faces and fashions are expressive and detailed, depictions of movement are awkward and unnatural.

She wants to chastely care for a gay man who needs her emotional support but will never trouble her with sexual advances.

she will no longer have anyone to accompany her to the toilet

It soon becomes clear that Ira is not merely charmingly eccentric, she is also mentally ill. Indeed, the story ends with her suffering a psychotic break.

gender switching, cross-dressing, science fiction, fantasy, and historical settings to imagine different lives for girls (Shamoon 2012, 102–5). “Boys’ love” also emerged in this period,

comfort in friendship

shōjo tastes

catering to girls’ tastes proved profitable.

The shōjo years end with adulthood, when a woman is expected to forgo her own pleasures and desires and become a wife and mother.

expressive of longing—longing for freedom within a strict patriarchy

“girls’ novels”

her Western education posed a real threat to male control of public and private life (Copeland 2006, 4; Patessio 2011, 68). Like a film star, she was both idolized and degraded.

With the coming of Westernization, modernization, and industrialization, there was for the first time a gap, a waiting period—for the middle and upper classes at least—between childhood and adulthood, when girls were sent off to school for a few years before marriage

both an innocent teen girl in a school uniform and a sexualized female character, both the fictional fighting girls of anime and the love-struck girls of shōjo manga

(d)

(a)

hikikomori

prolonged adolescence, with seemingly no clear endpoint for identity exploration while they are in school

inability to incorporate increased cultural variation

s, the younger generation in Japan has less support for identity development than the older generation, and they may no longer consider the older generation as role models and traditional customs as cultural norms to follow

are still taught more conventional cultural values by their parents, even though they no longer share those values with the older generation (Brinton, 2011). Thus, many adolescents struggle with paradoxical cultural demands:

society is not synchronized with youth’s emerging individualism but rather clings to the traditions of cultural homogeneity.

pursuing individuality (e.g., self‐determination) within a collectivistic society

typical, I mean adolescents who finished education, were financially independent, and had a child

a deep recession in the 1990s affected the younger generation distinctly

selfless devotion to the society, decreased from 42 to 9%, while the proportion of young Japanese who endorsed individualism, or enjoying one’s own private life,

Western countries.

Western

dolescence is a critical period of developing a clear and coher-ent sense of identity and finding one’s place in society

Western

trut down the streets with paint on my face

My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae    Will grow up to be a bad woman. That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

charity children

rough and untended and hungry weed grows

the back

front yard

here's the smell of sperm in my nostrils

Oh well, J guess I've made my decision, and there's no going back now

because I chink someday he'll be some­body. Whether he's a complete success or a complete failure, even if he ends up in the gutter, he'll drag himself back up, and he'll somehow manage to look cool doing it. Well, that's what f believe, anyway.

hat looks something like milk.

Ac this rate, I might even lose my virginity by the end of the summer, because I don't really know how to say no

They were my fingers, but they were totally out of control. I was bright red in the face. Totally embarrassing! Suddenly the whole si tu,1t1on sucked. \Ve've got nothing to talk about anyway. He's too much of a punk. It even says Br111g 11 011, asshole on his eel I phone strap.

How is it chat when the four of us are together, everything becomes such a big issue? If there were only two of us, we would probably just talk normally about scuff. I've decided chat if! talked about my life at home everyone would gee bored, so I never mention it.

It's a style chat doesn't go with fashionable clothes al all.

Men notice chat kind of girl first.

Mind you, I might be reading meaning into things, like ] was watc-h;ng some soap opera. And truthfully, I've never seen a seriously dramatic scene yet. Jc just feels like I'm going co sometime. I can't wait.

Well, we haven't ,lCtuallr tested whether we reallr do mesh. It wouldn't be right co just go off together, and anyway if we did, the group would break up.

dult men going out with middle-schoolgirls.

architect guy has his office

Could be she really isn't into love and chat kind of thing yet

In middle school, eighth gr;iders basically rule

if you found a job at some sleazy place in the city, you could probably earn that much in a nig

retards

's the season for eating simmered odm in hot soup, and steaming, fluffy meat dumplings

Being fourth in the group, this is her first time co get a guy.

"She told me I have a really handsome forehead."

"He's no genius. Why, he falls in love."

R's utterance "You don't understand yet" had wounded him deeply. At his age, nothing was stronger than feelings of inferiority about age

He was interested in the brevity of the poets' lives. Poets must dieyoung. Even a premature death was far off for one only fifteen; from thisarithmetical security the boy was able to consider premature death withoutfeeling troubled.

Without the slightest emotion he used words like "supplication," '1malediction," and "disdain'."

He knew, in his head, that a poem is brought forth from sadness, malediction, or despair, from the exact center of solitude. Yet for that to be the case with him, he would need a deeper interest in himself, some problem to tax himself with. Although he was convinced of his genius, he was curiously without interest in himself. He found the outside world more fascinating.

But his own ugliness 4 had hardly begun to bother him.

He began to address his seniors with a decided impudence.

<;;> -, -=-MISHIMA YUKIO The Boy Who Wrote Poetry The Japanese novelist, playwright, and essayist Mishima Yukio was born in 1925 in Tokyo as Hiraoka Kimitake (to follow the Japanese custom of putting family name before given name). Disguise permeates Mishima's work: His first great literary success was the autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask (1949). This followed his graduation at the top of his class from the Peers' School, his study of law at Tokyo University, and his short-lived job at the Ministry of Finance. Mishima also practiced kendo (fencing with bamboo swords) and karate, sang, modeled, acted in films, traveled, married (and stayed married), organized his OMI anny, and designed its uniforms, among other activities. "The Boy Who Wrote Poetry" has been described by Japanese liter­ature scholar Howard Hibbett as "a miniature portrait of the artist, an exception to his rule of keeping a strict separation between literature and life." In this story we can see the roots of Mishima's "rule of separation" and also of his dramatic ritual suicide (seppuku) in 1970. "The Boy Who Wrote Poetry" ("Shi o kaku shonen," 1954) was translated from the Japanese by Ian H. Levy. Poem after poem flowed with complete ease from his pen

also of his dramatic ritual suicide

His first great literary success was the autobiographical nove