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Access provided by Harvard University (3 Mar 2016 23:35 GMT) Chapter 5 The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga

Shòjo manga today is not only the primary locus of girls’ culture, but because of its mainstream, widespread popularity, it has become an important site of cultural production, as popular series inspire anima- tion, films, TV shows, music, stage plays, and novels. Manga in general comprise about 40 percent of the total books and magazines sold in Japan (Schodt 82), and circulation of manga magazines for girls is nearly three million per month.1 The genre-defining elements of shōjo manga that developed in the early 1970s, spe- cifically the prevalence of homoeroticism and the densely layered, decorative art, both attract girls and puzzle outsiders, perhaps intentionally so. In this chapter, I will examine the development of shōjo manga as a coherent genre in the 1970s through detailed analysis of two representative texts, Tōma no shinzō (The Heart of Thomas, 1974) by Hagio Moto and Berusaiyu no bara (The Rose of Versailles, 1972–1973) by Ikeda Riyoko. In doing so, I will chart the transition of shōjo manga from a genre for children in the 1950s and 1960s to one for teenage girls in the 1970s. Perhaps the most confusing aspect of shōjo manga to outside observers, par- ticularly Western observers, is the dominance of homosexual and homosocial pairings. What is the appeal for girls of romance and even explicit sex between two boys? What are we to make of the violent sexuality that sometimes appears in these stories? And why, even in stories of heterosexual romance, do the boys look like girls? Some critics have attempted to answer these questions by read- ing shōjo manga in terms of repressed homosexual desire. But just as contem- porary queer theory is not a historically grounded means to approach prewar girls’ culture, it also obscures the meaning and context of postwar shōjo manga. In this chapter, I will instead offer a reading of shōjo manga as the narrative and aesthetic heirs to prewar girls’ magazines, both of which rely on an aesthetic of sameness and homogender pairings.

101 102 Passionate Friendship

The Year 24 Group in the 1970s

Although Takahashi Makoto, along with other artists in the 1950s and 1960s, innovated some of the aesthetic conventions of shōjo manga, the genre as it exists today emerged in the early 1970s, when a group of young women who became known as the Year 24 Group (nijūyo nen gumi), began to write psychologically complex stories for older teenage readers.2 Although the genre-defining work of these artists is often characterized as revolutionary, their entrance in the world of professional manga publishing was less a counterculture takeover and more a recognition by (male) editors that stories penned by female artists were and still are more popular with girl readers than works by male artists and hence more profitable (Prough 100–101). Manga by the Year 24 Group dealt openly with politics and sexuality, leaving behind the parent-child stories of the 1950s and 1960s for stories of teenage psychological development. As manga scholar Takeuchi Osamu notes, shōjo manga in the 1970s changed from simple enter- tainment to a vehicle of self-expression for the author (139). Ōtsuka Eiji describes this change as analogous in importance and scope to the discovery of interiority in early Meiji fiction (Sengo manga 65), while film scholar Yomota Inuhiko likens the Year 24 Group to the New Wave in cinema (40). As these analogies indicate, the early 1970s was a time of significant, profound changes in shōjo manga that marked the emergence of the genre.3 Chapter 4 outlined the changes that took place in girls’ magazines through the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, the manga publishing industry had established many of the features that still exist today. Rental books gradually disappeared, along with hybrid formats like the photo story. Most manga of all genres now are printed in large anthology magazines that appear weekly or monthly, intended to be read and discarded, and popular titles are reprinted as smaller paperback books for those who want a more permanent version. Most of the manga magazines for girls, such as Nakayoshi, Ribbon, and Margaret, shifted their content by the early 1970s to manga exclusively, dropping text-only fiction, as well as articles on lifestyle or film stars.4 Manga in general had already become a cultural force, particularly in the student movement of the late 1960s, and new avant-garde works appealed to older teens and college students.5 However, this shift toward an older audience in the 1960s occurred primarily with manga for boys; shōjo manga did not appeal to older teen readers until the early 1970s, and manga aimed at young women in their twenties and thirties did not appear until the 1990s. Interactivity, so much a part of prewar girls magazines, returned with the surge in popularity of shōjo manga in the 1970s, although in slightly different form. While shōjo manga magazines never devoted as much of their content The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 103 to reader submissions as prewar girls’ magazines had, they retained an interac- tive quality. All the magazines still had prizes, contests, and surveys meant not only to stimulate sales, but also to locate new talent. Some magazines, such as Ribbon, began to feature a regular column in which readers could send in their own work to be critiqued. The column in Ribbon, called “Ribbon Manga School,” also offered monthly cash prizes for top contributions, starting with twenty thou- sand yen in 1972 and up to one hundred thousand yen in 1976, a substantial amount of money at the time.6 Although the letters sections tended to be only two to four pages long, as in prewar magazines, the letters did not always com- ment directly on the content of the magazine but acted as a forum for girls to talk about their problems, such as a girl who admits she ran away from home for three days because she was fighting with her mother (Shōjo comic, 30 March 1975, 261). Some magazines such as Nakayoshi had special inserts printed on colored paper at one-half or one-quarter size dedicated to reader submissions in the form of let- ters and drawings. Most shōjo manga magazines featured marginalia encouraging readers to send fan mail to the magazines and to artists they liked. Text arranged both vertically and horizontally around the margins also contained requests from girls for pen pals, usually for other girls in the same grade at school. Although the form of communication was different, postwar shōjo manga magazines also worked to form a nationwide reading community of girls. Further evidence of manga’s growing importance is that by the mid 1970s articles about movie stars were almost entirely replaced with articles about popu- lar manga artists, treating the artists as celebrities and relating the details of their personal lives to eager fans.7 These kinds of articles, along with marginalia by artists addressing readers directly, fostered the impression of a close relationship between readers and artists. Although magazines only published a few fan letters in each issue, many more readers wrote fan mail directly to their favorite authors, who often responded to their fans in the pages of their stories. Most manga art- ists began to publish their work in their late teens, encouraged by magazines eager for new talent, and readers responded enthusiastically to artists who were close to them in age. Like prewar magazines, while most of the editors were (and still are) men, shōjo manga developed an impression of being a closed world of girls, where girls could communicate directly with each other. Rather than cre- ating a nationwide network of girls based on the shared experience of the girls’ school, these magazines contributed to the formation of a manga culture for girls, where fandom became a means of connecting with other girl readers and with young women artists. The Year 24 Group, because of their youth and their willingness to connect with fans, were the first to create this girls’ manga culture. Compared with prewar girls’ magazines, shōjo manga artists in the 1970s had far more freedom to depict heterosexual romance, but they found social 104 Passionate Friendship reality as well as generic conventions stood in the way of granting agency to girl characters in heterosexual couples. Fujimoto Yukari points out that many shōjo manga stories in the 1970s center on a girl who finds her identity and self-worth through a close emotional bond with a boy (Watashi no ibasho 112). The girl, who sees herself as unpopular, clumsy, and unattractive, eventually achieves happiness by completely subsuming her desires into her relationship with the one boy who loves her in spite of her defects. Having made passivity a virtue, the only way a girl can find true love is by sacrificing herself to her boy. Deprived of agency, the girl must rely solely on the “power of love” to achieve her goal. Fujimoto calls this the “love trap” (Watashi no ibasho 114). Although this type of Cinderella/ Prince Charming story is not unique to Japan, it was the dominant narrative of heterosexual romance in shōjo manga and one that has not entirely disappeared even today. Although heterosexual romance still accounts for a large percentage of the shōjo manga genre, one of the revolutionary changes of the 1970s was the intro- duction of homosexual romance, usually between two boys. These stories of the love between boys allowed artists to explore adolescent sexuality in a way that was safe for readers because they relied on homogender pairings that had developed in prewar magazines. Although stories of S relationships like Takahashi Makoto’s Sakura namiki continued to appear in the 1950s, by the early 1970s, portrayals of male homosexual romance, or boys’ love, had become more popular.8 Boys’ love stories allowed shōjo manga artists to portray sexuality and eroti- cism in a safe, nonthreatening way. Because the characters are boys, they are not only distanced from the girl readers’ own bodies, but also from the possibili- ties of marriage and childbirth. Moreover, in the 1970s, it was easier for read- ers to imagine sexually active boys than girls. Midori Matsui argues that boys’ love stages the repressed desires of the female readers: “It was apparent that the boys were the girls’ displaced selves; despite the feminine looks that belied their identity, however, the fictitious boys were endowed with reason, eloquence and aggressive desire for the other, compensating for the lack of logos and sexuality in the conventional portraits of girls” (178). As Matsui suggests, the boy charac- ters in these manga invite the girl readers to identify with them because of their feminine appearance, marked with ectomorphic bodies, long flowing hair, and huge eyes. Boys’ love as a subgenre of shōjo manga was largely created by two innova- tive artists, Hagio Moto and Takemiya Keiko, whose work had both an intellec- tual and an erotic dimension. The first boys’ love story was “Sanrūmu nite” (In the Sunroom), by Takemiya Keiko, which appeared in Shōjo comic in December 1970 (Ishida 21). Masuyama Norie, who was a manager and collaborator of both Takemiya and Hagio early in their careers, encouraged them to depict boys’ love The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 105 in their work and also introduced them to the novels of Herman Hesse, which had a profound impact on both of them (Ishida 51–57). Ishida Minori claims, “If Masuyama had never met Takemiya and Hagio, there might never have been this thing called ‘boys’ love’ [shōnen ai] or stories of the love between boys in shōjo manga” (51). Takemiya and Hagio were particularly impressed by Hesse’s bildungsroman Demian, and Masuyama challenged them both to create a shōjo manga version of the novel. The results were Hagio’s Jūichigatsu no gimunaji- umu (November Gymnasium, 1971) and Tōma no shinzō (The Heart of Thomas, 1974), and Takemiya’s Kaze to ki no uta (The Song of the Wind and the Tree, 1976), all three of which were seminal works in the shōjo manga revolution of the 1970s in terms of both theme and visual storytelling.

