Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2019. xix, 203 pp. (Illustrations.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-7391-8.
Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase’s monograph Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girls’ Magazine Fiction is a welcome contribution to the body of academic literature on Japanese women’s writing in the twentieth century. Numerous articles and book chapters have explored the origins of shōjo culture, and Dollase’s monograph ties these threads together into a tapestry depicting the history of how imagined communities of young women were shaped by the editors and contributors of popular mass-market magazines.
Age of Shōjo contains eight chapters, all of which are illustrated with high-quality black-and-white images. Each chapter is informative yet concise, averaging about fifteen pages. Dollase’s writing is well-structured and nicely edited, making her monograph accessible to undergraduates and a true pleasure to read. The book’s accessibility also recommends it to specialists in Japanese studies interested in popular media and currents of youth culture that run a bit deeper than contemporary anime and manga.
Age of Shōjo opens with a discussion of Louisa May Alcott’s two-part novel Little Women, which was translated by Kitada Shūho in 1906 as Shōfujin. Through a close reading that compares the translation to the original, Dollase demonstrates how the novel “introduced the Japanese female audience to Western lifestyle and the image of a Western home” while still conforming to native Meiji-era constructions of femininity (5). “Shōfujin (Little Women): Re-creating Jo for the Female Audience in Meiji Japan” would be an excellent chapter to assign to undergraduates in a class on modern Japan as a means of foregrounding the push and pull between domestic discourses of femininity and the cultural drive to adapt the international trappings of “modern” lifestyles.
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on two key figures who helped shepherd young women’s fiction into public venues. The first is Numata Rippō, who edited the seminal magazine Shōjo sekai (Girls’ World). The second is Yoshiya Nobuko, who is famous for her contributions to this magazine, which were later published as the collection Hana monogatari (Flower Tales). Chapters 4 and 5 trace the development of the portrayal of gender and sexuality in Yoshiya’s work in comparison with her contemporaries Morita Tama and Kawabata Yasunari, who also contributed short fiction to popular magazines such as Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ Friend) during the 1930s and early 1940s. Chapter 6 jumps forward to the postwar occupation era, when girls’ magazines such as Himawari (Sunflower) were filled with romanticized images of the United States.
Chapter 7 chronicles how magazine fiction for teenagers took a more mature turn during the 1980s. Although the genre of sensual and slightly scandalous junia shōsetsu (junior fiction) proliferated during the 1960s, the magazines that ran these stories gradually lost market share to publications specializing in manga during the 1970s. One of the most prominent magazines carrying junior fiction, Shōsetsu junia, changed its name to Cobalt (Kobaruto) in 1982 in order to differentiate its content from shōjo manga. The stories published by Cobalt and similar magazines were still commissioned, selected, and edited to appeal to a readership of young women, but this fiction now addressed themes relating to women in the workforce, including frustrations concerning the socially mandated choice between marriage and career.
Chapter 8 provides a fitting conclusion by offering a close reading of the work of Tanabe Seiko, who grew up enjoying the fantasies of girls’ fiction in the early twentieth century only to confront the realities of a society that discriminated against older women at the turn of the millennium. In contrast to the pessimism of the literary fiction of writers from the same generation like Enchi Fumiko and Ōba Minako, Tanabe’s popular fiction remains cheerful as it creates a space for readers to imagine “the possibility of the elderly to remain active participants in society rather than being excluded and isolated” (120). Dollase argues that, while Tanabe writes to entertain her audience, her humor and happy endings are also a deliberately feminist project intended to provide hope and comfort to women who have already entered the world of adult maturity but are still shōjo at heart.
Through her informative descriptions and deft analysis, Dollase demonstrates how, “through magazine stories and illustrations, readers came to acknowledge themselves as shōjo, a new cultural identity,” and that the fiction of these shōjo, which was developed in collaboration with magazine editors, contains “messages of resistance against disagreeable cultural conditions [that] are cloaked in fantasy, sentimentalism, humor, and sarcasm” (128). Over the course of Age of Shōjo, the reader comes to understand how the culturally constructed category of shōjo did not remain static, but instead shifted and transformed over time. Age of Shōjo is an excellent compliment to Deborah Shamoon’s Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012) and Jennifer Prough’s Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shōjo Manga (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), as it adds new material and a new perspective on the relationships between readers, writers, and magazine editors in the creation of popular fiction and comics. In addition, the monograph’s annotated reproductions of magazine covers and interior illustrations are a gift to readers interested in the visual culture of girlhood in Japan.
As related by the anecdotes included in the short Introduction and Afterword, girls’ fiction continues to be widely read and culturally influential in Japan. Dollase handles this material with respect and care, frankly acknowledging its problematic aspects but not dwelling on them, preferring to contextualize instead of critique. This is especially the case with the heavily censored magazine fiction of the 1940s, as well as the work of writers whose stories were progressive when they were published but may seem socially conservative now. The excellent writing, editing, formatting, and illustrations of Age of Shōjo come together to make this monograph as delightful to read as the stories under analysis, and it is certain to inspire academic interest and perhaps even nostalgia in many readers.
Kathryn Hemmann
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia