Table Of ContentYellow Rose
by Yoshiya Nobuko
Translated with an Introduction by Sarah Frederick
www.expandeditions.com
Originally published as “Kibara” (黄薔薇) in the magazine Girls’ Pictorial
(Shōjo gahō) from April to September, 1923
© 2016 Yoshiya Yukiko
English translation and
Translator’s Introduction © Sarah Frederick
Cover design by Kate Page-Lippsmeyer
Formatting by Polgarus Studio
Second Edition
Table of Contents
Note on the cover
Translator’s Introduction
Suggested Readings
“Yellow Rose”
I. Queer Bond Between Two Blossoms
II. A Flower Petal for a Bookmark
III. Sappho’s Pledge
IV. A Tearful Farewell at the Port
Notes
Author and Translator Biographies
Note on the cover
The cover illustration for this translation is by Takabatake Kashō (1888–
1966) and is titled “Rose Fantasie” (Bara no gensō). Takabatake was one of a
group of important woodblock print artists who built their careers in the girls’
magazine and illustration cultures that attended the rise of 1910s and 1920s
popular print culture. These artists included Fukiya Kōji, Katō Masao, and
the perhaps better-known Takehisa Yumeji; many of these illustrators used
styles popularized by the elegant and wildly detailed art nouveau ink
drawings of the Victorian-era British artist Aubrey Beardsley.
While the original illustrations for “Yellow Rose” were black and white
panels by Fukiya Kōji, Takabatake’s “Rose Fantasie” is similarly typical of
the era in its fusion of romantic and modernist design as a background for a
beautiful and thoughtful young woman. This style was tremendously popular
among Yoshiya Nobuko’s readership and, together with Yoshiya’s own
parallel skillful melding of contemporary youth vernacular yet ornate writing
style, very much defined the Japanese shōjo aesthetic. The thematic ties are
strong as well, with these artists often depicting an ideal girl who is as
cosmopolitan and confident as she is young and pure. (The original Fukiya
images include woodcut depictions of the two “Yellow Rose” protagonists
gazing at the shore and more abstract images such as a giant eye shedding a
tear, which is evocative of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration for Oscar Wilde’s
Salomé, and perhaps depicts the tears of Sappho, quoted in “Yellow Rose,” in
empathy with the characters.)
While we don’t see a romantic pairing here, they were a consistent motif
of Takabatake’s style in related shōjo works, which also highlight gender
ambiguities. “Rose Fantasie” is from a letter set, one of the many accessories
popular among readers of girls’ magazines, and perhaps of the sort used by
the protagonist to send poems to her friends in the epistolary scenes in the
story. My thanks to the Yayoi Museum and Takabatake Kashō Estate for
permission to use such a fitting image.
Translator’s Introduction
Girlhood days that won’t return
Flowers that blossomed in dreams
I send each and every one
To you lovely girls
Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973) thus offers a dedication to readers of an
early book version of her Flower Stories (Hana monogatari, 1916–1924).
This version came out in 1920, and she would add to it over time.1 Flower
Stories was her first major group of stories published for pay in a magazine
after many years as a reader-contributor.2 The long-running series of over
fifty stories launched her career as one of the most popular authors of
twentieth-century Japan. The collection cemented her place as a progenitor
and stylist of Japanese girls’ fiction (shōjo shōsetsu), writings for and about
the girl or shōjo.
Consumers of contemporary shōjo culture will find much that is familiar
in Yoshiya’s Flower Stories, including the emotionally charged relationships
among girls, the prevalence of flowers (especially roses!), and the school and
dormitory settings. These settings evoke a time when girls were under the
supervision neither of father figures nor husbands, a time elongated by the
expansion of women’s education in Yoshiya’s lifetime and expressed on the
pages of the increasing number of girls’ magazines. Flower Stories was itself
influenced by a combination of early twentieth-century girls’ magazines and
authors. Writers such as Frances Hodsgon Burnett (especially The Little
Princess) and Louisa May Alcott (including Little Women and others) had
been translated into Japanese at this time.3 Flower Stories and others of its
genre drew on these styles to describe an intensely emotional, often beautiful
and erotic world for adolescent girls. The suggested readings below have
been chosen to provide greater detail about the complexity of this history, and
I will make only some brief comments for this introduction.