Tōma no shinzō and the Triumph of Spiritual Love

Tōma no shinzō, which first appeared in Shōjo comic in 1974, shows the influence of Herman Hesse in its emphasis on spiritual awakening and in the setting, a Gym- nasium, or boys’ boarding school, in early-twentieth-century Germany. Although Hagio was inspired by Hesse, she also relied on the conventions of girls’ novels, S relationships, and spiritual love. Like the girls in prewar girls’ novels, the boys in Tōma no shinzō inhabit a private, homosocial world, and their primary concern is love, both spiritual and familial. The story is suffused with the sensibility of longing and nostalgia, with repeated emphasis on the purity and spiritual quality of the boys’ love for each other. Tōma no shinzō is an early classic of the genre, joining the emergent aesthetic idiom of shōjo manga with a psychologically com- plex story. Like the novel Demian that Hagio used as a model, Tōma no shinzō is a bildungsroman in that it centers on the identity formation of the adolescent characters and their difficulties in transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Unlike many other boys’ love stories, even in the 1970s, there is little explicit sexual activity among the boys. Moreover, the emphasis on familial love marks this as a transitional work, away from the childish narratives of the 1950s and 1960s such as Paris-Tokyo, which displaced the romantic plotline from the girl onto her parents and toward teen characters who could seek love as individu- als outside the family. While using male characters, as Matsui suggests, allowed Hagio to invest the characters with sexual agency, the homosocial world of boys’ love manga relies on the aesthetic of sameness and the ideals of spiritual love that informed prewar girls’ magazines. The narrative in Tōma no shinzō operates on a discourse of spiritual love. Although the Gymnasium setting is rendered more or less realistically, there is a strong Gothic undercurrent, with references to ghosts, angels, biblical sto- ries, and psychic visions, all symbolic of the characters’ psychological turmoil 106 Passionate Friendship and indicative of the overriding importance and nearly supernatural power of spiritual love. The story begins during the Easter break, when thirteen-year-old Thomas Werner dies from a fall off a pedestrian bridge over a railroad. The stu- dents and teachers at Schlotterbetz Gymnasium, where Thomas was a student, assume it was an accident, but head prefect Julismole (Juli, age fourteen) and his roommate, Oskar (age fifteen), know it was suicide because Thomas left a note addressed to Juli, with whom he had been in love.9 The note reads in part,

I have been thinking for the past six months about my life and death, and also about my one friend. I am well aware that I am still a child, just beginning to mature, and that he will toss aside this asexual, half-formed, boyish love. . . . Right now, he is as good as dead. I think nothing of destroying my own body in order to bring him to life. They say that everyone dies twice: first one’s own death, then when you are forgotten by your friends. If that is so, I will never die that second death. . . . I will live forever in his eyes. (Hagio 6)

Thomas describes his suicide not so much as an act of despair over his unre- quited love for Juli, but as a sacrifice in order to free Juli’s repressed emotions. Although Juli feels intense guilt for his role in Thomas’ death, he claims to feel nothing for him and does not understand this message until the arrival of Erich, a fourteen-year-old transfer student, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the deceased Thomas. Though at first Erich and Juli are antagonistic, eventually Erich gains sympathy for the repressed, unhappy Juli, as he falls in love with Juli himself. Erich also discovers that Oskar is in love with Juli as well, but the romantic rivalry between Erich and Oskar is not developed. On the contrary, the two of them work together to uncover the secrets of Juli’s past, the revelation of which finally frees his repressed emotions. In the end, however, Juli chooses nei- ther Erich nor Oskar, but confirms his love for the angelic, ethereal Thomas by leaving Schlotterbetz to enter a seminary. In other words, Juli chooses spiritual love (ren’ai) at its most pure. Spiritual love in this story, as described by Kitamura Tōkoku, is a transcendent, divine experience, separated from physical desires. Because of its status as a classic of shōjo manga, Tōma no shinzō has received more critical attention in English than other manga by the Year 24 Group. Like other aspects of girls’ culture, however, such as Takarazuka and the novels of Yoshiya Nobuko, Tōma no shinzō is often discussed in a Western context in terms of contemporary gay and lesbian identity. For instance, James Welker reads Tōma no shinzō and other boys’ love manga as instances of “lesbian panic,” that is, partially suppressed same-sex desire on the part of both the artist and the read- ers. His approach demonstrates the problem with trying to map a lesbian identity onto the homosociality in girls’ culture. Welker dismisses the Japanese point of The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 107 view, expressed by feminist scholars such as Ueno Chizuko and Fujimoto Yukari, that homosociality and androgyny in girls’ culture represent chūsei, a gender- neutral approach, and likewise also dismisses Hagio’s own reflections on chūsei. He reads Juli’s initial denial of Thomas’ love as a panicked response to the threat of same-sex desire, and he asserts that Hagio herself suffers from unresolved, repressed lesbian desires because she admitted that she initially considered set- ting the story in a girls’ school. Welker writes,

