Nobuko Yoshiya : Queer Manga Icon

There is an ordinary building in Kamakura, Japan, that used to belong to an extraordinary woman. Nestled among elms and red maples, the house is an oasis, resembling a traditional teahouse in the Sukiya style characteristic of Kyoto’s 16th-century imperial villas. Now it is a memorial and museum dedicated to its former occupant, prolific Japanese novelist Nobuko Yoshiya.

The Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial Museum is unusually hard to visit, but if you manage to make it inside, you will see a small arsenal of memorabilia from Yoshiya’s life: first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts, photos, and some of her original furniture. But the real allure is the house itself, preserved just as it was when Yoshiya died in 1973—including the study where she penned the novels that made her one of 20th-century Japan’s most successful writers.

Yoshiya never married; instead she lived with a female partner, Chiyo Monma, for 50 years. Despite a life lived against the grain, Yoshiya became one of Japan’s most beloved artists. She published feminist stories that focused on the strong emotional and romantic bonds between women—one with the notable title Danasama muyo (Husbands Are Useless). The impact of her novels is still being felt, far beyond the feminist and queer communities where she has become a particularly celebrated icon. Her writing laid the groundwork for shōjo manga, a genre of comics and graphic novels aimed toward teen girls that includes iconic titles such as Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena—widely devoured by millions upon millions all over the world. “There is not a single woman alive who doesn’t know who Yoshiya Nobuko is,” declared a 1935 profile published in the magazine Hanashi.

Yoshiya was born in 1896 in Niigata, Japan, the only daughter in a family of five children—an upbringing that had an impact on her approach to gender roles, and her resentment of the male domination of society. In 1915, Yoshiya moved to Tokyo, where she resided for the rest of her life. She began attending meetings of Seitō, Japan’s pioneering feminist magazine, where she met other modern female writers attempting to carve out lives not beholden to men. With the support of this community, she cut her hair into an unconventionally short bob and began to wear men’s clothing.

Just a year later, Yoshiya published a 52-story collection called Hana monogatari. Translated into English as Flower Tales, the collection details intense emotional relationships between girls—and introduced many of the motifs and symbols that define modern shōjo manga, such as the boarding school dormitory setting, imagery involving Western flowers, and a dreamily wistful style of writing. Yoshiya used flowers, most often roses, to symbolize the emotional intensity of these girls’ relationships. Each story was paired with an illustration by the famed artist and doll creator Jun’ichi Nakahara, who drew schoolgirls with the huge, bubbly eyes so characteristic of manga and anime today. Most of the Flower Tales concern unrequited crushes or longing among women, often for another student or a teacher.

These stories soared in popularity and cemented Yoshiya’s place among the canon of popular Japanese writers. According to Sarah Frederick, a professor of Japanese literature at Boston University, Yoshiya’s stories can be read two ways: as queer (though they hold back from anything more shockingly sexual than a kiss) or as purely, if intensely, platonic.

In 1919, shortly after Flower Tales, Yoshiya wrote one of her best-known—and most scrutinized—stories, ”Yaneura no nishojo” (“Two Virgins in the Attic”). Many critics read it as quasi-autobiographical, as it follows two students, Akiko and Tamaki, who feel like outcasts in their dormitory. They spend all their time in a triangular attic, where they develop a romantic longing. They spy on each other in the bathroom and smell each other’s scent of “lily magnolia”—all culminating in a kiss. Urban Japanese architecture has a notable lack of attics, yet they commonly appear in modern-day shōjos—a lineage almost directly traceable to Yoshiya.

Many manga scholars consider “Two Virgins in the Attic” to be the first prototype of yuri manga, the modern extension of shōjo that is more explicitly focused on lesbian romantic and sexual relationships, according to Hiromi Tsuchiya-Dollase, a professor of Japanese at Vassar College. Though yuri is now considered a genre in its own right, some of the most popular shōjo mangas of all time, including Sailor Moon, have subplots that veer into yuri.

