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well, well, well, look who's come crawling back......

i've missed our beautiful old-fashioned posting style more than i would have believed, and i've got something i'd rather put on here than anywhere else (coming shortly). those of you i haven't seen on tumblr anytime in the last god knows how many years: how've you been?

[translation] "Pear Blossom" by Yoshiya Nobuko

Yoshiya Nobuko, who lived with her partner Monma Chiyo for more than four decades, is often known as "Japan's first lesbian author". Her early writing focuses largely on female relationships within the space of the girls' school, as a space of homosocial freedom outside the family (and wifely) sphere. Contemporary (male) critics charged her writing with being narcissistic, overly sentimental, and unrealistic — in short, with manipulating the emotions of her young readers for cash rather than creating art. Some more favorably disposed towards her said that she should have been a poet, rather than a (very popular) fiction writer. However, we can recognize today the breadth of influence Yoshiya's flowery sentimentalism (aided by Nakahara Jun'ichi's limpid-eyed illustrations) has had on girls' culture generally and shōjo manga in particular.

Her early collection of short stories, Hanamonogatari ("Flower tales"), published 1916-1924, was particularly influential. Filled with unconsummated lesbian relationships, exotic European (occasionally Chinese) aesthetics, and ornamental descriptions so lush as to border on the ridiculous, the stories of Hanamonogatari shift over time from a celebration of the closed world of girlhood to a fierce and impossible longing to cross the border from girlhood to womanhood without giving up — a crossing that would be finally completed in her 1920 novel Yaneura no nishojo ("Two virgins in the attic"). (Michiko Suzuki has written on Yoshiya's use of contemporary sexological discourse to legitimate lesbian desire even for girls who "age out" into marriage in Becoming Modern Women: Love & Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature & Culture. For more on Yaneura no nishojo, see Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase.) For another story from Hanamonogatari in English, see Sarah Frederick's translation of "Yellow Rose".

Though more recent critics have connected Yoshiya's closed and exclusionary world of the girls' school (higher schooling was neither legally required nor free) to her later nationalist support of Imperial Japan's Fifteen-Year War (and not without reason), the desire to get out into the wider world is palpable in later Hanamonogatari stories such as "Pear Blossom."

A few further notes: Although Uno Chiyo always laid claim to being the first Japanese woman to cut her hair short, Yoshiya was also an early adopter of the style, which marked its wearer as scandalously "modern", unfeminine, or both. Arranged marriage was still the norm for Japanese women at this time, although marriage and divorce were somewhat easier than they would become — in other words, marriage and children were something of an inevitability unless you took specific paths to avoid it. Although I've followed Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase in playing with the potential plurality of "witch", I see the landscape of "Pear Blossom" as more ephemeral than fragile and have translated accordingly. Finally, I have largely retained Yoshiya's em dashes, ellipses, and line breaks, in order to preserve the sense of fragmentation and of words that cannot be said.

( Pear Blossom )