Hagio has explained in interviews that she abandoned the lesbian version because she found her girl-girl romance plot “disgusting” (iyarashi) and the idea of a kiss scene between girls to be “as gooey as fermented soy beans” (Hagio and Yoshimoto 90; see also Aoyama 188–89). For Hagio, drawing the world of the girls’ school is too restrictive, as if she were “bound by a witches’ spell” (quoted in Fujimoto 205), whereas drawing the “unknown world” of the boys school is far more “interesting” (204) and offers a “dif- ferent sense of liberation” (205). . . . [T]he lesbian narrative was graphically silenced because of Hagio’s and perhaps her readers’ inability to confront or admit their own lesbian desire directly. And, either way, the fact remains that Hagio had lesbian desire in mind when she created the narrative. (858, refer- ences in original)

It is interesting that Hagio first considered setting her adaptation of Demian in a girls’ school before reverting to a location closer to the original, but Welker’s conclusion is not the only possible interpretation of these quotes from Hagio. If her comments are considered in the historical context of girls’ culture, it seems likely that Hagio was not attempting to silence or suppress a “lesbian” narrative, but rather that she was reacting to the long tradition of girls’ novels featuring S relationships. The “stickiness” she refers to might better be translated as “sappy” and suggests frustration with a genre that by the 1970s seemed hope- lessly old-fashioned. Stories of love between girls, far from being unimaginable or shocking, had been the norm through the 1950s, for example, in Sakura namiki. It seems more likely that Hagio was inspired by the discourse on spirituality she found in Hesse’s work, which led her to the German boys’ school setting and also provided an exciting variation on an old generic convention. Portraying Hagio and Takemiya as unaware of the eroticism and meaning in their own work also diminishes the sophistication they brought to the emer- gent shōjo manga genre. Although they were in their early twenties, or perhaps precisely because they were young, they were part of the trend in the late 1960s and early 1970s to understand sexuality in new ways.10 Ishida Minori discusses how the Year 24 Group artists (particularly Takemiya and Hagio), like other 108 Passionate Friendship artists and writers at the time, including literary giants such as Mishima Yukio, were involved in a project of rediscovering discourses of desire from the 1920s, such as the writing of Inagaki Taruho on male homoeroticism (107). Hagio and Takemiya were not unaware of homosexual identities in the West or Japan; rather they used homosexuality, via the filter of girls’ culture, to tackle adult themes in shōjo manga. Tōma no shinzō represents a leap forward in the creation of the new shōjo manga genre not only because Hagio shifted the story of passionate friend- ship and idealized love from a girls’ school to a boys’ school, but because she helped shift the target audience back up toward high school age by moving away from stories of familial love toward romantic love. While searching for repressed lesbian desire is not a productive mode of analysis, the discourse of spiritual love provides a different analytic paradigm, one that illuminates the larger meaning of Tōma no shinzō for shōjo manga and girls’ culture. Although Tōma no shinzō is a more mature narrative than Paris-Tokyo, it is still a transitional work in that familial love and romantic love are intertwined. Erich, the doppelganger of the dead Thomas, has no father but develops an overtly oedipal attachment to his mother. He calls her by her first name, Marie (echoing the idealized, archetypical mother Eva in Demian), and thinks of her as his lover. The sight of her kissing other men sends him into a state of shock. In another instance of doubling in the narrative, Erich is sent to Schlotterbetz by his mother’s latest boyfriend, who is also named Juli. Erich dreams of displac- ing this interloper, quitting school, and returning to his mother. However, after Marie dies in a car accident, Erich is reconciled with the older Juli, who offers to adopt him, and they vow to keep Marie’s memory alive between the two of them. Once Erich has resolved his oedipal issues by finding a surrogate father and letting go of his mother, he is at last able to help the younger Juli free his repressed emotions and learn how to love. In other words, he can only give and receive spiritual love once he has resolved his issues with familial love, the classic resolution of the oedipal complex.11 Oskar, who is also in love with Juli, has a similar character arc involving the difficulties of familial love. He is the inverse of Erich in that the tension is with his father rather than his mother. Oskar’s father is missing and presumed dead, but the reader discovers early in the narrative that in fact the Schlotterbetz head- master, Mueller, is Oskar’s biological father, a fact his mother, now deceased, had kept secret. Oskar’s story resolves when he acknowledges this truth and allows Mueller to adopt him. Like Erich’s storyline, Oskar’s story ends with his recov- ery of a father and acceptance of familial love. This moment also becomes a turning point for Juli in freeing his emotions. When Juli hears Oskar’s confes- sion about his true parentage, he wonders why Oskar is not angry at Mueller for keeping this secret from him, but Oskar replies that he forgives him. Oskar says The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 109 to Juli, “All I ever wanted, from you and from him, was to notice that I love you” (Hagio 427). As Juli begins to weep, he realizes that he too can be forgiven and loved. The resolution of family crises for the two supporting characters, Erich and Oskar, serve as a model for the main character, Juli, whose difficulties with both familial and romantic love are much less easily solved. If the emphasis on familial love and parental attachment seems unusual, it is important to remember that the imbrication of familial love and romantic love is a common trope in shōjo manga, especially in the 1970s, as the genre was transitioning away from narratives aimed at younger readers. A comparison with a contemporary shōjo manga series Candy Candy shows how much more mature Hagio’s work was for its time. Candy Candy, a heterosexual romance by Igarashi Yumiko (serialized in the magazine Nakayoshi, 1975–1979, and based on the novels by Mizuki Kyōko), features an even more thorough conflation of parents and lovers. The heroine, Candice “Candy” White, an orphan in turn-of- the-century America, falls in love as a young girl with an older boy whom she calls her “Prince of the Hill.” Throughout the hundreds of pages of the story (seven volumes in reprints), as Candy grows from a child to a young woman, she continues to dream of this mysterious “Prince of the Hill,” whose real name and identity she does not know. Candy is adopted by the wealthy Ardley family, which is presided over by an unseen patriarch named Uncle William. Although Candy falls in love twice with boys her own age, at the end of the series she chooses to live with an ailing older man, who turns out to be both the mysterious Uncle William, that is, her adoptive father, and the “Prince of the Hill,” her one true love. The final scene is deeply ambiguous: Candy goes to live with him, but is it as wife, daughter, or nurse? This ending suggests the difficulty of presenting idealized romantic love in a heterosexual framework. As in Paris-Tokyo, in order to maintain her purity, the girl’s desires are continually routed back to familial love. Compared to Candy Candy, the narrative of Tōma no shinzō seems far more adult in that the characters eventually grow out of their childhood fixations on their parents and concentrate on forming new love attachments, even if those relationships are not fully realized within the plot. In Tōma no shinzō, the story arc of the main character, Juli, represents the triumph of spiritual love over the traumas of adolescence and specifically the threat of sexual violence. When the story begins, Juli is unable to reciprocate Thomas’ love because, unlike Erich and Oskar, Juli does not have loving parents or parent surrogates to mentor him in human affection. Even worse, he reveals at the climax of the story that he was the victim of sexualized abuse by an upper- classman, Seifreit, which leaves him physically scarred and fearful of emotional attachments. Throughout the story there are hints of a traumatic event that Juli says “clipped his wings,” that is, that cut him off from his properly spiritual side. 110 Passionate Friendship