Though male homosexuality had a long history in Japanese culture, literature, and art, at the time the country had no conception at all of sexual relationships between two women, Tsuchiya-Dollase says. In the Edo period, which spanned most of the 17th through 19th centuries, it was considered normal and often idealized for men to engage in love affairs with both women and men. These same-sex relationships existed under a code of ethics called nanshoku, wherein older men could pursue younger men who had not yet undergone coming-of-age ceremonies.

But at the turn of the 20th century, Japanese culture clearly understood the specific concept of an S relationship, or a passionate friendship between two girls (the “S” stands for “sister”). In the 1910s and 1920s, S relationships were everywhere in literature written for schoolgirls, where these intensely emotional relationships were seen as training for eventual marriage with a man. Though many modern readers classify Yoshiya’s work as lesbian literature, the term “lesbian”—or in Japan, rezubian—only came into popular use after Yoshiya’s death. Instead, her work belongs squarely in the acceptable realm of S relationships—though it was deeply imbued with what we now recognize as queerness.

These inclusive if shrouded conceptions of same-sex desire changed when Sigmund Freud began publishing works on the aberration of homosexuality in the early 1910s, according to Tsuchiya-Dollase. It suddenly became dangerous for women to hold hands in public, or even exchange letters. In 1911, two high school girls died together in a high-profile “love suicide” under the understanding that their love could not continue in the post-graduation world, writes Peichen Wu in the collection Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia.

This shift coincided with Yoshiya’s ascendance to commercial success. After “Two Virgins in the Attic,” she stopped writing about schoolgirls and turned to housewives. Her stories lost almost all explicit queerness, and instead focused on unhappy marriages in which a wife, after learning of her husband’s affair, takes solace in the arms of a close female friend. But whenever something resembling a queer relationship begins to form, one character will end it in a typical “bury your gays” trope—usually by dying or becoming a nun.

Yoshiya’s queerness may have been veiled in her work, but her private life was no secret. Early in her 20s, Yoshiya met Monma, who was working as a math teacher at the time. The two soon became inseparable, and in classic lesbian style, moved in together within a year of meeting each other. After Monma’s job sent her away for 10 months, Yoshiya mailed her beloved a rather practical proposal.

1. We will build a small house for the two of us.

2. I will become the head of household and officially adopt you.

3. We will ask a friend to serve as a go-between, and hold a wedding reception.

 Same-sex marriage was not, and still is not, legal in Japan, so adoption was the only legal recourse that would allow two unrelated women to co-own property or make medical decisions together. Monma accepted, and the two moved into a small house in Tokyo. By 1928, Yoshiya had amassed enough royalties to own five homes in Japan, one of which would become her future museum.

During Yoshiya’s life, Tokyo hosted other female writers with known romantic relationships with other women. In the early 20th century, prominent Japanese-Russian translator Yoshiko Yuasa became one of the first female Japanese writers to go public with her relationship with a woman, and later in life explicitly identified as a lesbian. But Yoshiya stands out as someone who both wrote about same-sex love and friendship, and also lived with a female partner for her entire life, according to Hiromi Tsuchiya-Dollase, a professor of Japanese at Vassar College. Japanese society didn’t seem to mind—or at least they managed to ignore it. During World War II, the government even commissioned Yoshiya to report on the war.

The first iterations of illustrated shōjo comics appeared in magazines not long after the war. Despite their intended audience of teenage girls, they were largely created by male artists who either needed the money or saw shōjo manga as a training ground for shōnen manga, the genre aimed at boys. Either way, these men didn’t know what their teen readers wanted. “So they read Yoshiya’s stories and copied her works,” Tsuchiya-Dollase says. She cites Osamu Tezuka’s popular Astro Boy manga, for example, as an example of an early manga that drew inspiration from Yoshiya’s themes of sentiment and melodrama. Similar to the plight of many of the orphaned heroines in Yoshiya’s work, Astro Boy is discarded by his father and creator, who had made him to fill the void of his dead son. Tsuchiya-Dollase believes this theme, of longing to be loved by absent parents, could derivey from Yoshiya’s work.

