Not That Innocent: Yoshiya Nobuko’s Good Girls

Abstract

We might expect that a writer who was openly lesbian in 1920s Japan would automatically quality as a “bad girl.” Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973) in many senses questions such an assumption. She prolifically created novels for serialization in newspapers and women’s magazines from the 1910s to the 1970s, and throughout most of her writing life she lived with a female partner Monma Chiyo, and this became widely known. It would seem likely that her fiction would defy the gender norms of her time and extol bad girls of various sorts. Yet the female characters of her girls’ fiction and romance novels exhibit hyper-typical images of “good girl” femininity rather than subvert them, and critics frequently describe her writing style as flowery (bibunchō). On the surface at least, her descriptions of pure and clean girls and women hardly overturn stereotypes and ideals of girlishness or feminine virtue. However, Yoshiya’s celebration of ultra-feminine virtue and emotional intensity did work as a criticism of and resistance against gender norms and the family system during her lifetime, and her writings help to complicate our sense of what resistance or badness might be. In particular, Yoshiya used the flexibility of fiction to construct alternative gender expectations in a way that could appeal to a broad range of readers of various sexualities and genders.