The scars on his back and chest are the physical reminder of the loss of his angelic “wings.” Juli keeps Seifreit’s attack secret out of shame and guilt: he repeatedly refers to himself as a “devil” because he thinks of himself as a willing accomplice to Seifreit’s abuse. He says, “I was attracted to him . . . I knew what kind of per- son he was, but even so . . . a part of me said not to approach him . . . but . . . in my heart, there are the seeds of good and evil, and the good was drawn to Thomas, and the bad was drawn to him [Seifreit]” (Hagio 441, ellipses in original). The bifurcation of Juli’s attraction to the angelic Thomas and the demonic Seifreit indicates the threat of romantic attachments for young teens. Through Erich and Oskar, who love him unconditionally, Juli learns to forgive himself and accept love from others. Erich’s and Oskar’s resolution of their conflicts with familial love allows them to serve as positive models of spiritual love for Juli. Juli’s total embrace of spiritual love at the end of the story is marked sym- bolically by his acceptance of the angelic Thomas and literally by his decision to enter the priesthood. While this conclusion could be interpreted, as Welker reads it, as a denial of physical desire, such an interpretation of Juli as increas- ingly repressed is at odds with the liberatory, cathartic tone of the manga. As discussed in Chapter 2, Christianity, particularly in the world of girls’ mission schools in Japan, does not have the same puritanical connotations as in the United States but instead conjures a world of sophisticated elegance and purity as well as homosocial relationships and valorization of spiritual love. It is no accident that this story of the triumph of spiritual love takes place at a Christian school and that Juli’s embrace of spiritual love is tied to his return to a belief in God. At the end, Juli regains his “wings,” indicating his recovery of a spiritual, hopeful part of himself. It is also important to realize that Hagio’s decision to focus on spiritual rather than physical love was an artistic one, not a choice necessarily mandated by publishers or editors. Sex scenes in shōjo manga began appearing early in the 1970s, at the same time Tōma no shinzō was published (1974). Unlike prewar girl’s magazines, in which the threat of censorship prevented even the hint of sexual desire, by the early 1970s shōjo manga were becoming quite racy. According to Fujimoto Yukari, the first heterosexual “bed scene” in shōjo manga appeared in 1972 in Love Game (Raabu geemu) by Ichijō Yukari (Watashi no ibasho 46). More- over, Kaze to ki no uta (1976), Takemiya’s response to the challenge of remak- ing Demian as shōjo manga, while thematically similar to Tōma no shinzō, con- tains numerous explicit sex scenes. Takemiya set her story in a boys’ boarding school in France, rather than Germany, but the story also features a beautiful boy (bishōnen), Gilbert, who, like Juli, is desired by the other boys and has been the victim of sexual abuse by upperclassmen.12 Unlike Juli, however, Gilbert responds by becoming sexually promiscuous and seductive. As in Tōma no shinzō, The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 111 the story revolves around the efforts of a newcomer, Serge, to save Gilbert and teach him the importance of spiritual love. After the success of Kaze to ki no uta, in 1978 Takemiya helped to found June magazine, dedicated exclusively to boys’ love, with the goal of carving out a public space for girls to express their sexual desires (Takemiya, Takemiya Keiko no manga kyōshitsu, 210). One of the revolutionary aspects of Year 24 Group and 1970s shōjo manga was the ability to portray sexual desire in fiction for teen girls. Although Hagio and Takemiya modeled their early work on Hesse’s novels, they also drew on Japanese generic conventions. Tōma no shinzō is essentially a girls’ novel about S relationships, with boys substituted for girls. It contains many of the same elements, such as the exchange of letters, the Christian school setting, and the emphasis on purity, innocence, and spiritual love. What Hagio adds, however, is a serious meditation on adolescent development and a transi- tion from familial to romantic love, aspects that resonated with teenage girl read- ers and have become the central theme for many shōjo manga stories.

Boys’ Love and Girls’ Desires

Why the shift from S relationships between two girls to boys’ love? In part this was a way to invigorate an old genre and also a move away from the restrictions of prewar mores while still connecting with the aesthetics and emotions that girls associated with girls’ culture. The substitution of boys for girls also allowed for more sexually explicit stories, which could still be coded as safe or innocent. To quote Takemiya Keiko, “If there is a sex scene between a boy and a girl, they [the readers] don’t like it because it seems too real. It leads to topics like getting preg- nant or getting married, and that’s too real. But if it’s two boys, they can avoid that and concentrate on the love aspect” (Takemiya Keiko no manga kyōshitsu 210). As Takemiya implies, the discourse among fans of shōjo manga and particularly boys’ love, like the discourse on the Takarazuka, focuses on fantasy and chūsei, the imaginary neutral gender. Mark McLelland quotes from a fan: “[Boy-love] comics are an imaginary playground in which I can flee the realities of every- day life” (“Why Are Japanese Girls’ Comics Full of Boys Bonking?” 7). Midori Matsui writes, “The Japanese boy-love comic, in its most imaginatively ambitious mode, is a remarkable amalgam of the feminine and the adolescent imagination” (194). The transference of the girl reader’s identity onto the boy character can be a powerful means for girls to access eroticism and contemplate their own desires for boys or men. While Western critics concentrate on the homosexual aspect of boys’ love, these are not stories about real homosexual relationships.13 Boys’ love manga is a strategy for heterosexual teenage girls to negotiate their feelings about relationships with boys, just as slash fiction in the United 112 Passionate Friendship

States stages homoerotic scenes between male characters in popular TV shows for the enjoyment of heterosexual women. The similarity between boys’ love and slash demonstrates how both speak to the concerns and anxieties of heterosexual girls and women. Writing on the oldest and largest slash fandom, dedicated to the characters Kirk and Spock of Star Trek, Constance Penley calls this “a proj- ect of retooling masculinity itself” to conform with women’s desire for equality and emotional openness in heterosexual relationships (127). The beautiful boys (bishōnen) of shōjo manga, like the idealized Kirk/Spock of slash fandom, allow girls to imagine a romantic and sexual relationship outside the sexist expectations imposed on them in real life. This strategy of altering existing texts is what Penley, citing Michel de Certeau, calls “Brownian Motion” or “the tactical maneuvers of the relatively powerless when attempting to resist, negotiate, or transform the system and products of the relatively powerful” (104).14 Boys’ love is a way for girls to access mature sexual and even pornographic texts in a manner that is socially tolerated. In a comparison of boys’ love and slash, Marni Stanley states that the pleasures of both genres lie in “giving females a chance to play with boys and the male body in ways that male authors/artists have traditionally assumed to be their right to manipulate and play with the female body” (107). To expand on Stanley’s point, it is worth remembering that pornography featuring two women produced for a male audience is widely understood in the United States as a male fantasy, removed from the realities of lesbian desires, and the men who consume it are not presumed to identify with the female characters. Boys’ love, as a form of erotica for girls, can be understood in the same way. Boys’ love has branched out from professional manga to other media, mainly self-published manga (dōjinshi) and illustrated novels as well as drama CDs, which feature dramatic readings of popular boys’ love manga and novels by professional voice actors. The emphasis in these CDs on the sex scenes, complete with deep breathing and sound effects, suggests that these are low-budget substitutes for the kind of pornographic anime or adult video widely available for men. While some shōjo manga are made into animated TV series or movies, as yet there is no boys’ love equivalent of the hentai (animated pornography) genre for the male demographic, perhaps for economic reasons. In the low-budget amateur markets, that is, in self-published manga and on the Internet, however, boys’ love has flourished, both in original stories and in parodies and revisions of popular manga, anime, film, and television.15 As with slash fiction in the United States, boys’ love gives girls permission to direct a libidinous gaze on the male body and fantasize about sexual fulfillment in response to male-directed fictions that do not grant them agency or acknowledge their desires.16 As the boys’ love genre has evolved since the 1970s, it has become more rig- idly codified than in Tōma no shinzō and Kaze to ki no uta. In contemporary boys’ The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 113 love, the two partners are usually designated as the seme and the uke, indicating the penetrative and receptive roles in anal sex. The seme (literally, “attacker”) is usually older, taller, more masculine and aggressive, while the uke (literally, “receiver”) is the weaker partner, often drawn with an exaggeratedly feminine appearance. As Penley says of slash fiction, however, it is important to the readers that both characters are in fact male (126).17 While the heteronormative gender roles and sexual violence of some boys’ love manga raises fears that girls may be receiving and internalizing negative gender stereotypes, it should not be assumed that readers necessarily identify only with the uke. In an online survey of English-speaking boys’ love fans, Dru Pagliassotti found overwhelming evidence of shifting or multiple identifications; as one respondent wrote, “I can choose to relate to the seme, or the uke, or both” (71). Another reported, “In hetero manga, I automatically relate to the female because I am a woman. In yaoi or boys’ love I can relate to either character more easily” (71). While Pagliassotti’s respondents were presumably not Japanese, there is no reason to assume Japanese readers might respond differently. While the gender signifiers of the uke and seme are often heteronormative, even exces- sively so, fixating solely on the question of reader identification misses the more subtle ways that readers may be using these texts to access a female-centered eroticism. As with the S-relationship, heteronormativity in boys’ love is precisely the point, in that both genres allow heterosexual girls a safe space to think through problems of romantic and sexual relationships. Like the S relationship, as a fan- tasy space, boys’ love is coded as innocent and pure, even when depicting sexual activity. While queer readings of boys’ love are possible, the majority of readers are heterosexual, as were the readers of prewar girls’ novels. The boys in boys’ love manga behave differently from boys in manga genres aimed at male read- ers, reflecting female readers’ desires. The seme, for all his macho posturing, will usually at some point express his feelings of love for the uke, confirming his emo- tional side in a way that is appealing to girls and that is not usually seen in manga for boys or adult men. In this regard, the uke/seme relationship is remarkably similar to the older sister/younger sister bonds of the S relationship. As sexual mores have changed for teens in the postwar years, the content of the fiction girls read has also shifted, but homosocial tropes and spiritual love remain dominant in girls’ culture.

The Visual Grammar of Shōjo Manga

Hagio Moto’s work also shows the development of shōjo manga’s discrete visual grammar, using elements taken from illustration in prewar girls’ magazines 114 Passionate Friendship

(particularly jojōga, or lyrical pictures) to create a new dynamic storytelling style. The significant features of this new style, seen in Tōma no shinzō, are interior monologue, open frames, layering, symbolic imagery, and emotive backgrounds, which taken together form the visual grammar of shōjo manga. Hagio is not solely responsible for creating the distinctive shōjo manga aesthetic, which developed gradually over the course of the 1950s and 1960s in the works of many artists, including Takahashi Makoto. As with jojōga in prewar girls’ magazines, the dis- tinctive style of postwar shōjo manga serves to draw in the reader by establishing an appeal to emotion and a shared girls’ culture, while at the same time reflecting the emotional depth of the story in a three-dimensional effect on the page. Casual observers tend to fixate on the exaggerated eye, but for scholars of manga writing in Japanese, the use of interior monologue outside word balloons is far more significant in the development of the shōjo manga genre. Ōtsuka Eiji argues that extensive use of interior monologue is the fundamental difference between shōjo manga and manga for boys, in which action drives the narrative (Sengo manga 60). As shōjo manga usually do not feature third-person narra- tion, the interior monologue of the main character outside word or thought bal- loons approximates voice-over in film or first-person narration in the novel. The result, according to Ōtsuka, is that in shōjo manga, the feelings of the characters become as important as the dialog, and the reader is drawn into the inner world of the characters (Sengo manga 61). As in girls’ magazines, the emotional lives of teenage girls are given weight and significance. In shōjo manga, as in Yoshiya Nobuko’s novels, fragmented narration expressing the emotions of the main character is a means of exploring the character’s interiority. This aspect of shōjo manga’s visual grammar can be seen in Tōma no shinzō, where the interior monologue of the three main characters, Erich, Juli, and Oskar, appears outside word or thought balloons, accompanied by symbolic images that add weight and immediacy to the psychology of the characters, which otherwise would have no material or visual presence. As in Yoshiya’s novels, this interior monologue often takes the form of sentence fragments scattered across the page, approximating poetry. The thoughts expressed in the interior monologue are expressed symbolically in images that exceed the boundaries of each frame or that are layered together in a montage. For instance, when Erich thinks back to the moment he saw his mother kissing another man, she appears in the top half of the page, holding a bunch of white lilies (Hagio 125) (Fig. 5.1). The panels at the bottom of the page depict her kissing the man, that is, literally representing Erich’s memories, but the large image of Marie at the top of the page is sym- bolic, showing his idealized memory of her, with additional close-up images of white lilies surrounding her in the middle of the page. The white lilies here, as in prewar magazines, symbolize spiritual love. As the characters use the imagery Figure 5.1. As Erich thinks about his mother, his interior monologue appears outside word balloons, and images of his mother are layered through the irregular frames, showing his thoughts graphically. (Hagio Moto, Tōma no shinzō [Shōgakukan, 1996], 125. © Hagio Moto, Shōgakukan) 116 Passionate Friendship of angels and wings to represent their capacity for love, the motif of wings also appears frequently. As Juli begins to reveal to Erich the history of his abuse by Seifreit, he says, “I have no wings” (Hagio 407). At the same time, his thoughts are repeated outside word balloons, and an image of the angel Gabriel blowing a trumpet appears at the bottom half of the page, layered over the frames of Erich and Juli conversing (Fig. 5.2). Similar images of angels appear throughout the story, as the thoughts of the characters are rendered through symbolic motifs. This use of symbolic motifs contributes to a layered, three-dimensional effect, another key aspect of shōjo manga’s visual grammar. In addition to overt symbols, such as the angels, Hagio makes use of the full-body portrait, first used by Takahashi Makoto, to mark the main characters. Hagio also superimposes multiple close-ups of the main characters, which again marks them and encour- ages identification (Fig. 5.3). She also uses emotive backgrounds to reflect the emotions of the characters. This often takes the form of flowers, as in Takahashi’s work, but by this time the flowers have become symbolic and are understood to be purely emotive, not representational, and hence there is no need to place the characters in an actual flower garden, as in Paris-Tokyo. The symbolism of flowers has deep roots in girls’ culture, as in the use of the white lily with Erich’s mother, and relates directly to the jojōga style and in an indirect way to the decorative quality of Art Nouveau that influenced jojōga artists. The emotive backgrounds are often abstract, with clouds, starbursts, or screentone used to reflect emotion. Since all of these symbolic and emotive elements (full bodies, repeated close- ups, flowers, abstract shapes) must be frontally arranged on the two-dimensional surface of the page, the accretion of these elements creates a layered or three- dimensional effect. This three-dimensional effect not only creates visual interest but lends both literal and symbolic depth to the story. For instance, when Erich hears a rumor that Juli is responsible for Thomas’ death, Hagio layers a full-body portrait of Erich on top of panels that depict the faces of Thomas and Juli, surrounded by drifting flowers that suggest the angelic Thomas and his fatal plunge from the pedestrian bridge. At the bottom of the page, Erich’s face appears again in close-up, with a small starburst symbolizing his sudden fear that Juli might try to kill him as well. This layered effect represents Erich’s thoughts dynamically, adding drama to a scene that would otherwise lack action. In a larger sense, the layered, three-dimensional effect is analogous to Hagio’s attempt to bring narra- tive depth to shōjo manga by dealing with psychologically complex themes. This use of layering and open panels is what Takemiya refers to as the “lawlessness” of shōjo manga, that is, a world in which emotion is given free range. The densely layered, montagelike arrangements serve as moments of melo- dramatic stasis, especially when accompanied by interior monologue. This kind Figure 5.2. Juli tells Erich he has no “wings” (i.e., capacity for love), while the lower half of the page depicts his thoughts outside word balloons and a symbolic image of the angel Gabriel, who strongly resembles Juli. (Hagio Moto, Tōma no shinzō [Shōgakukan, 1996], 407. © Hagio Moto, Shōgakukan) Figure 5.3. Layering, diagonal lines, full-body portrait, repeated close-ups, and emotive back- grounds add drama to what would otherwise be a static scene of Erich’s thoughts. Here Erich (full body and again in profile at the bottom of the page) thinks about the deceased Thomas, whose face appears twice upside-down; Juli appears in the third panel. (Hagio Moto, Tōma no shinzō [Shōgakukan, 1996], 130. © Hagio Moto, Shōgakukan) The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 119 of effect is not limited to shōjo manga but appears across media in genres that dramatically stage extreme emotions. Film scholar Linda Williams, writing on American cinema, describes melodramatic stasis as “ephemeral spectacle, show- manship, and moments of ‘artistic motivation’ in which audiences admire the show rather than get caught up in the cause-effect linear progress towards nar- rative resolution” (57). In other words, there are frequent moments where the action halts to allow a static staging of pathos, as in the examples above from Tōma no shinzō. To criticize these scenes for being overdetermined, unmotivated, and excessive is, according to Williams, to miss the point of the melodramatic imagination, which is about regeneration and a reaffirmation of innocence (42). In this regard as well, the static moments in shōjo manga are similar to jojōga’s tone of wistful innocence. The use of the full-body portrait and other arrangements that create a lay- ered effect as well as irregular and open frames are all techniques for investing shōjo manga with emotional depth. These techniques can include layering panels on top of each other, laying dialog, narration, close-ups, or sound effects over two or more panels. Hagio and other shōjo manga artists also make liberal use of white space and diagonal lines, with the result that the panels are splintered or exploded, while characters and scenes appear to float in space. Because the stories emphasize emotion and are not action-oriented, the composition of the panels is intended to create a mood rather than to guide the reader’s eye from one moment of action to the next. The effect is dreamy and nonlinear, which is appropriate to the tone of the stories and illustrates the inner psychology of the characters. Although artistic styles in shōjo manga have changed over the past thirty years, most shōjo manga artists still use these conventions of layering and interior monologue in order to emphasize affect.

