Jinhee Choiwho transfers to an exclusive prep school where students have chauffeurs and can afford luxury
brands. Surrounded by and with the help of F4—a nickname and abbreviation for “flower four,”
consisting of four male students Tsukasa, Rui, Sōjirō, and Akira, who rule the school—Tsukushi
turns from a “mediocre” girl into a girl she had always aspired to be.
Boys Over Flowers, Le observes, “stands at the junction of this regional/national imaginary
as a text that is both transmedial and transnational in character” (2008, 24). She claims that
the consistent imaginary across the various adaptations of the series is the imaginary of “Asian
modern,” which is dramatized through the experience of girlhood (2008, 115). But as I hoped
to show in this chapter, the shōjo sensibility has originally been developed with recourse to
the transnational imaginary, and many narrative and stylistic tropes employed in shōjo writ-
ings and manga underscore the longevity of its sensibility and ideal representation. In the
series, the décor of Tsukasa’s mansion evokes the sense of the exotic, in addition to serving as
a symbol of his affluent family. The shōjo ideal in the series, Shizuka, who is a role model for
female protagonist Tsukushi, is a transnational figure; having previously worked as a model
in Tokyo, she gives up that career and moves to Paris, to pursue her dream of becoming an
international lawyer.
As both the title of the series and the nickname F4 indicate, it is masculine beauty that is
associated with flowers, a key shōjo iconography. Kukhee Choo relays, “it is not the female
characters, who exhibit and define what ladylike femininity should be. Rather, more often than
not, it is the male characters, who embody feminine physical traits such as pretty faces, slender
bodies, and the ... graceful mannerisms that place the female subject as inferior to the male”
(2008, 291). Yet, as discussed earlier, shōjo is flexible in its gender identification; in Boys Over
Flowers, various character traits—both feminine and masculine—are permutated among the four
male characters as well as across gender. At the beginning the female lead—Tsukushi—is unruly
and aggressively masculine, standing up for her childhood friend and a bullied classmate while
exerting her trademark high kick. And in fact, this attitude is what attracted the heart of the
male lead—Tsukasa—who finds tomboy Tsukushi similar to his sister. The femininity manifest
in male characters is what a shōjo desires to embody in herself, rather than merely reversing the
usual gender dynamic by turning the male into the object of the female gaze. Moreover, it is a
combination of a pair—Rui and his former girlfriend Shizuka (Figure 11.3)—who embody the
shōjo ideals of sophistication, understanding, sensitivity, gentleness, and kindness. The impossi-
ble romance between Rui and Tsukushi (due to Rui’s disavowal at the beginning of the series
and Tsukushi’s attraction towards Tsukasa later) signals the impossibility of embodying, yet still
acknowledging, the shōjo ideal.
This chapter has traced out the historical foundation, development, and transformation of
the shōjo culture across East Asia. Following on, the shōjo sensibility can be viewed as grounds
for a regionally shared, affective engagement with contemporary visual culture. Changes in
media policies, as well as new media distribution channels played a significant role in the
dissemination and subsequent consumption of shōjo culture and sensibility. Cultural products
are no longer distributed solely via terrestrial broadcast, but also through cable, satellite,
digital recordings, and the Internet. As a result, the shōjo sensibility discussed in this chapter,
demonstrates a viable theoretical framework supporting inter-Asian cultural media correla-
tions. This framework is complementary to previously developed models that have empha-
sized the imagined coevalness of production and of consumption across East Asia (Iwabuchi
2002, 85–120) and/or pan-Asian middle-class identity (Chua 2004, 216–218). In illuminating
the transnational imaginary and sentimentalism manifest in shōjo fiction, we get a more acute
picture of an inherited and evolving shōjo sensibility that helps to promote the inter-Asian
media flows.