at the top of the age-based hierarchy, they lorded it over the three friends and other drama club members. The resulting discord led to the eventual dissolution of the club (SBF, 4:191–98).

Yassan, in particular, was so discouraged by this experience that she accepted as fate Matsuoka’s lack of a cultural festival and the fact that Matsuoka’s drama club consisted only of herself, Mogi, and Pon (SBF, 4:199, 1:23). After Akira’s attempt to lobby the Matsuoka faculty failed, Fumi did join the drama club, but it remained relatively moribund (3:271–73).

However, as the girls of the drama club entered their third year at Matsuoka, two separate events revived the club’s fortunes. First, an enthusiastic first-year student, inspired by the acting manga Glass Mask, joined the drama club and persuaded her friend to do likewise (SBF, 4:15–18). Together they also lobbied the school’s faculty and students to support a cultural festival at Matsuoka (4:187–90).

Second, rather than putting on an existing play, the girls of the drama club created a play of their own, inspired by one of their own. The previous Christmas, a conversation about boyfriends and a question from Pon had led to Fumi coming out to her three friends (SBF, 3:304–11). That night Pon began writing a play about a girl like Fumi and (after asking Fumi’s permission) presented the completed script as a proposed entry into the theater contest the club planned to participate in (4:102–5).

Though Pon wrote the play as a (presumed) heterosexual girl exercising her imagination on what she may have gleaned from observing and talking to Fumi, Fumi herself found the play to be relatively true to life (“I kept reading myself into it!”) (SBF, 4:106). In fact, lines from the play (“That small, shy crybaby has died. What’s inside me now is a strong will to be near the woman I love”) are later echoed by Fumi herself as interior monologue (4:111–12, 4:185, 4:208, 4:279–80).

The play is an award-winning success, though it is performed only for the theater contest judges and other contest participants. This relatively small group of people echoes Fumi’s own coming out, thus far limited only to her friends and Hinako. Nevertheless, the play finds its audience in the form of a girl who, mistaking Fumi for the playwright, tells her how moving she found the performance and script and how much it resonated with her feelings (SBF, 4:284–88).

It’s worth noting here that the appearance of the girl in question does not conform to any of the traditional yuri types (types which Sweet Blue Flowers itself contains): the tall “nadeshiko beauty” with long black hair (represented in the manga by Fumi), the short lighter-haired “genki girl” (Akira), or the handsome “girl prince” (Yasuko).

She’s just an ordinary girl, a bit plain, a bit plump. As such, she represents an intrusion of reality into the stereotypical yuri fantasy—almost a breaking of the fourth wall in which someone who could be a typical young Japanese lesbian takes her brief turn upon the stage. Perhaps she reads yuri manga like Sweet Blue Flowers, or even hopes to be like Takako Shimura and other yuri creators and one day write and draw them.

Although we as readers don’t learn what Fumi might have told the girl about her own relationship to the play, it’s clear that despite the girl’s ordinariness, Fumi sees her as a kindred spirit and even a potential romantic partner had things worked out differently: “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we had fallen in love with each other?” (SBF, 4:288).

But back in the reality of the story, Fumi is frustrated at the breakdown of her relationship with Akira, who is racked with doubts about her ability to return Fumi’s love and satisfy her desires. These doubts apparently intensified as Akira read Pon’s play and gained new insight into Fumi’s feelings, and she felt compelled to voice them to Fumi. Fumi assured her that she’d be able to move on if they broke up, and Akira concluded that break up they must indeed (SBF, 4:201–7, 4:269).

And there things stand with Fumi and Akira as we enter the concluding chapters of Sweet Blue Flowers.