Jinhee Choiawaits her: marriage (Kim 2011, 108). The gender role projected onto Korean schoolgirls puts
them in a doubly marginalized social position—as both colonial and female subjects—and the
desire to defy such impositions is manifest through the transnational imagery evoked in the
letter to her beloved. The transnational imagery evident in Japanese shōjo writings and Korean
epistolary fiction can be understood as a sign of shōjo’s self-regarded imaginary. The imaginary
expansion, in fact, underscores the very real social limitations of shōjo.
Homoeroticism associated with shōjo culture can be seen as another symptom of adherence
to shōjo’s private world and imagined homogeneity within it. Often dubbed as “S relationship”
(esu kankei; S refers to sister), homosocial relationships were formed among girls in dormitories
at missionary schools. The discourses on homosocial relationships among girls flourished across
East Asia under the influence of the sexology advanced by both Japanese and Western writers
that was introduced in the region. “S relationship” was condoned as far as it did not present itself
as a threat to heterosexual normativity. Japanese sexologist and social activist Tokutarō Yasuda
(1898–1983) and psychoanalyst Kenji Ōtsuki (1891–1977), for instance, claimed that the same-
sex love among schoolgirls should be considered a form of adolescent “love play” (ren’ai yūgi) ,
or a transitory phase that one experiences prior to being engaged in a heterosexual relationship
(Pflugfelder 2005, 147; cited in Shamoon 2012, 36). Some Korean writers were openly remi-
niscent about same-sex relationships they engaged in while studying in Japan and viewed it as
“harmless” (Kim 2007, 155), although the increase in female double suicides reported in the
1930s raised social concerns for the perceived negative consequences of same-sex relationships
(Kim 2007, 169). The homoeroticism of shōjo culture was also carried into China during the
1920s and 1930s, as Chinese intellectuals were familiar with both Japanese and Western sexology
of adolescent same-sex relationships (Martin 2010, 39).
Homosocial relationships among girls constituted a major trope in shōjo narrative across East
Asia. In Japan, Yoshiya’s Two Girls in the Attic (1920) depicts the same-sex relationship between
girls who share a dorm room in the attic of the YWCA: Akiko, who is in a training program
to become a kindergarten teacher, and Miss Akitsu, who is older than Akiko and a student at
an advanced institution. They develop a romantic relationship and at the end decide to live
together as “adults” leaving the attic behind. The “attic,” claims Sarah Frederick “lies outside of
the Japanese family structure or other institutions (school, dormitory administration, church)
and is even not quite Japanese; this is what will permit Akiko to explore different options for liv-
ing as a young woman in the world” (2005, 71). Both the space and the homosocial relationship
of the two protagonists, provide an expanse to explore the transnational imaginary, in which one
could identify “beyond a narrowly Japanese girlhood and womanhood, opening up a cultural
world beyond boundaries of gender, sexuality, and nationality” (2005, 72).
Fran Martin, in her discussion of the homoerotic imagery manifest within contemporary
Chinese adolescent cultures, finds precedents going back to the Chinese schoolgirl romance
genre of the 1920s and 1930s. Influenced by Japanese shōjo writings, Chinese writers such
as Lu Yin, Ling Shuhua, and Ding Ling delineate same-sex love between female adoles-
cents as “a pure, sentimental, and spiritual bond” that contrasts with adult marital relations—
relationships that are represented as socially compulsory and emotionally stultifying (Martin
2010, 40). In Lu Yin’s Lishi’s Diary (Lishi de riji, 1923), same-sex love develops between two
girls—Lishi and Ruanqing, and the narrative begins with the discovery of Lishi’s diary. Despite
Ruanqing’s initial attempt to maintain her romantic relationship with Lishi, she succumbs to the
pressure put on her to marry a cousin and urges Lishi to recognize the difficulty and unfavorable
social perception of same-sex love. Lishi then dies, allegedly from a heart attack. However, Lishi’s
friend, who doubts this was the cause of her death, publishes Lishi’s diary to prove that Lishi died
out of her grief over the ill-fated love.