Abstract
“Is this friendship, or love, between two women?” asks the blurb of Hamano Sachi’s 2011 film Yuriko, dasuvidāniya (do svidaniya, good-bye).1 The two women in question are historical figures—the Russianist Yuasa Yoshiko (1896–1990) and the novelist Chūjō (Miyamoto) Yuriko (1899–1951).2 The line is from Yuriko’s diary entry dated May 29, 1924. The entry records that while Yoshiko, who was visiting Yuriko in Kaiseizan, Fukushima, was half asleep on a chair in the afternoon, Yuriko was seized by a sudden “impulse” to kiss her. Yoshiko, however, covered her head with a blanket. That night they talked into the early hours of the morning about “whether that impulse was Liebe or friendship.”3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Kurosawa Ariko, Ōfuku shokan Miyamoto Yuriko to Yuasa Yoshiko (Tokyo: Kanrin Shob ô, 2008), 14; italics indicate German and English words in the original Japanese text.
Yumiko Soeshima, “The Poetics of Gender, Class, and Sexuality in Miyamoto Yuriko’s Fiction” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2006 ), 2.
Iwabuchi Hiroko, Miyamoto Yuriko: Kazoku, seiji, soshite feminizumu (Tokyo: Kanrin Shobô, 1995), 205–6. This chapter was originally published as an article in 1991.
Anton Chekhov, Five plays, translation and introduction by Ronald Hingley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 237. I have modified “my dears” in Hingley’s translation here to reflect Yoshiko’s “ô, kawaii im ô to-tachi” (oh, my dear/sweet younger sisters).
James Welker, “Lilies of the Margin: Beautiful Boys and Queer Female Identities in Japan,” in Fran Martin, Peter A. Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue, eds., AsiapacifiQUEER: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities ( Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008 ).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2015 Ruth Barraclough, Heather Bowen-Struyk, and Paula Rabinowitz
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Aoyama, T. (2015). Yoshiko & Yuriko: Love, Texts, and Camaraderie. In: Barraclough, R., Bowen-Struyk, H., Rabinowitz, P. (eds) Red Love Across the Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137507037_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137507037_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57079-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-50703-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)