Girl Reading Girl in Japan

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.

"This collection strikes a delicate balance between the feminist desire to re-evaluate the girl?s subversive reading/writing practices and a careful attentiveness to their historical and textual ambiguities. The innovative significance of this volume also lies in the way it opens up the scope of Japanese girl studies by placing the girl texts within the context not only of Japanese studies but also of feminist literary criticism and cultural studies. Reading such diverse manifestations of girl-ness ? even Dostoevsky?s anti-hero finds himself reincarnated as a girl-writer in contemporary Tokyo ? reinforces and enhances the idea that the attribute ?girl? is not restricted to its biological sense but can be assumed by any individual responsive to the paradoxical desire within her/himself to defy and at the same time to be desired by society. The reader of this volume, regardless of gender, age or nationality, is invited to add another layer of reading and participate in this intricate and irresistible practice of girl reading girl." - Mayako Murai, Kanagawa University; Asian Studies Review; March 2013 - volume 37, issue 1.

"This is a valuable resource... Summing Up: Recommended.  Lower- and upper-division undergraduates." - L. I. Winston, CHOICE (July 2010)