Banana Yoshimoto is often classified as a purveyor of “shojo culture,” a term that may not be familiar to most readers. We will look at what this term means, which will provide greater context for Yoshimoto’s works and greater insights into Kitchen.
The term shojo means “girl,” but in the context of contemporary culture, it is specifically about a cultural space that is girls-only, a space in which, scholar Emily Jane Wakeling writes, “girls negate and make complex the dominant gender stereotypes that exist in contemporary Japanese society through creations of gender that transgress hegemony.”
In 1899, the Meiji government’s Girls’ Higher School Order initiated a wave of new girls’ schools; concomitantly, literacy rates rose. Publications targeting young women also proliferated, and thus both the school environment and the literary world became spaces for constructing girlhood. The quintessential shojo was feminine and youthful, but she was neither docile, nor meek, nor pure, nor innocent; rather, she was a young woman, not quite at adult femininity, whose life was characterized by freedom and a dearth of strong male authority. A shojo adherent tried to define her own life, eschewed worry over the reaction of authorities, and resisted archaic social conventions. Shojo art and literature embraced romance, including same-sex romance, and concerned itself with education, governmental power, and the post-WWII economy.
Critics saw the shojo as infantile, selfish, or representative of an exotic “Western” life characterized by decadence and consumption—but those are reductive, often condescending, views. Wakeling explains, “within the girl-only community, manga, fashion, and other creative outlets often provide shojo participants with the expressive agency to say, ‘No’. As argued previously, shojo culture may have been created by the patriarchal system in pre-war Japan, but it ended up paradoxically being a space that barred the patriarchy to make a subversive culture of ‘aesthetic and sexual magic’.”
The shojo motif can be seen in numerous areas of modern Japanese life. Manga is perhaps one of the most salient, as Nicolle Lamerichs explains: “Shojo manga are unique. Unlike comics for boys, they do not focus on fighting, power, or ambition, but can be understood more as coming-of-age stories. Shojo manga emphasize romance and being in the world, and favor social relationships. Even when these stories are set in fantasy worlds, or involve superheroes or magical girls, love remains a common theme.”
