This Queer Japanese Novelist Disrupted Beliefs about Sexuality, Love, and Friendship
BU literature scholar says that Nobuko Yoshiya's work from early 20th-century Japan takes on a new sense of importance as book bans target LGBTQ+ literature
Nobuko Yoshiya in 1961 in Tokyo, Japan. As many Japanese push for the country to embrace same-sex marriage, the author's work shows the country's long history of tolerance, says Yoshiya scholar Sarah Frederick. Photo by The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images
Nobuko Yoshiya was one of the most popular writers of 20th-century Japan. She was born in 1896, and today would be considered a queer woman. She was in a relationship with another woman for decades and eventually adopted her partner, using a work-around still invoked today by same-sex couples in Japan-where same-sex marriage has not been fully legalized, despite popular support.
I have been translating and researching Yoshiya for over a decade to introduce this inspiring figure to an English-speaking audience. To me, her work takes on a renewed sense of importance not just in Japan, but in our own country, as states and lawmakers in the United States attempt to censor LGBTQ+ content for young readers.
What can a Japanese writer born in the late 19th century teach us about queer history, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights today?
In the early 20th century in Japan, when Yoshiya was beginning her career, the education system was expanding quickly, including more opportunities for young women to go to school and continue past elementary school. Many attended boarding schools, lengthening the time during which young girls were neither under their parents' close supervision nor in a marriage. This period of longer adolescence is the source of the word shōjo (which translates literally to "girl," but generally refers to school-aged adolescent girls), a concept Yoshiya helped to popularize and shape. She launched the genre shōjo fiction-stories expressly written for girls and young women.
For Yoshiya and her writer contemporaries at that time, same-gender romances, particularly those among girls, were seen to be especially appropriate for younger readers, even more so than heterosexual storylines. My research on girls' magazines suggests this attitude extended to parents as well. They often wrote in reader columns in girls' magazines that they were thrilled about their daughters' crushes on other girls. For some parents, this was simply because such relationships would not result in pregnancy and thus not compromise future marriage prospects. But others, like Yoshiya, argued that such connections with peers could help build a sense of empathy and kindness toward other people that would be a lifelong skill and ethical foundation. She referred to international thinkers who shared her opinion, such as the British intellectual Edward Carpenter, considered an early advocate of LGBTQ+ people and sexual liberation.
Throughout her life, Yoshiya argued against conservative educators and pundits who worried about same-sex partnership and passion. They should focus on more important issues, she wrote, like sex education, consent, and making sure young women had the education and economic stability to be able to choose whether or not they married. She saw the importance of foundational teenage friendship as a source of ongoing support throughout a woman's life, however they chose to live it. For married women, this might mean having friends to turn to if they were stressed by the demands of motherhood or during marital crises, such as infidelity, substance abuse by a spouse, or death of a partner-all of which were situations she often depicted in her fiction.
She saw the importance of foundational teenage friendship as a source of ongoing support throughout a woman's life, however they chose to live it.
Yoshiya's life and her storylines showed LGBTQ+ readers the option of pursuing a lifelong relationship with a same-sex partner. Most famously, her novel Two Virgins in the Attic (1920) depicted the challenges of such a relationship, but also the possibility for the two young women who love each other to stay together outside the confines of their dorm room, where their relationship began. While some of her later works center more traditional heterosexual domestic melodrama, like To the Yonder Edge of the Sky and A Husband's Chastity, my research shows her continuing to develop queer relationships and complexities of gender identity throughout her fiction, notably The Sound of the Waves and Women of the Tokugawa, up until her death in 1973.
The years that followed her death gave way to a new generation of women writers in Japan who wrote fiction that was strongly feminist and stylistically challenging. The melodramatic family plots and flowery prose of Yoshiya came to be seen as immature-and perhaps too stereotypically feminine in the 1980s and '90s. However, over the past two decades, a blossoming discourse on LGBTQ+ identities and political rights in Japan have led readers back to her work. People seem to be more aware that girlish content can be feminist, and that her writing style can show a way to embrace life outside heterosexual marriage. Her biography is inspiring and comforting to people with lesbian and queer identities, while also continuing to model many positive forms of friendship.
I believe that Japan should embrace its history of tolerance for same-sex relationships, as found in my research, and the 70 percent of the population who are in support of gay marriage. To me, comparative, transnational literature can do important work to disrupt beliefs about love and sexuality and remind us, during a time when LGBTQ+ content is under attack, of the importance of representation for young people.
Sarah Frederick is a BU College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of Japanese and comparative literature. The author of Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women's Magazines in Interwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2006), she is also the translator of Nobuko Yoshiya's Yellow Rose, has published many journal articles and book chapters on Yoshiya's work, and is currently finishing a book on the author.
