Shōjo sensibility and the transnational imaginaryoutside of Japan, transporting shōjo readers to “a world they can only fantasize about inhabiting”
(Welker 2006, 842). In addition to Thomas’ Heart, set in Germany, The Rose of Versailles is set in
France, while Candy Candy (serialized in Nakayoshi, 1975–1979) unfolds against the backdrop
of the United States.
The homosocial relationships found in the modern era, had by the 1970s been replaced by
boys’ love (shônen ai). As a sub-genre of shōjo manga, boys’ love manga use boys as protagonists but
are specifically produced for, and consumed by the shōjo community. It inherited from modern
shōjo fiction both its exoticism and exploration of homosocial relationships. Thirteen-year-old
Thomas, who has fallen in love with his senior Julismole (Juli), commits suicide by jumping off
an overpass onto a railroad track in efforts to free Juli’s repressed homosocial desire. Juli suffers
from his guilt for causing the death of Thomas, yet refuses to acknowledge his feelings for him,
until the arrival of new transfer student, Erich, who resembles Thomas. Erich falls for Juli, who
ultimately realizes his own repressed feelings for Thomas. Juli decides to leave the school and
join a seminary in order to cherish his spiritual love for Thomas. Precedents of beautiful boys
can be found in both the cross-dressing tradition in the all-female theatre troupe Takarazuka
Revue (Robertson 1998) and shōjo manga gender bending conventions. Both Princess Knight
(Tezuka, 1953–1956) and The Rose of Versailles (Ikeda, 1972–1973) feature female protagonists,
Sapphire and Oscar, who are disguised as a boy and a man in order to be seen as the “proper”
heir to the throne and protect the country, respectively.
The shift from girls’ to boys’ school as the primary site for homosocial love, it is claimed,
provides the female manga artists with a means to both invigorate the shōjo manga genre and
push the boundaries for depicting eroticism (Shamoon 2012, 104). Boys’ love set in a bygone
Europe removes from the imagination of girl readers a need to be concerned with the unwanted
consequences of adolescent heterosexual love, such as pregnancy. Whether boys’ love manga is a
gender-neutral vessel for shōjo readers’ self-regarded imagination, or indeed helps to transgress
social norms and discover one’s sexual predilection is beyond the scope of this chapter. Yet the
homoeroticism and shōjo iconography shared between boys’ love manga and modern shōjo
fiction underline both the genealogy as well as transformation of shōjo culture. Shōjo could be
considered, as John Whittier Treat puts it, “their own gender, neither male nor female but rather
something importantly detached from the productive economy of heterosexual reproduction”
(1993, 364). Gender in shōjo culture can merely be a constellation of favorable and/or deplora-
ble traits that can be flexibly mapped onto either girls or boys.
The publication and broadcasting of Japanese shōjo manga and anime such as The Rose of
Versailles and Candy Candy helped to establish a regional inter-text or even an urtext within
South Korea. The pirated version of The Rose of Versailles was widely circulated among schoolgirls
(Park and Kim 2010, 146) and Candy Candy was dubbed in Korean and broadcast twice in South
Korea, in 1977 and 1983. Park In-ha claims that when South Korean comic book culture, which
had proliferated in the 1960s, died out due to increasing censorship from 1970 onward, Japanese
shōjo manga provided a bridge to the renaissance of Korean sunjeong manhwa in the 1980s.
The contemporary shōjo
The history of shōjo manga warrants more attention than this brief interlude provided, but will
now turn our attention to the parallels between the shōjo writings of the 1920s and its contem-
porary counterpart as exemplified by the writers Yoshimoto Banana in Japan and Guiyeoni in
South Korea. Yoshimoto Banana (born in 1964; Banana hereafter to be distinguished from her
father Yoshimoto Takaaki, who was an influential postwar intellectual) was a writer whose work
immediately appealed to readers with a shōjo sensibility. In 1988, Banana published her debut