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YOSHIYA NOBUKO (1896-1973), novelist, poet, and essayist, was one of the most successful and prolific Japanese writers of the twentieth century. As a popular author, Yoshiya enjoyed a broad readership; by the mid 1920s, she was a celebrity whose face was easily recognized on the street, and by the late 1930s, she had become one of the wealthiest people in Japan, earning an income several times that of ministers of state (Tanabe 1999, vol. 2, p. 111). The recent growth of interest in popular culture has contributed to the rediscovery of Yoshiya as an author who developed the genre of girls' fiction (shojo shosetsu) and brought a feminist perspective to the family romance in the genre of popular fiction (tsuzoku shosetsu). She has received most attention, however, as writer of female same-sex love (doseiai). Much of Yoshiya's fiction features girls and women who are strongly attached to each other, valuing above all else their love and sisterhood.1
Although Yoshiya herself was never "out" in the current sense, for 47 years she lived openly with her lifelong partner (and legal heir), Monma Chiyo. As a result, Yoshiya's stories of same-sex love are often simply considered an extension of her own life or just a non-Western example in the genre of lesbian literature. To fully appreciate the depth and complexity of Yoshiya's texts, however, it is crucial to recognize that they are constructed through an intricate negotiation with contemporary ideas about female same-sex love. Of particular significance is the way Yoshiya engages with ideas found in sexology, a field of scientific inquiry into the "truth about sex" (Frühstück 2003, p. 5), which was originally established during the 1900s in Germany and quickly spread to other parts of the world (Haeberle 1983). In Japan, sexology was a subject of academic and popular interest throughout the prewar period; the publication of various books and articles by both Western and Japanese sexologists contributed to a so-called sexology boom (Roden 1990, pp. 45-46; Furukawa 1994, 1995; Yoshikawa 1998b; Robertson 1999; Fruhstuck 2003).
Female same-sex desire and practice were important areas of sexological inquiry, part of its endeavor to understand the "truth" about modern female sexuality and identity. The major works of Western...