Women did not begin working as shōjo manga artists until the 1960s, often making their debuts—as Yoshiyo had as a young writer—by entering competitions in magazines. These new female artists began writing more complex and authentic stories of girlhood, which sold better among their target audience. By the 1970s, which some see as the golden age of shōjo manga, women artists outnumbered men. By the early 1990s, artists began expanding the genre to include young warriors (Red River and Sailor Moon) and ecologically inspired science fiction (Please Save My Earth and Moon Child). Steered by this new female vanguard, shōjo plots drifted away from heterosexual romance and toward self-fulfillment.

In the late 1990s, shōjo manga more directly inspired by Yoshiya—primarily focusing on the love between girls—experienced a major revival when writer Oyuki Konno published Maria Is Watching, which Tsuchiya-Dollase calls a direct descendant of Flower Tales. Like Yoshiya’s early work, Maria takes place in a dormitory, teems with melodrama, and tells the stories of strong emotional relationships between young girls. The manga also involves Yoshiya’s beloved European roses and distinctly floral dialogue.

In turn, Maria inspired a new burst of shōjo manga written by women that focuses on strong female bonds. Notable examples include Magic Knight Rayearth and Nana as well as Revolutionary Girl Utena, set in a magical academy featuring queer characters who transgress gender roles and so, so many roses—in tornadoes, graveyards, and even a garden that hosts a very queer dance.

Yoshiya’s work should be considered feminist for her women-centered narratives, according to Michiko Suzuki, a professor of Japanese and comparative literature at UC Davis. “Yoshiya created new ways for girls and women to imagine themselves,” she says. “They uphold the ideal of female sisterhood above all else.”

Early in her career, Yoshiya wrote a letter to her Monma threatening war on male writers who she saw as chauvinist pigs, who could care less about the meaningful relationships girls could have with each other. “Almost to the point of endorsing obscenity, they push on girls the idea that they should be flirting with men,” she wrote, coming to what she saw as a perfectly logical conclusion. “I will do battle with them face-to-face shouting ‘begone you demons’ and exorcise them from our midst.” The sensitive students, powerful magic-wielders, and ecological warriors in shōjo manga today are keeping up that fight.

 The Beloved Japanese Novelist Who Became a Queer Manga Icon. By Sabrina Imbler. Atlas Obscura , April 4, 2019. 

Nobuko was born on the 12th of January, 1896, in Niigata, Japan. She showed talent in writing from a very young age - her first short story was published when she was just twelve, and by seventeen, her work was being featured in prestigious literary magazines.

Her early works included Hana Monogatari (”Flower Tales”) - a series of 52 short stories focussing on relationships between women; and Yaneura no Nishoujo (”Two Virgins in an Attic”), a semi-autobiographical novel mirroring the romantic relationship between Nobuko and her roommate Kikuchi Yukie.

The relationship between Nobuko and Yukie didn’t last, but in 1923, a friend introduced Nobuko to maths teacher Monma Chiyo. In 1926 the two women moved in together, with Nobuko adopting Chiyo. As Nobuko explained: “I will … adopt you so you can become a legal member of my household (adoption being a formality since the law will not recognize you as a wife. In the meantime, I aim to get the law reformed).”

Nobuko’s writing was incredibly popular, especially amongst young women, and her success made her the richest woman in Japan. She continued to live with Chiyo for the rest of her life, and passed away at age 77 on July 11, 1973, holding Chiyo’s hand.

Irene, Alice and Eli  talking about Yoshiha Nobuko in a  Queer as Fact podcast, July 15, 2017.  This episode details the life and times of Yoshiya Nobuko, a prolific and extremely successful Japanese author of the 20th century and possibly the first Japanese woman to own a racehorse. Listen on for flower metaphors, fifteen page love letters and '20s flappers from all over the globe.