Although fitting the label “short story,” “Yellow Rose” was published in
brief serialized segments from April to September of 1923 in the magazine
Girls’ Pictorial (Shōjo gahō), where most of the Flower Stories appeared.4
Such magazines that aimed at the rising number of girl students and readers
flourished in the early 1920s, and the pages of Girls’ Pictorial swell with
stories, letters, and poems that emphasize what they often label shōjo
romansu (girls’ romance). These letters established emotional connections
among girls, some of whom might share schools or regions, including not
only areas of the islands of Japan, but also colonial and expatriate spaces
around Asia and beyond. Many never met one another, but expressed their
passions and affections on the pages of the magazine.
Yoshiya’s own early life was profoundly shaped by the girls’ magazines
for which she would eventually write. She recalls receiving her first issue of
Girls’ World (Shōjo sekai): “I was so happy because my older brothers had a
subscription to a magazine called Boys’ World (Shōnen sekai), and I would
have to steal it to read whenever they left it unread on a desk. I remember
being so happy when I could finally read the girls’ version and have it all to
myself. Whenever Girls’ World was delivered from the bookstore, I would
spread it out in my hands and savor every corner of it. Taking great care not
to get it the slightest bit dirty, I would neatly pile each issue on my desk and
enjoy the way the stack grew higher and higher.”5 As the stack grew higher,
she joined in and began to enter the magazines poetry and story contests.
Such contributions were central to these magazines: reader submissions from
young women like her made up ten to thirty percent of the pages. When she
began to publish this new work that received royalties, the narrative style of
Flower Stories continued to highlight the image of an all-girl world imagined
and sustained by this publication venue, with each story told by what seems
to be a female narrator who introduces yet another girl or pair of girls on
whom the story focuses.
Another important aspect of these publications was their illustrations.
These magazines helped to form and enable the development of commercial
art and illustration communities, groups that influenced and helped shape the
burgeoning manga industry that would come. Girls’ culture also helped
inspire and promote the creation of the Takarazuka theatre, still alive today,
in which all roles are played by young women. In the 1920s, stories of the
Takarazuka and its actresses appeared in the same girls' magazine as “Yellow
Rose.” The line of influence between the girls’ magazine culture of Yoshiya’s
time and girls’ manga passed through the personhood of manga great Tezuka
Osamu. Tezuka was the author of the manga (and later anime) Astro Boy and
himself a Takarazuka fan who brought the girls' aesthetic to works to a wider
audience, readers who pored over the visuals with great attention. The
wistful, intelligent look of the girls in these girls’ magazine illustrations has
remained a direct influence on the style of girls’ manga, from the work of
Takahashi Makoto onward, and it is not at all surprising to see Flower Stories
reappear in a new manga version in 2014.6 Yoshiya’s storylines, themes, and
writing style are likely an influence on girls’ manga artists more generally.
One simple example is the 1977 Anthology of Flower Poems (Hana shishū),
whose structure is nearly identical to Flower Stories with a flower as a title
for each installment.7 With a resurgence of interest in Yoshiya’s work in the
early twenty-first century, the influence has only expanded further.8
“Yellow Rose” begins as the protagonist Katsuragi Misao is graduating
from what appears to be the Tsuda English Language Academy (now Tsuda
College) in Tokyo, and heading off to be an English teacher at an unnamed
country town, her goal to avoid getting married. Onto the same train boards a
beautiful young woman who carries an armful of the eponymous yellow
roses; she turns out to be one Urakami Reiko, a pupil in her final year at the
school where Katsuragi will teach. The two are brought together once again
by a train during a field trip, when coal soot enters Urakami’s eye and
Katsuragi supervises her treatment at a mountainside clinic. The two spend
time together by the sea on summer vacation. After sharing the story of
Sappho, they make plans to return to Tokyo and perhaps study abroad in
America together, but these plans are thwarted by the demands of an arranged
marriage for Urakami. Eventually Katsuragi sets sail to study in America
alone, though it seems that distance will never heal her loss of love, as
expressed in the message she types at her job in a basement office in
Colorado, a line from William Butler Yeats: “For my dreams of your image
that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.”
“Yellow Rose” is from the midpoint of the Flower Stories series, and
contains many typical elements, particularly the intense relationship between
the two young women and the sad ending (fan letters about Flower Stories
almost without exception mention the buckets of tears shed while reading).
