Shōjo sensibility and the transnational imaginaryKorean writer Kim Il-yeop’s The Death of a Girl (Eoneu sonyeoui sa, 1920), published in New
Woman (Shinyeoja), also explores a girl’s suicide. Unlike Lishi’s Diary though, the focus of Kim’s
story is on women’s loyalty and chastity instead of romantic desire between two girls. It is com-
prised of two letters written by eighteen-year-old schoolgirl Myeong-suk that are discovered on
a train (Eom 2011, 158–159). In them, it is disclosed that an arranged marriage was proposed for
Myeong-suk. But upon news of that family’s desolate financial difficulties, Myeong-suk’s parents
decided to instead send her as a concubine to a rich family. Rather than following her parents’
decision, Myeong-suk terminates her life, her body found on the bridge over the Han River.
Whether the death of the protagonist is attributed to the same-sex love or not, in both Lishi’s
Diary and The Death of a Girl, what is revealed through peeking into the protagonists’ “private”
world through diary entries and letters, is the incompatibility between girls’ idealized purity
and adult heterosexual norms. Wendy Larson elaborates on a function that the diary and the
letter share as a literary device in modern women’s fiction: “since the diary is not published by
its writer, but only posthumously by a friend, it is doubly mediated: first as a private form of
writing, and second as that made public only through the agency of another” (1998, 155). Both
framing devices provide a means to reveal the shōjo interiority—the female subjectivity to be
initially hidden and then publicly shared—that eventually leads to the decision to end the shōjo
by death, further accentuating the purity of shōjo as an ephemeral existence, eternally threat-
ened by external pressures.
Illustrations that accompanied shōjo magazines augment and reinforce the sense of both the
exotic and the homosocial. Visual representation of the ideal shōjo were swiftly formed with the
popular illustrators such as Yumeji Takehisa (1884–1934) and Kashō Takabatake (1888–1966)
in the 1920s, whose drawings created the shōjo image of “empty, wandering gaze” (Takahashi
2008, 118). Jun’ichi Nakahara (1913–1983), who began his career as an illustrator in the 1930s
for the magazine Girls’ Friend (Shōjo no tomo), and whose drawing heavily influenced the post-
war shōjo manga aesthetics, found the Shōjo beauty in a slim, fragile body, with dreamy eyes and
a pensive look (Figure 11.2). As Dollase notes, “Shōjo [images] are created only to be admired
and gazed at by girls. They are so unrealistic that their nationality is blurred; they exist only as
Shōjo” (2003, 733). This foreignness becomes a significant constituent in shōjo’s self-imagining
that provides the symbol of the other (“neither me, nor here”), whom one differentiates from
as well as wishes to identify with.
As Deborah Shamoon notes, the dominant mode of these illustrations—“the lyrical, wistful
tone, the tendency toward sameness and patched pairs of girls, and the exaggeration of the eye,”
all of which provided the motifs for postwar shōjo manga to inherit—“was not only a tendency
toward inner reflection, but more important, an emphasis on homogender relations within a
private world of girls” (2012, 70). She further claims that the S relationship was premised on
what Jennifer Robertson calls, “same gender” relationships in which both girls display feminine
traits rather than forming a butch–femme couple (Shamoon 2012, 37; Robertson 1998, 68).
Illustrators such as Kashō, Kōji Fukiya, and Jun’ichi pair up schoolgirls with similar physiques
and appearance, providing the aesthetic unity between girls (Shamoon 2012, 66).
The recurring imageries and tropes employed in shōjo’s self-imagining delineated here, such
as those of the exotic/foreign, diary/letter, and death, point to the formation and dissemination
of the shōjo sensibility as a regional sensibility. The common discourses on shōjo and schoolgirls
in Japan, Korea, and China, signal the visibility of, as well as anxiety toward, girls as a modern
demographic group. More importantly, it also functions as a social and cultural ground for devel-
oping a shared sensibility in the East Asian region. Yet, it would be injurious to ignore the spec-
ificity of the writings, novellas and illustrations, including those that were briefly discussed here.
As previously mentioned, Korean writers and discourses emphasized the role of “schoolgirls”