Homogender Romance in The Rose of Versailles

Like Tōma no shinzō, The Rose of Versailles (serialized in Margaret, 1972–1973) is another of the early classics in the emergent genre, a story that Yokomori Rika calls the “shining masterpiece of shōjo manga” (32). Fan response to The Rose of Versailles was immediate and unprecedented, sparking a craze among teenage girls in the early 1970s for anything related to the manga, or indeed for anything French. When the main character, Oscar, died well before the end of the series, teachers reportedly were forced to suspend classes because all the girl students were in tears, and one distraught fan mailed a letter containing a razor to artist Ikeda Riyoko (“Berusaiyu no bara” daijiten 126). How did this narrative-heavy account of the events leading to the French Revolution evoke such an impas- sioned response among Japanese girls? The story’s focus on political issues and 120 Passionate Friendship adult romantic love mark it as part of the trend toward more serious content. The story features an epic scale, a lush, rococo setting, and an active female main character, which appealed to girls’ sensibilities. However, what distinguishes The Rose of Versailles from other shōjo manga of the time is the depiction of adult heterosexual romance between equals. The continued popularity of The Rose of Versailles suggests that girls long for romance stories featuring a powerful female character, but the narrative compromises that Ikeda used to depict that romance suggests the extent to which equality in heterosexual romance remains a fantasy in shōjo manga. Although The Rose of Versailles depicts heterosexual romance, the narrative still operates within the genre of shōjo manga, which tends to favor homosocial and homosexual relationships, and points to the difficulties in por- traying realistic heterosexual romance narratives without sacrificing the social and sexual agency of the female character. Ikeda Riyoko, like Hagio Moto and other shōjo manga artists in the early 1970s, was experimenting with ways to expand the genre to address more mature themes. Ikeda, who was just twenty-four years old when she began writing The Rose of Versailles, encountered strong opposition when she first proposed the idea of a biography of Marie Antoinette to her editors. As a result of this opposition, Ikeda was dependent on fan feedback to ensure continued publication of her story (“Berusaiyu no bara” daijiten 123). The story changes significantly over the course of its serialization, as the young and inexperienced Ikeda developed as a writer and artist but also in response to readers’ feedback. The development of the plot over the course of its serialization provides a unique opportunity to see how read- ers reacted to Ikeda’s innovations. Chief among these was to make the main char- acter a woman who dresses and behaves as a man. Readers responded positively to this story because Ikeda wrote in the idiom of earlier shōjo manga and girls’ novels. At the same time, however, she attempted a compromise between the adolescent world of S relationships and the adult world of heterosexual romance. In its early chapters, The Rose of Versailles begins as a straightforward biog- raphy of Marie Antoinette. Ikeda drew most of her historic details from Stefan Zweig’s 1933 book Marie Antoinette: Portrait of an Average Woman, which she had read in high school (“Berusaiyu no bara” daijiten 122). The first several chapters of The Rose of Versailles detail many real aspects of Marie Antoinette’s life, including her close relationship with her mother, Maria Theresa of Austria, her loveless marriage at the age of fourteen to Louis XVI, her early rivalry with Madame du Barry, her friendship with the comtesse de Polignac, the Affair of the Necklace, and her lifelong romance with the Swedish count Hans Axel von Fersen. Ikeda casts this historical story in terms of shōjo manga: the teenage Marie Antoinette is not much different from the lively, silly girls of shōjo manga looking to be redeemed by love, in this case, her love for von Fersen. Marie Antoinette’s fights The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 121 with du Barry also take on the tone of schoolgirl rivalries. The exotic setting, elaborate costumes, and polite language appealed to girl readers who had long enjoyed this sort of fantasy in girls’ magazines. Ikeda addressed her readers in an idiom that was familiar to them. Readers who were expecting a romantic comedy and light tone typical of girls’ magazines in the 1960s, however, were no doubt shocked by the social and gender critiques that emerge as the story becomes increasingly serious. As the characters enter adulthood, Marie Antoinette is eclipsed by the fictional Oscar François de Jarjayes, a cross-dressed woman and the captain of the Queen’s Royal Guard.18 Oscar begins the story as a supporting character, invented, Ikeda later revealed in interviews, because she felt unable to convincingly portray a male soldier (Nimiya 228). Oscar is born the youngest daughter of General de Jarjayes, who, despairing of a male heir, raises her as a boy and a soldier. She proves to be an accomplished officer and a natural leader. Although she dresses and behaves as a man, however, Oscar’s sex is never a secret; the other characters all know that she is in fact a woman. In spite of her masculine dress and bearing, she retains feminine features, specifically long hair and large eyes (Fig. 5.4), as well as compassion and empathy. She is far more charismatic and complex than Marie Antoinette, and it is easy to see why she takes over the narrative. Through Oscar, the text radically questions the assumptions of heterosexual romance and gender roles. As her narrative trajectory gains momentum, Oscar has two basic conflicts, the first in her career and politics, and the second in her romantic life. To summarize the first briefly, Oscar gradually begins to realize that in spite of her personal friendship with Marie Antoinette, as captain of the Royal Guard, she is supporting a corrupt regime. She learns to sympathize with the revolutionaries, renounces her aristocratic status, and takes on a new com- mission as captain of a regiment of commoners. She and her men eventually join with the revolutionaries in a series of events also loosely based on real incidents. Oscar herself is killed while leading her regiment in the storming of the Bastille. In her political career, Oscar moves from a position of privilege to learning to embrace the ideals of the French Revolution. The political content of The Rose of Versailles was one part of the revolution in shōjo manga, as writers like Ikeda, Hagio, and Takemiya brought complexity and seriousness to the genre. While in prewar girls’ magazines political con- tent, along with sexual content, had been forbidden, in the liberal atmosphere of the 1970s, authors had the freedom to address these topics. Oscar’s search for personal meaning through political action and her gradual awakening to social injustice echo the student movements of the New Left that galvanized Japanese youth through the 1960s. The shōjo manga artists of the Year 24 Group had grown up in the midst of these protests and were empowered by the sense of Figure 5.4. Oscar François de Jarjayes, the cross-dressed heroine of The Rose of Versailles. Despite her masculine clothing, her hair and eyes indicate her feminine qualities. This page is also an example of the full-body portrait, with the middle panel showing a repeated close-up of Oscar and her interior monologue outside word balloons. (Ikeda Riyoko, Berusaiyu no bara [Shūeisha Bunkō, 2004], 3:25. © Ikeda Riyoko Production) The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 123 youthful rebellion and iconoclasm at the time. Anne McKnight, in her analysis of the political dimensions of The Rose of Versailles, demonstrates how Ikeda, who was a member of the Japanese Communist Party, picked up on themes of revolu- tion and populist uprising at a moment when the New Left, also partly inspired by the French Revolution, was seemingly exhausted (29–30). There is a natural affinity between the decorative aesthetics of shōjo manga and the baroque or rococo art of prerevolutionary France, which McKnight writes “offers tropes for examining how a feminine subject becomes self-sufficient and free” (30). While the connection between boys’ manga and the student movement has been well documented (Kinsella, Adult Manga, 32), readers of shōjo manga were also politically engaged. The letters columns in shōjo manga magazines aimed at high school girls in the early 1970s ran many letters from readers protesting the war in Vietnam.19 Takemiya also says that the student movement influenced her to open her mind to different points of view and got her to think past absolutes (Takemiya Keiko no manga kyōshitsu 212–213). The Rose of Versailles linked the personal and the political in a way that was appealing to girl readers. Oscar’s romantic conflicts, however, were as significant as her politics in terms of fan response and influence on subsequent shōjo manga. The narrative first pairs Oscar in an S relationship with Rosalie Lamorlière.20 Rosalie is a ste- reotypical good girl, sweet, obedient, and timid, who falls in love with Oscar after Oscar rescues her from various perils. Rosalie’s adoring admiration for Oscar is reminiscent of the S relationship (Fig. 5.5), but Oscar does not reciprocate her love. Oscar makes it clear that she desires a relationship with a man; that is, she desires an adult, rather than an adolescent, relationship. It would seem that read- ers too could not accept Oscar in a schoolgirl relationship. Ikeda has stated that she originally intended Rosalie to serve as a point of identification for girls, but the character proved unpopular (“Berusaiyu no bara” daijiten 30). Ever dependent on fan feedback, Ikeda decreased Rosalie’s significance in the plot. Having rejected Rosalie and S relationships, Oscar’s first attempt at a het- erosexual relationship is with Marie Antoinette’s lover, Hans Axel von Fersen. Fearing that he does not see her as a woman, Oscar attempts to seduce him by donning a dress for the first (and only) time in her life and attending a ball in disguise as a foreign princess. Even this, however, is not enough to convince Fersen to see Oscar as anything more than a comrade. Oscar’s second foray into romance comes when her father arranges her marriage to the comte de Giro- delle. Whereas Fersen only saw her as a man, Girodelle only sees Oscar as a woman, which infuriates her. To spite both Girodelle and her father, she appears at her engagement party in her military dress uniform and dances with women. This ends her engagement and also highlights her inability to accept either a clearly masculine or a feminine role. Figure 5.5. The bottom right panel suggests the start of an S relationship between Rosalie and Oscar, but Ikeda later wrote Rosalie out of the story in favor of André. (Ikeda Riyoko. Berusaiyu no bara [Shūeisha Bunkō, 2004], 1:376. © Ikeda Riyoko Production) The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 125