Yuri, the bittersweet girls’ love genre that has become a staple of gay ships in recent years. Its popularity in both the East and West makes sense. Ecchi and hentai yuri has seen an enormous audience in recent years, primarily with straight men. But yuri wasn’t always created for men. In fact, its history veers towards literature by and for women.

As Yuricon founder Erica Friedman notes in her abridged history of yuri, Yoshiya Nobuko didn’t introduce lesbian manga into Japan. But her writing popularized many of the tropes and ideas that drive today’s yuri manga. As a lesbian herself, her literature became popular with Japan’s young women, and works such as her 1919 novel Yaneura no nishojo (or “Two Virgins in the Attic”) became defining stories for the scenes and relationships that drive yuri today.

Nobuko’s appeal with teenage girls didn’t fade over the years. Her works emphasizing the “S” genre of love and intimacy between two young women began appearing throughout girls’ magazines in Japan, featuring stories that “centered the ‘S’ relationship as a form of sisterhood beyond blood ties, and a deep, intense, almost-relationship that still is the core of many yuri stories,” as Friedman puts it. To that extent, after an initial resurgence through the success of such series as Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena, the “S” genre saw new life in the beginning of the 2000s, quickly giving birth to the yuri genre as we recognize it today.

On first glance, that history seems to suggest there’s some sort of lesbian revolution going on in Japan through yuri. But that’s not quite the case. As writer Chris Kincaid points out, yuri isn’t supposed to capture adult sexual relationships. Rather, the genre is seen as a reflection of same-gender sisterhood in teen years. In traditional Japanese social relations, this is expected to fade away in adulthood, making room for heterosexuality in one’s later years.

“Yuri isn’t considered homosexual literature in Japan. Japan has a strong stigma against homosexuality,” Kincaid states. “Yuri falls into what is called tatemono honmono. The phrase refers to the space between how something [appears] and how it really is. Yuri appears to be lesbian literature, but in the Japanese sense it is just a fantasy world. This attitude is starting to change, but lesbianism isn’t something discussed in polite conversation.”

As you can imagine, the yuri “fantasy” has become a major selling point behind the genre. For straight men, works dealing with intimate relationships between two women is a form of fanservice, a way to objectify the feelings and bodies that women share with one another. Publishers tend to gravitate towards these stories because they appeal to a staple demographic across regions. And in the West, the idea that yuri was ever created for women (let alone popularized by a gay lady) is largely left out of the conversation. The assumption among most Western anime fans is that yuri is by and for the male gaze, and has always been by and for the male gaze.

New York Comic Con is this week, and I’ve already secured my press badge to cover the event. As an anime fan, I know where I’ll be spending a good chunk of the con: browsing through the artist’s alley and merchandise section, looking to spend a significant portion of my paycheck on manga and Blu-rays. I’m extremely predictable that way. But even though I’m a proud and out anime fan, I always feel a little self-conscious shopping for one thing in particular: yuri.

It’s not because I’m in the closet. In fact, I’m pretty open about being a queer lady. It’s not because I have internalized baggage about yuri, either; I post about how much I love girls pretty frequently on my Twitter. It’s definitely not because I’m squeamish about sexuality; earlier this year, I published a Twine about Sonic fandom kink. All things considered, I’m a pretty free-spirited queer lady.

But even though mainstream yuri deals with intimate relationships between women, and even though many of these series have explicitly explored same-gender relationships in recent years, it’s hard to feel like yuri stories are written for me. Their take on gay life feels fantastical, almost dreamlike. Even when things fall apart, they do so in ways that are big and tragic. They never touch on the smaller tragedies that haunt gay relationships: the growing apart, the desire for someone “different” or “new,” the personal baggage and self-hate some of us struggle with, the melancholy of living and loving another woman in a world that really isn’t all that supportive. Those experiences are missing from yuri, because, as Kincaid points out, yuri is not realistic. It’s a fantasy for a Japanese audience.

