From Girls' Novels to Love Novels: Female Friendship in Yuikawa Kei's Sayonara, Insecurity and Sweetheart Nearby

Despite its marginal status in literary history, the genre of girls' novels has played a significant role in the development of Japanese popular literature. In this article, I demonstrate the thematic continuity between Cobalt girls' novels and popular literature for adults by examining representations of female homosociality in two novels by Yuikawa Kei: her girls' novel Sayonara, Insecurity (Sayonara, konpurekkusu, 1987) and her love novel Sweetheart Nearby (Katagoshi no koibito, 1999). I argue that both novels employ a model of female homosociality based on the exclusion of men and rejection of heterosexual love. In Sweetheart Nearby, Yuikawa expands this model to include a cluster of plot elements I call "lesbian panic defused," which signals the protagonists' heterosexual identity and serves as a foundation to the homosocial plot. I argue that the homoerotic tension between the female protagonists in Sweetheart Nearby links this novel to the tradition of passionate friendship in girls' novels and also queers the genre of love novels. Thus, Sweetheart Nearby expands the boundaries of the love novel genre (ren'ai shōsetsu) to include homosocial bonds.