At this point, Oscar finally realizes what the reader has already known for some time: her one true love is in fact André Grandier, who has been her faithful companion and sidekick since childhood.21 André first appears in the narrative as a background character (Fig. 5.6), and Ikeda later admitted that she did not initially create him as a love interest (“Berusaiyu no bara” daijiten 29). But as Ikeda, in response to feedback from fans, made Oscar the main character over Marie Antoinette, she also developed André more fully as a partner to Oscar. Signifi- cantly, however, André only begins to emerge as a love interest after Oscar cuts his hair, which alters his appearance to more closely resemble her own. As the story progresses, they increasingly resemble each other, in the shape of the hair and eyes, and in the clothes they wear, usually military uniforms (Fig. 5.7). When Oscar finally acknowledges her own feelings and returns his love, she describes André as her shadow and compares the two of them to the mythological twins Castor and Pollux (Fig. 5.8). This increasing physical resemblance does not occur with other characters; specifically, it does not occur between Marie Antoi- nette and Fersen, both of whom retain clearly gender differentiated appearances (Fig. 5.9). André becomes Oscar’s ideal love interest not only because he physically resembles her, but also because his own masculine identity is compromised. First, he is of a lower social class, little more than a servant in the de Jarjayes house- hold. For much of the story Oscar either gives him orders or ignores him. Sec- ond, and even more significant, their romance only begins to develop after André loses an eye in the line of duty; in the latter half of the story, he gradually loses his sight in the other eye as well. His disability enforces his subordinate, dependent position. By the time they finally consummate their relationship and pledge to marry, André has become completely blind, symbolizing his loss of masculinity. André’s suffering, both from Oscar’s inattention to him and from the grad- ual loss of his sight, is highlighted in moments of melodramatic stasis, which further feminizes him. For instance, in one such moment of melodramatic stasis, André decides to find out more about the republican politics that have so pre- occupied Oscar by reading Rousseau. But rather than one of Rousseau’s philo- sophical works, he reads the romance La Nouvelle Héloïse and sees himself in the story of forbidden love between a noble lady and a commoner. He reacts emo- tionally to the story (like a female reader of romance novels or shōjo manga), and his emotions and thoughts are portrayed visually (Fig. 5.10). Extended interior monologues and pauses in the action to represent emotional anguish visually are usually reserved for the lead female character (or the uke), but in the second half of The Rose of Versailles, as Oscar wrestles with political issues, it is André who suf- fers the stereotypically female pain of unrequited love. In visually representing his inner thoughts, the narrative invites readers to identify with him. As Midori Figure 5.6. One of the first appearances of André, in the upper left panel, behind a much larger image of Oscar. Note how different their faces and hairstyles are. (Ikeda Riyoko. Berusaiyu no bara [Shūeisha Bunkō, 2004], 1:143. © Ikeda Riyoko Production) The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 127

