The Relationship Between Girls as the Relationship Between Japan and the West: A Study of Wasurenagusa by Yoshiya Nobuko

One of the themes that eclectic novelist, poet, essayist, and reporter Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973) explores most often in her extensive literary production is the love between girls and young women. In Wasurenagusa (Forget-Me-Not, 1932), a piece of shōjo shōsetsu, “girl literature,” Yoshiya creates the relationship between the two schoolgirl protagonists by using the imaginary of the transnational relations between Japan and the Western world. On the one hand, Yoshiya characterises Masako, the novel’s heroine, employing a rich web of associations with Japan. On the other hand, Yoshiya portrays Yōko, the story’s love interest-cum-villain, by creating a wide series of references to the West. More specifically, Yoshiya shapes Masako after the Japanese ideal of the modest girl who is preparing to become a “good wife and wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo) as evidenced by the self-less and harmonious connection she shares with her family, especially with her mother. On the opposite, Yoshiya constructs Yōko around the figures of the kōha and the furyō shōjo, the “rough girl” and the “delinquent girl” who lead a life that is hedonistic, self-centered, and self-fulfilling, which means, according to the work’s rhetoric, destructive for those around her, inspired by the individualistic values imported from the West. Through Masako and Yōko, Yoshiya weaves a story of positive and negative influences coming from the West to Japan and back. By closely analysing the novel’s original text alongside contemporary materials on the categories of ryōsai kenbo, kōha, and furyō shōjo to frame the work in its historical, cultural, and ideological context, the paper will examine through Masako and Yōko’s friendship/love/distrust the multilayered rapport tying Japan and the West that Yoshiya establishes between the lines.