Girl Reading Girl in Japan

Book excerpt: Girl Reading Girl provides the first overview of the cultural significance of girls and reading in modern and contemporary Japan with emphasis on the processes involved when girls read about other girls. The collection examines the reading practices of real life girls from differing social backgrounds throughout the twentieth century while a number of chapters also consider how fictional girls read attention is given to the diverse cultural representations of the girl, or shôjo, who are the objects of the reading desires of Japan’s real life and fictional girls. These representations appear in various genres, including prose fiction, such as Yoshiya Nobuko’s Flower Stories and Takemoto Nobara’s Kamikaze Girls, and manga, such as Yoshida Akimi’s The Cherry Orchard. This volume presents the work of pioneering women scholars in the field of girl studies including translations of a ground-breaking essay by Honda Masuko on reading girls and Kawasaki Kenko’s response to prejudicial masculine critiques of best-selling novelist, Yoshimoto Banana. Other topics range from the reception of Anne of Green Gables in Japan to girls who write and read male homoerotic narratives.