This chapter will examine three novels which feature adolescent girls (shōjo): Yoshiya Nobuko’s Yaneura no nishojo (Two Virgins in the Attic), Tanabe Seiko’s Watashi no Osaka hakkei (My Eight Views of Osaka), and Hayashi Mariko’s Budō ga me ni shimiru (Grapes Stinging My Eyes). The young protagonists are deeply influenced by girls’ magazine stories which present an idealized image of female adolescence. They dream about becoming shōjo like the ones depicted in the fantasy stories that captivate them. However, they eventually perceive that their own qualities are not adequately represented in the shōjo world. The protagonists abandon the world of shōjo, which spurs them to seek new aspirations. In these works, we can glimpse the source of the authors’ literary creativity as they filter their girlhood experiences through their imagination. The overarching idea that they present in these works is the power of fantasies beyond those prescribed by others.

Introduction

The shōjo, or adolescent girl, represents a transitional moment in a woman’s life course, a moment in between childhood innocence and adult responsibilities. The liminality of this period made it ripe for imagination and manipulation. For magazines targeting shōjo readers, the ambiguity of the age allowed for the creation of richly scripted fantasies largely susceptible to social conditions of the time. The three novels discussed here, written by three popular authors well supported by women readers, will be placed in the context of girls’ magazine culture, which continuously functioned as an apparatus to serve society by constructing girls who would answer the socio-political needs of each era. Regardless of the era in which the stories take place, the girl characters depicted by Yoshiya, Tanabe, and Hayashi are all resilient and search for new identities that are not bound by norms, majority opinions, and authority. Through these works, the authors assert that fantasy is power for adolescent girls: fantasy, however, should not be inherited from others, but should be cultivated independently

These three stories are laced with projections of the authors’ girlhood experiences. Examining these works about juveniles, we can trace how the authors arrived at the idealized female characters of their fiction for adults—Yoshiya’s housewives, united by a spirit of sisterhood, Tanabe’s liberated postwar women, and Hayashi’s stylish career women.