Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shōjo Manga by Jennifer S. Prough (review)

I am embarrassed to recall that long ago I used to read "Girls' Romance Comics." These were formulaic affairs usually involving a young woman being "rescued" from the loneliness of singlehood by some dashing young man who brought her the joys of marriage and a house in the suburbs. Although I did not find them terribly exciting, I still enjoyed the stories, at the very least as a means of avoiding homework. What I did not know at the time was that all these "Girls' Comics" were written by men who apparently felt that they knew what girls wanted to read, without asking the opinions of the readers themselves.

The contrast between this approach and the shōjo manga industry that Jennifer Prough informatively profiles in Straight from the Heart is enormous. Whereas 1960s American "Girls' Comics" were essentially unimaginative slice-of-life soap operas with a covert top-down patriarchal agenda, the world that Prough illuminates in her book is a rich and multi-faceted one in which readers, writers, and editors interact to create complex and evolving visions of young Japanese femininity. After two years of researching the shōjo manga in­dustry in Tokyo, Prough discovered that the phrase "what girls like" was a common discus­sion point in many of her conversations with editors and artists. Although it appears to be simple, this notion is actually "the glue that holds fast the structure of economics, creativ­ity, authenticity, and ideology within the shōjo manga industry" (p. 3), since it leads to an emphasis on intense and creative interaction between readers (the "girls") and the manga industry. Therefore, unlike the "Girls' Comics" produced in 1960s America, shōjo manga are predicated on reader opinions.

This emphasis on discovering what readers want also leads to the privileging of female artists/writers. Prough informs us that the early shōjo manga industry included such male superstars as Tezuka Osamu, whose groundbreaking "Ribon no kishi" ("Princess Knight") was one of the first in a long line of strong heroines with traditionally masculine-coded characteristics. Since that early period, however, female artists have come to almost exclu­sively dominate the field and, as Prough documents, some women have even managed to become editors, although male editors are still predominant. Even so, there is a clear rec­ognition that the ideal interpreter of "what girls like" is not a fifty-year-old male editor but young female artists who are "recent graduates from girlhood [and] can better intuit the fushigi (mysterious) things that girls like" (p. 4).

Supporting this notion of audience-oriented artistic productions, Prough sees ningen kankei (human relations) as the framework through which the artist-reader-editor dynamic operates, and she links this somewhat amorphous, hackneyed phrase to notions of intimacy and identity, which in turn lead to production and consumption. This focus impels her to emphasize editors and artists more than fans, giving us a thought-provoking entrée into a world that is highly stimulating and genuinely creative but at the same time is forced to be obsessively concerned with the bottom line.

Straight from the Heart follows a straightforward and largely chronological structure. The book begins with the development of the shōjo manga industry from the early postwar pe­riod, when manga in general began their ascent to the mainstream of Japanese popular culture, and ends with a brief epilogue portraying the contemporary manga industry (of 2009) and its attempts to grapple with competition from video games, cell phone novels, and other rivals for readers' attention. Along the way, Prough takes us through the fantasy worlds emblemized by the cross-dressing heroines in exotic and elaborate locations favored by Tezuka and by later female artists such as Ikeda Riyoko, to the increasingly open depic­tions of all kinds of sexuality beginning in the 1980s, to the recent...