Matsui suggests, reader identification in shōjo manga does not necessarily follow gender lines; however, it is interesting that readers rejected Rosalie, the image of female suffering, as a point of identification, in favor of André. Although Oscar and André’s relationship is in a biological sense heterosex- ual, it is still configured within the story as homogender. As a masculine woman and an emasculated man, Oscar and André physically and symbolically resem- ble each other, indicating that the story is still operating within the aesthetic of sameness that pervades both prewar girls’ magazines and postwar boys’ love shōjo manga. Oscar is able to give herself completely to André because he never asks her to compromise either her masculine or feminine identity. Oscar remains popular among girl readers even thirty years after the story’s initial publication not only because she displays masculine strength and agency without sacrificing her feminine beauty and empathy, but also because she finds true love without losing her identity to her partner. Although Oscar emerges as the main character, her death (preceded by André) occurs well before the end of the story. Ikeda has said in interviews that after André’s and Oscar’s deaths, readership declined sharply and her editors pressured her to finish the story quickly, although she had wanted to continue through the entire revolution (“Berusaiyu no bara” sono nazo to shinjitsu 114–115). In the 4 November 1973 issue of Margaret, two weeks after Oscar’s dramatic death, a note from the editors in the margin of the letters column indicates that the magazine was flooded with letters from distraught fans and requests to bring Oscar and André back to life. They printed one example, written in typical girls’ language: “Boo hoo—Oscar-sama died—I knew she would die at some point, but I didn’t think it would be so soon! Ikeda-sensei! P-please!! It’s not too late: please bring Oscar and André back to life!” (265). This letter indicates that the reader perhaps expected a more safe, reassuring kind of narrative, where beloved main characters only seem to die but are resurrected quickly in order to continue the story. Ikeda’s insistence on a more serious register is all the more remarkable given the intense pressure from both readers and editors to change back to a more childish mode.22 The final chapters of The Rose of Versailles rush through many details of the revolution, with a focus on Fersen and Marie Antoinette’s doomed love. The story ends, as it must, with Marie Antoinette’s execution. Her character has evolved from a silly, flighty teen, not unlike many girl characters in shōjo manga of the previous decade, to a mature woman who recognizes her failures as a head of state and faces her death bravely. As a strong female character, how- ever, she still pales in comparison to the more complex Oscar. The final page of the story recounts Fersen’s own fate: in 1810, he was trampled to death by a mob in Stockholm, the victim of political rivalry among Swedish royal families. Figure 5.7. Oscar and André much later in the narrative, after Ikeda has developed him as Oscar’s ideal man and altered André’s appearance to more closely resemble Oscar’s. (Ikeda Riyoko, Berusaiyu no bara [Shūeisha Bunkō, 2004], 4:220–221. © Ikeda Riyoko Production)

Figure 5.8. An emotive page during the scene in which Oscar and André consummate their love, depicting them as twins. She says: “You are always with me. We are like Castor and Pollux.” (Ikeda Riyoko, Berusaiyu no bara [Shūeisha Bunkō, 2004], 4:292. © Ikeda Riyoko Production) The Revolution in 1970s Shōjo Manga 131

The final panel shows Fersen’s broken corpse lying in the street, a far cry from the light, cheery tone that characterized the opening chapters. Over the course of the series, in moving from these early, childish illustrations to the final gruesome image, we can see in Oscar’s increasing importance as a character and, in the relative decline of Rosalie and Marie Antoinette, the evolution of shōjo manga from a genre for children to one for older readers. These brutal images and the deaths of the main characters shocked readers at the time but also led them to embrace more serious stories and stories with adult characters as well as with political and social criticism. Although Ikeda did not bring Oscar and André back to life in the manga, the characters have enjoyed continued popularity on the Takarazuka stage, begin- ning in 1974, with revivals appearing every few years ever since. The Takarazuka Revue, with its all-female cast, and its roots in prewar girls’ culture, seems ide- ally suited to stage the gender ambiguities of The Rose of Versailles. Although the Takarazuka version changes the plot somewhat, it remains true to the homogen- der nature of the romance between Oscar and André. While Ikeda claims she did not originally write the story with the Takarazuka in mind (Nimiya 228), shōjo manga and the Takarazuka both share an aesthetic of chūsei. Takayama Hideo asserts that only a Takarazuka actress trained in playing male roles and schooled in the seventy-year history of girls’ culture can play the role of Oscar appro- priately (301). By using female actresses to assume the roles of both men and women, the Takarazuka is uniquely compatible with shōjo manga, which stages the desires of girls in a closed, private world of girls’ culture. While Oscar seems to challenge traditional gender roles, she is still firmly embedded in a discourse of girls’ culture.23 Tōma no shinzō and The Rose of Versailles helped to transform shōjo manga into a genre that could encompass complex psychological portraits, political commentary, and adult romance. The “bed scene” featuring Oscar and André on the eve of the revolution had a profound impact on girl readers. Fujimoto Yukari writes, “From that scene, we all decided ‘I want to have sex like Oscar and André.’ For junior and senior high school girls at the time, our conception of sex was fixed by that manga” (Watashi no ibasho 47–48). Although theirs is a heterosexual union, Oscar and André still operate within the realm of chūsei, neutrality, which allows for spiritual love. As one reader put it in a fan letter, “The sex scene was a bit shocking to me, but Oscar and André’s love is pure, so it didn’t seem dirty [iyarashii]” (Margaret, 7 Oct. 1973, 266). Significantly, it is not only the cross-dressing Oscar who is gender neutral, but also André. Ueda Shinji, the scriptwriter and director of the Takarazuka adaptation, real- ized that part of André’s appeal for fans was his willingness to say “I love you” to Oscar, something that Ueda feels real Japanese men are hesitant to do Figure 5.9. Marie Antoinette meets her lover, Hans Axel von Fersen, in secret toward the end of The Rose of Versailles. Note how both characters are more clearly gender differentiated than Oscar and André. (Ikeda Riyoko, Berusaiyu no bara [Shūeisha Bunkō, 2004], 5:44–45. © Ikeda Riyoko Production)

Figure 5.10. André in a scene of melodramatic stasis, as he projects himself into Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and contemplates his (as yet) unrequited love for Oscar. Reads from right to left. (Ikeda Riyoko, Berusaiyu no bara [Shūeisha Bunkō, 2004], 3:306–307. © Ikeda Riyoko Production)

136 Passionate Friendship

(Yamanashi 223). For this reason, in the stage version, when they admit their love for each other, Oscar and André sing a duet about their pure love, repeating the refrain “love” (ai). The perfect union between Oscar and André that Fujimoto recalls as so appealing is only possible because both characters have defied gender roles. Oscar can give herself to André without fear of losing her independence to him because he not only admires her masculine qualities, he is emotionally and socially dependent on her. Ikeda avoids the “love trap” by inverting it. While the tough but compassionate Oscar and her heterosexual, homogender romance with André have proved enduringly popular with teenage girls, she is still the product of a narrative compromise. The persistence of gender switching and homogender romance tropes in shōjo manga suggests that equality in hetero- sexual relationships remains a problem for both female writers and readers. Shōjo manga is everywhere in Japan today. Shōjo manga magazines are widely read by the majority of junior high school and high school age girls. As with girls’ magazines in the prewar period, shōjo manga magazines create a private discourse about girlhood and teenage identity formation. The shōjo manga discourse on love and sex, however, is limited by the genre from which it developed. Shōjo manga in the 1970s developed as a safe place for girls to fan- tasize about their own sexuality and sexual and social agency through the use of same-sex romance, but that same rhetorical device made the portrayal of hetero- sexual, adult sexuality difficult. Whether future shōjo manga artists will continue to push the genre in new directions or abandon it entirely in favor of genres that are not gender-divided remains to be seen. Regardless, comics as a medium of self-expression for girls would not exist today in any form without the prec- edent of prewar girls’ magazines and the genre-defining explosion of creativity in the 1970s.