Suggestions for Further Reading

Below I’ve highlighted a selection of works that I consider particularly significant and well worth seeking out for anyone interested in the topics discussed in this book. I’ve also included a final section of works in Japanese that I’d like to see released in official English translations.

See the full bibliography for more information on these works, along with a complete list of all the other works I consulted in writing this book and have referenced in its pages.

Class S Culture and Literature

• Alice Mabel Bacon, Japanese Girls and Women. Bacon provides a contemporary perspective on the lives of Japanese girls and women in the Meiji era. She grew up with Sutematsu Yamakawa, a Japanese girl studying in the US, and was also close friends with Yamakawa’s fellow US students, Ume Tsuda and Shige Nagai. (See the chapter “Setting the Stage.”) Bacon visited and taught in Japan in 1889–1890 and 1900–2. She wrote this book afterward with assistance from Tsuda (who wanted her participation to remain anonymous).
• Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women. This collection of essays is an early example of what we’d refer to today as LGBTQ advocacy. Carpenter’s ideas influenced Nobuko Yoshiya’s thinking on S relationships, as discussed in the chapter “Homage to Yoshiya.” See, in particular, the 1899 essay “Affections in Education,” reprinted in this volume and translated into Japanese in 1920 by the feminist socialist Kikue Yamakawa.
• Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girls’ Magazine Fiction. Age of Shōjo is a book-length treatment of Class S culture and literature, including how it was influenced by Western literature in translation.
• Sarah Frederick, “Not That Innocent: Nobuko Yoshiya’s Good Girls.” Frederick provides an overview of Yoshiya’s life and work, with a particular focus on her novel Yaneura no nishojo (Two Virgins in the Attic), for which Frederick provides a detailed plot description and translates several passages. (Frederick is also working on a book project focusing on Yoshiya’s work in the context of twentieth-century Japanese literature and history.)
• Gregory M. Pflugfelder, “‘S’ is for Sister: School Girl Intimacy and ‘Same-Sex Love’ in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.” Pflugfelder provides a good overview of Class S culture from the late nineteenth century to World War II, emphasizing how it was perceived by sexologists, journalists, and feminists. The paper also references interviews with several women who had first-hand experience of S relationships while schoolgirls. Unfortunately, Pflugfelder does not quote the women at length—ironic since the last line of the paper laments that Japanese schoolgirls were “more often spoken to than listened to.”
• Deborah Shamoon, Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan. This is another book-length treatment of Class S culture and literature, including a discussion of its postwar fate.
• Nobuko Yoshiya, Yellow Rose. The only work by Nobuko Yoshiya available in an official English translation (by Sarah Frederick), this story from Hana monogatari gives a taste of Yoshiya’s sentimental themes and ornate prose.

Yuri Literature and Criticism

• Nicki Bauman, The Holy Mother of Yuri. This regularly-updated blog covers yuri-related news stories and reviews yuri works, including dōjinshi and visual novels released in English. Bauman has also published on the demographics of the yuri readership (see the bibliography).
• Erica Friedman (ed.), Okazu. Written by Friedman with occasional guest posts, this is the most well-known and authoritative blog covering the yuri genre and related topics. It features regular reviews of yuri manga and light novels (in both Japanese and English editions) and news reports on yuri-related events.
• Erica Friedman, By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Manga and Anime. Friedman’s recently-published book is the most comprehensive history of the yuri genre yet, with essays discussing topics ranging from Nobuko Yoshiya and Class S literature to current yuri works and classic yuri tropes.
• Verena Maser, “Beautiful and Innocent: Female Same-Sex Intimacy in the Japanese Yuri Genre.” To my knowledge, Maser’s 2015 PhD dissertation is the most extensive academic treatment of the yuri genre in English. It discusses the disputed boundaries of the genre, its history, how yuri manga and related works are produced and distributed, and the results of a survey of yuri fans.
• Yuricon, “Essays.” Part of the Yuricon website that hosts the Okazu blog, this web page contains a comprehensive collection of links to yuri-related resources in English. It is a recommended starting point for anyone interested in exploring the history of the yuri genre.

Lesbianism and Feminism in Japan

• Sharon Chalmers, Emerging Lesbian Voices from Japan. This 2002 book is a pioneering treatment in English of the lives of Japanese lesbians, marred in places by excessive academic jargon. It includes extensive quotes from women interviewed by Chalmers.
• Hiroko Kakefuda, On Being a “Lesbian” (“Rezubian” de aru to iu koto). Far from being a dry academic work of theory, Kakefuda’s 1992 book is eminently readable, a combination of personal memoir and exploration of various topics around being a lesbian in Japan.
• Mark McClelland, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, eds., Queer Voices from Japan: First-Person Narratives from Japan’s Sexual Minorities. Queer Voices from Japan is a collection of interviews and first-person articles discussing the lives of LGBTQ individuals in postwar Japan. Several chapters provide glimpses into the lives of Japanese lesbians from the 1950s to the 1990s. The book also includes insider accounts of the early years of the Japanese lesbian feminist movement, for anyone wanting more detail than is found in James Welker’s paper (referenced below).
• James Welker, “From Women’s Liberation to Lesbian Feminism in Japan: Rezubian Feminizumu within and beyond the Ūman Ribu Movement in the 1970s and 1980s.” This is a good overview of the early history of the lesbian feminist movement in Japan, including a discussion of how it was influenced by the contemporary lesbian feminist movement in the US.

Other Works of Interest

• David Chapman and Karl Jakob Krogness, eds., Japan’s Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki, Identification, and Documentation. Reading detailed discussions of the history and application of Japanese laws and regulations relating to personal identity and household registration can be a tough slog. However, this volume is invaluable as an inside look into how the Japanese state regulates the lives of individuals and their families, especially those in marginalized groups.
• Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan. It’s difficult to make sense of twentieth and twenty-first-century Japanese social and literary movements without some knowledge of Japanese history. You can skip the portion of the book covering the Tokugawa shogunate if you’re impatient, but the discussion of the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa eras provides helpful background for the Class S and yuri genres and Japanese popular culture in general.
• kyuuketsukirui, “Don’t Want to Know What I’ll Be without You.” Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of Sweet Blue Flowers fan fiction; other yuri works like Bloom Into You and the Kase-San series have an order of magnitude more fan-written stories. Of the fan fiction that does exist, this is my favorite: almost four hundred words that provide an intimate picture of Akira and the nature of her love for Fumi.
• Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society. A comprehensive overview of various aspects of Japanese society, including social classes, the educational system, gender and the family, politics, ethnicities, religion, and culture. It’s written from the viewpoint that Japan is not “uniquely monocultural” but rather is “fraught with cultural diversity and class competition” (from the preface). The book was intended to be a university textbook; this latest edition adds a concise history of Japan, links to online sources and videos, and suggestions for student research projects.

Works in Japanese

• Eureka, November 2017. This special issue of a literary magazine focuses on the work of Takako Shimura. It includes a nineteen-page interview with Shimura and what appears to be a complete bibliography of her works.
• Takako Shimura, Awashima hyakkei. Set at a girls’ school associated with a Takarazuka-like musical theater troupe, this manga (initially published online) looks to be Shimura going all-out in her fascination with the stage. Begun in 2011, it was on hiatus for a few years but recently resumed publication.
• Nobuko Yoshiya, Hana monogatari. This is Yoshiya’s famous collection of Class S stories published from 1916 to 1924.
• ———. Yaneura no nishojo. Erica Friedman and others have hailed this 1919 novel as the first yuri (or proto-yuri) work.