That’s understandable, to some extent. I’m an American looking for an American version of queer literature in a Japanese medium that markets towards a non-queer audience. I’m not going to find myself one-to-one in mainstream yuri stories, and I’m not about to ask another culture to change for my American preferences. But yuri isn’t coded as non-”homosexual literature” when the genre’s manga and anime are localized in the West. Yuri manga are labeled as homoerotic and homosexual. They become “gay” and “lesbian.” And that label isn’t used in a way that empowers queer relationships. It’s more akin to looking through someone’s search history on PornHub.

Granted, that’s not to say that queer ladies can never relate to yuri. Yuri is a complicated genre, and many American LGBTQIA women readers are perfectly fine with the way yuri is handled today. But the predominantly male focus in yuri publishing doesn’t necessarily have to be the only offering, nor should it. There should be more room in yuri for stories that aren’t just founded in sex appeal.

That’s certainly the case in Japan. As Friedman points out, there’s been a rise in lesbian narratives from female mangaka in recent years, shifting and expanding the Japanese definition of what can be called “yuri.” And while niche at first, these stories recenter yuri as autobiographical and lesbian works, challenging the yuri “fantasy” by focusing on real, day-to-day life experiences. [Editor’s note: one of the first shojo yuri manga, 1971’s Shiroi Heya no Futari, was created by a female mangaka, Yamagishi Ryoko.]

Mangaka artist Nagata Kabi has dealt with depression her whole life, in part because of the social pressures thrust onto her as a post-high school woman, and in part because of her family’s overbearing presence in her life. Hoping to find human contact and female companionship by embracing gay sexuality, she visited a lesbian brothel and lost her virginity to a female sex worker. In response, she wrote the comic essay Sabishisugite Lesbian Fuzoku Ni Ikimashita (better known as “The Private Report on My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness”) and published it on Pixiv, later turning the essay into a volumed series.

Interestingly enough, Kabi’s work hasn’t seen much exposure in the West. In fact, I first stumbled across her Pixiv essay through a site dedicated to adult video games. But her approach to yuri is one that challenges the traditional conception of the genre’s fantasies. In the full release, Kabi explores her social anxiety, her depression, her struggle with self-harm and eating disorders. She tells the reader about her codependent desire for a mother figure and its sexual manifestation. And, according to the Japanese publication KAI-YOU, when the final moment comes in which Kabi is deflowered by another woman, her first time isn’t a scene of erotic release that cures her loneliness. Instead, Kabi learns that sex won’t save her from her depression. Her life carries on with many of the same problems as before, which is a running theme throughout Kabi’s story.

Sabishisugite Lesbian Fuzoku Ni Ikimashita challenges the traditional yuri fantasy because it sheds light on the complicated emotional and mental dynamics involved in lesbian relationships. Her story is an open, honest, and deeply personal look at her struggles to fight back against her eating disorder, stop self-harming, and learn more about her sexuality. The events leading up to her sexual affair with a female sex worker shed a new light on how we can think about yuri. Yuri can, in essence, embrace lesbian experiences beyond fantasy. It can be a genre that explores everyday life and relationships, mental illnesses, or the social expectations thrust upon women when they engage in homosexual relationships. And it can turn the erotic into something deeper than just a fantasy: It can portray lesbian sexual relationships as something with its own traumas and flaws.

That’s not to say that Western yuri fans should tell Japanese creators how to create yuri. That would be extremely inappropriate; we are, after all, a different culture approaching Japanese works from a different cultural lens. But it does mean that yuri doesn’t have to be a genre that just focuses on the male gaze. Yuri can also fall into the realm of queer literature, created by and for queer women. Yuri can capture our lives, our struggles, and our relationships with other women beyond mere fantasy. Mangaka like Nagata Kabi show how that can be the case. And by supporting these artists in the West, by buying their works and raising up their voices, we can send a message to Japan’s independent yuri mangaka: We love your stories, we care about your work, and we want to see more. Because as queer women in the West, we relate to your art too.

Rethinking Yuri: How Lesbian Mangaka Return the Genre to Its Roots. By Ana Valens. The Mary Sue, October 7, 2016.