Girl Reading Girl provides the first overview of the cultural significance of girls and reading in modern and contemporary Japan with emphasis on the processes involved when girls read about other girls. The collection examines the reading practices of real life girls from differing social backgrounds throughout the twentieth century while a number of chapters also consider how fictional girls read attention is given to the diverse cultural representations of the girl, or shôjo, who are the objects of the reading desires of Japan’s real life and fictional girls. These representations appear in various genres, including prose fiction, such as Yoshiya Nobuko’s Flower Stories and Takemoto Nobara’s Kamikaze Girls, and manga, such as Yoshida Akimi’s The Cherry Orchard. This volume presents the work of pioneering women scholars in the field of girl studies including translations of a ground-breaking essay by Honda Masuko on reading girls and Kawasaki Kenko’s response to prejudicial masculine critiques of best-selling novelist, Yoshimoto Banana. Other topics range from the reception of Anne of Green Gables in Japan to girls who write and read male homoerotic narratives.

DIVA study of the "modern" woman in Japan before World War II./div

An animator and author on dolls and Japanese popular culture describes her trip to Japan to visit the place where her favorite dolls are made and to see Kyoto and Tokyo, dress up in costumes, eat at theme restaurants, and shop.

Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? The authors in this volume propose shifts in our perceptions of bad girls by providing new ways to understand them through the case of Japan. By tracing the concept of the bad girl as a product of specific cultural assumptions and historical settings, Bad Girls of Japan maps new roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender. Bad Girls of Japan explores deviancy in richly diverse media: mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.

Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase examines the role that magazines have played in the creation and development of the concept of shōjo, the modern cultural identity of adolescent Japanese girls. Cloaking their ideas in the pages of girls' magazines, writers could effectively express their desires for freedom from and resistance against oppressive cultural conventions, and their shōjo characters' "immature" qualities and social marginality gave them the power to express their thoughts without worrying about the reaction of authorities. Dollase details the transformation of Japanese girls' fiction from the 1900s to the 1980s by discussing the adaptation of Western stories, including Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, in the Meiji period; the emergence of young female writers in the 1910s and the flourishing girls' fiction era of the 1920s and 1930s; the changes wrought by state interference during the war; and the new era of empowered postwar fiction. The book highlights seminal author Yoshiya Nobuko's dreamy fantasies and Kitagawa Chiyo's social realism, Morita Tama's autobiographical feminism, the contributions of Nobel Prize–winning author Kawabata Yasunari, and the humorous modern fiction of Himuro Saeko and Tanabe Seiko. Using girls' perspectives, these authors addressed social topics such as education, same-sex love, feminism, and socialism. The age of shōjo, which began at the turn of the twentieth century, continues to nurture new generations of writers and entice audiences beyond age, gender, and nationality.

A thousand years ago, a young Japanese girl embarked on a journey from deep in the countryside of eastern Japan to the capital. Forty years later, with the long account of that journey as a foundation, the mature woman skillfully created an autobiography that incorporates many moments of heightened awareness from her long life. Married at age thirty-three, she identified herself as a reader and writer more than as a wife and mother; enthralled by fiction, she bore witness to the dangers of romantic fantasy as well as the enduring consolation of self-expression. This reader’s edition streamlines Sonja Arntzen and Moriyuki Itō’s acclaimed translation of the Sarashina Diary for general readers and classroom use. This translation captures the lyrical richness of the original text while revealing its subtle structure and ironic meaning, highlighting the author’s deep concern for Buddhist belief and practice and the juxtaposition of poetic passages and narrative prose. The translators’ commentary offers insight into the author’s family and world, as well as the style, structure, and textual history of her work.

A book for comic lovers and Japanophiles of all ages, Diary of a Tokyo Teen presents a unique look at modern-day Japan through a young woman's eyes. Born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and an American father in 1997, Christine Mari Inzer spent her early years in Japan and relocated to the United States in 2003. The summer before she turned sixteen, she returned to Tokyo, making a solo journey to get reacquainted with her birthplace. Through illustrations, photos, and musings, Inzer documented her journey. In Diary of a Tokyo Teen, Inzer explores the cutting-edge fashions of Tokyo's trendy Harajuku district, eats the best sushi of her life at the renowned Tsukiji fish market, and hunts down geisha in the ancient city of Kyoto. As she shares the trials and pleasures of travel from one end of a trip to the other, Inzer introduces the host of interesting characters she meets and offers a unique--and often hilarious--look at a fascinating country and an engaging tale of one girl rediscovering her roots. **Listed as a 2016 Great Graphic Novel for Teens by the Young Adult Library Services Association**