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  • Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan by Deborah Shamoon
  • Noriko J. Horiguchi
Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan. By Deborah Shamoon. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012. 208 pages. Hardcover $60.00; softcover $27.00.

With Passionate Friendship, Deborah Shamoon presents a fascinating analysis of shōjo bunka (girls’ culture) in a range of discursive spaces that she characterizes as “private” (p. 4) and “protected” (p. 139)—spaces that include all-girls schools, the Takarazuka Revue, films, novels, magazines, and manga. Shamoon offers innovative readings of literary and visual texts and media with a focus on their aesthetics, [End Page 128] grammar, and themes in specific literary, social, and historical contexts. Her analysis extends to the desires of editors, artists, and readers and to the meanings and inter-textuality created within their interactive communities.

Shamoon points out discrepancies between English- and Japanese-language scholarship on shōjo bunka and problematizes what she perceives to be an imposition of contemporary gender politics on the historical and contemporary texts, the artists, and the readers that form girls’ culture in Japan. In response to Western scholars’ “misunderstandings” (p. 140) of the shōjo’s preference for stories involving homosociality and homoeroticism, she contends that these scholars often apply to the shōjo their own agenda of feminist/lesbian/queer theory, or, alternatively, the idea of repressed desire and identity. She also points out the tendency of English-language scholarship to portray the shōjo as rebels who reject heterosexual marriage and subvert the patriarchal family structure (pp. 7, 70–74).

Shamoon contends that the shōjo and their largely homosocial relationships are not about lesbian identity but about “a transitional state between the social roles of child and wife or mother” (p. 9) that is “normative” (p. 35) rather than subversive. Her readings of both young women’s discourse and Japanese scholarship demonstrate that female adolescents’ preference for narratives depicting homogender romance is deeply embedded in a long discursive tradition that has continued since the early twentieth century; moreover, both producers and consumers of shōjo bunka material view this preference as safe, pure, and innocent. Her understanding of shōjo’s homosocial relationships stands in opposition to the characterization of shōjo bunka eros as radical and subversive. Shamoon’s examination shows that depictions of homo-gender romance are a neutral and safe discursive space where gender differences are elided and confrontation with the Other, or with the dominant patriarchal discourse, is avoided, yet negotiation with the power dynamic of Japanese society remains possible. Although her overview of prior scholarship on shōjo bunka at times tends to draw a rigid line between “English-language” (or “Western”) and “Japanese-language” scholarship, Shamoon succeeds in explicating “competing discourses of empowerment and obedience that resist easy categorization as feminist or chauvinist, supportive or subversive of patriarchal structures” (p. 74).

Passionate Friendship is an important contribution that will appeal to scholars and students in Japanese studies, Japanese literature, gender studies, and cultural studies. Shamoon’s writing is accessible because she uses theory sparingly and devotes herself to close readings. The book is clear and engaging. Each chapter traces a chronological phase in the evolution of shōjo bunka and reinforces the main points of its argument with the generous use of illustrations and manga as supporting evidence.

The first chapter, “The Emergence of the Shōjo and the Discourse of Spiritual Love in Meiji Literature,” clarifies how literary developments in the Meiji period portrayed the shōjo, that is, the middle- and upper-class girl student, as “a symbolic representation of male desires and anxieties, on both a personal and a national level” (p. 14). By replacing the geisha and prostitutes of Edo gesaku literature, the shōjo thus imagined [End Page 129] became the new love interest in the modern novel promoted by Tsubouchi Shōyo. By the 1890s, the depiction of iro, or lust, and of codified courtship in the gesaku had been replaced by a focus on ren’ai, with its accompanying ideals of women’s chastity and intellectual companionship, in works emerging from the schools of Realism and Naturalism. Shamoon demonstrates that patriarchal...

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