Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girl's Culture in Japan

Abstract

Whether because comics for girls were such a novelty in the US at the time (Robbins 1999) or the smashing global success of Sailor Moon (Thompson 2007), shōjo manga attracted a lot of attention in the 1990s.1 It continues to do so, both inside and outside the academy. Few other forms of manga have websites, magazines, conventions, exhibitions (Toku 2005) and books (for example, Prough 2010) devoted to them. Shōjo manga is one of the most written on topics in the study of Japanese popular culture. Faced with the vitality and diversity of shōjo manga, much of the work in English takes as its task to introduce genres, works or creators. This can be unsatisfying, as there is a tendency toward the very general or specific, and repeated descriptions take on the character of facts through the combined power of reference and redundancy. Deborah Shamoon’s Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girl’s Culture in Japan is her intervention into the discussion of shōjo manga, which she situates in a ‘coherent girls’ culture’ (p. 1) that spans from pre- to postwar Japan.2 Rather than historical record, Shamoon focuses on what she calls ‘fictional representations’ of shōjo, analyzing written and visual materials to reconstruct the culture of girls. The first half of Passionate Friendship reviews the place of the shōjo, or rather the schoolgirl, in classic literature by Futabatei Shimei, Miyake Kaho and Tayama Katai, then moves to detail prewar shōjo culture, focusing on magazines in the 1920s and 1930s that carried stories by Yoshiya Nobuko and illustrations by Takehisa Yumeji, Takabatake Kashō and Nakahara Junichi. In the second half of the book, Shamoon takes up postwar shōjo manga, with one chapter devoted to early years and experiments and another to the 1970s, when female artists took over and revolutionized the genre.

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