At the same time, the story digs with particular depth into the possibility of
the two women staying together more permanently, even if that possibility is
cut off tragically in the end. One obstacle to Yoshiya Nobuko’s entry in the
Japanese high literature canon has been her flowery style and apparent
excesses in her writing, but this story is one missing link in the source for
these styles in modernist literature. In my translation I have attempted to
maintain aspects of this style as well as the precocious speech of Katsuragi,
something that seems to have held an emotional and aspirational appeal for
young women readers of Yoshiya’s works.
The story is structured around dramatic moments of coincidence and
chance encounters. In reading the story, it is worth focusing on how it
deploys moments of meeting, haste, surprise, and ellipsis. As James Fujii and
Alisa Freedman have shown in various ways, meeting on the train was a
literary trope of the early twentieth century, and this story is another that
dramatizes the potential for chance encounters and intensification of space
and time made possible by train travel. These are exploited to bring the two
young women together, even as they only highlight the anxieties of
separation.9 The two train rides are pivotal moments in “Yellow Rose,”
providing the girls the first glimpse of each other and then, later, the occasion
for them to be alone together for the first time. If Urakami had missed the
first train, their relationship would not have happened; the near miss is
precisely what draws the attention of Katsuragi and the reader to the lovely
girl running to catch the train, her armful of quavering yellow flower
blossoms and her heart pounding. Applying the “pressure” on characters that
Peter Brooks associates with the melodramatic mode, they also almost miss
one another; Urakami is almost “too late,” in the timing that Linda Williams
has identified as the stuff of melodrama. The two see each other because they
are on the same train and because they almost are not.10
Commuting became an important mode of train meetings in Japanese
literature, especially after the 1923 Kantō Earthquake, on the eve of which
this story finished its serialization, reflecting their rising importance in
urbanites’ daily lives. But even the earlier influence of long-distance trains on
the lives of young women cannot be underestimated. Young women moved
to Tokyo in great numbers at this time, to work, study, or aspire to writing
professionally, and trains were crucial to that movement. For Yoshiya herself,
it was the train that allowed her to move away from Tochigi Prefecture to
Tokyo. This freed her from helping with housework at her parents’ house in
the countryside. It was in Tokyo that she could network with the writers in
the city and other young unmarried women, perhaps finding models for the
characters in this story.
One much-quoted passage from this story comes from the paragraph
where Katsuragi Misao consents to Urakami Reiko’s parents’ request that she
help convince Reiko to get married (though Katsuragi’s plea to Urakami
itself is elided):
She had a whole array of arguments why it was not a good idea for
parents to decide whom their children married. But now, standing
before these particular parents, none of those arguments seemed the
least bit convincing. Nor did it help that she was all too conscious
of the fact that Reiko’s refusal to marry was based on nothing other
than her own excessive love for the girl. What paltry support that
was for one who was trying to make a shield of their love and
boldly show it to the world! So it is that the sadness of those who
love their own sex and therefore cannot live their lives in the form
of a conventional marriage is redoubled by the chagrin of parents—
for whom marriage represents the sole pinnacle of womanly
achievement—and the opprobrium and scorn of everyone else.
Miss Katsuragi lost track of any way to uphold her own position—
and so she made her decision.
This scene is quite difficult for the translator as it expresses a moment when
Katsuragi’s logical, philosophical nature and resolve fail her—she does not
know what argument to use, what social structure into which to place her
relationship, as it is not possible, “being of the same sex,” for it to exist “in
the form of a conventional marriage” (sejō no kekkon no kata).11 While from
a contemporary or American perspective one might think that the mother
would mind the thickness of her daughter’s friendship with her high school
teacher, this is utterly uncontroversial and the mother values that “worship”
herself. Rather than anything to do with their sexuality or desires, it is the
family structure and expectations of marriage that put the mother in a bind
(and the mother’s own request is tellingly quite fragmented as well). The
same confusion Katsuragi displays in this paragraph pervades the whole
story. She continually seeks an architecture of and space for thought that
might fit her feelings and desires, something that might offer more than
“paltry support” of their endeavor.
Yoshiya’s Two Virgins in an Attic (Yaneura no nishojo) of a couple of
years earlier uses more explicitly architectural imagery for the girl who
becomes an adult and must move her theory of love into social spaces:
