It is also worth noting that the ambiguous intimacy of girls' relationships has historically been used to subvert censorship in order to tell stories about queer love. Michiko Suzuki’s wonderful paper “Writing Same-Sex Love: Sexology and Literary Representation in Yoshiya Nobuko's Early Fiction,” examines the early work of Yoshiya Nobuko, a writer who pioneered the Class S genre of which contemporary yuri is a descendant. In the paper, Suzuki contextualizes Yoshiya’s work by laying out the prevailing beliefs among the Japanese intelligentsia related to sexuality and how her stories quietly defied the expected norms of young women’s literature in subtle, yet profound ways.
During the late Meiji period and into the Taishō and Shōwa periods (basically, the pre-war 20th century), it was widely understood that a deep level of emotional intimacy between teenage girls was not only acceptable but considered healthy for their emotional development. Homosexuality between women was only a problem if it became too sexual or if it persisted after high school and into the age at which women should be married. Thus, there was space within the largely homophobic world of Japanese print media for stories that depicted deeply intimate relationships between teenage girls. These were supposed to be didactic narratives that both valourized the acceptable parts of these relationships (emotional development, social education, etc) while downplaying the existence of unacceptable levels of homosexulity. Their aim was to teach girls that emotional intimacy was a good but temporary thing to be indulged as a sort of practice for when they left the environment of the all-girls school for their marital home.
Suzuki argues that, on first blush, Yoshiya’s work fits this mold perfectly. The relationships between the girls in her Hanamonogatari (Flower Tales) all centre around a virtue that can be learned through the relationship in question. Further, the relationships in these stories always have definite endings and often tragic ones. Unrequited love, illness, and death always intervene to separate rate the girls from one another. These ending are suggestive of a warning against growing too attached to these fleeting, youthful feelings. Suzuki writes:
The girls in Flower Tales are extremely melancholy, overwhelmed with tears; they are nostalgic, not only for the past but also already for their own girlhood that will inevitably come to an end. They are in a continuous state of mourning for the loss of the same-sex world; as a character from the tale "Shiro mokuren" (White Magnolia) notes about her life after graduating from higher girls' school, "I was happiest when I was in school—having entered the real world, there is nothing but loneliness." (Suzuki 2006, 582)
It is in these stories, the girls often do not grow up and leave the all-girls school. They die young before ever having had to taste the outside world and its compulsory heterosexuality. As the above quote suggests, those who do survive leave a part of themselves in that edenic garden of their youth. These reoccuring motifs in Yoshiya’s work have been identified by critics as being indicative of a resistance to the very mainstream narratives that her work seems to play into. Again, to quote Suzuki:
Flower Tales simultaneously re-presents mainstream assumptions about same-sex love in youth while resisting simplistic notions of purity, innocence, and the "normal" transitory relationship. By reiterating acceptable views of the sentimental romantic friendship, these stories could be published en masse by mainstream publishers eager to supply girl readers, a newly emergent consumer base for age/gender-specific fiction. At the same time, however, Flower Tales opens up resistant modes of interpretation, allowing readers to see same-sex love and girlhood in new ways, to question compulsory heterosexual development and ideas about female adolescence. The narrative content (histoire) of these stories offers such possibilities for resistance, not only through the girls' nostalgia for their youth and refusal to grow up but also by the overwhelming tragedies (death, suicide, disease) that are repeated in every story. This excessive dysphoria can be considered through Homi Bhabha's theorization of melancholia, not as passivity (or internal prohibition) but as resistance through repetition for subaltern voices (see Bhabha 1992, pp. 65-66; Butler 1997, p. 190). The recurring tragic drama of "normal" same-sex love, repeated in the serialized stories and book publications, underscores the subversive aspects of girlhood and highlights the oppressive nature of a society that demands compliance through heterosexual maturity. This repetition transforms same-sex love beyond a temporary phase and redefines this experience and girlhood as key aspects of female identity. These stories enable girls and women to explore alternative ways of reading such relationships without overtly transgressing the boundaries of social acceptability. Yoshiya describes Flower Tales as a "bouquet," a special gift of love from author to reader that continually underscores the importance of girlhood love; in book form, the dedicatory preface comments: "The many flowers that bloom / in the dream of a young girl's days / that will never return, / these I send to you, my beloveds" (Yoshiya 1975, vol. 1, p. 5). (Suzuki 2006, 583)
In Yoshiya’s work we can see how prevailing homophobic views on same-sex relationships between girls play into and inform resistance to those views. The tropes that today define yuri have their origin in both. So when we see these tropes in contemporary media, it is worth remembering that they inherit this legacy of subversiveness. Whether the authors are conscious of this or not, simply playing into yuri tropes means drawing on that legacy. In my humble opinion as an amateur (FOR NOW) scholar of the genre makes Bandai’s statement somewhat ironic. If you’re leaving a relationship that draws on yuri tropes ‘up to interpretation’ then the history of the tropes suggests there really is only one conclusion to draw. Moreover, that they originate with an author who was using them to subvert the expectations of homophobic publishers and critics makes it all the more amusing. Going out of your way to deny the inherent queerness of a story that uses these tropes really only serves to reinforce their meaning to those who understand the tropes. There truly is nothing new under the sun.
Michiko Suzuki, “Writing Same-Sex Love: Sexology and Literary Representation in Yoshiya Nobuko's Early Fiction,” in The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 65, No. 3 (Aug 2006): 575-599. Author’s note: This paper is excellent and worth a read. I absolutely will under no circumstances send a PDF copy to anyone who wants to read it. You simply should not message me if you want to read it because I will not send you my PDF copy. ;)
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