Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1973) who lived with her partner Monma Chiyo for more than four

decades, is often known as "Japan's first lesbian author". Her early writing focuses largely on
female relationships within the space of the girls' school, as a space of homosocial freedom
outside the family (and wifely) sphere. Contemporary (male) critics charged her writing with
being narcissistic, overly sentimental, and unrealistic — in short, with manipulating the emotions
of her young readers for cash rather than creating art. Some more favorably disposed towards
her said that she should have been a poet, rather than a (very popular) fiction writer. However,
we can recognize today the breadth of influence Yoshiya's flowery sentimentalism (aided by
Nakahara Jun'ichi's limpid-eyed illustrations) has had on girls' culture generally and shōjo
manga in particular.

Her early collection of short stories, Hanamonogatari ("Flower tales"), published 1916-1924, was
particularly influential. Filled with unconsummated lesbian relationships, exotic European
(occasionally Chinese) aesthetics, and ornamental descriptions so lush as to border on the
ridiculous, the stories of Hanamonogatari shift over time from a celebration of the closed world
of girlhood to a fierce and impossible longing to cross the border from girlhood to womanhood
without giving up — a crossing that would be finally completed in her 1920 novel Yaneura no
nishojo ("Two virgins in the attic"). (Michiko Suzuki has written on Yoshiya's use of contemporary
sexological discourse to legitimate lesbian desire even for girls who "age out" into marriage in
Becoming Modern Women: Love & Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature & Culture.
For more on Yaneura no nishojo, see Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase.) For another story from
Hanamonogatari in English, see Sarah Frederick's translation of "Yellow Rose".

Though more recent critics have connected Yoshiya's closed and exclusionary world of the girls'
school (higher schooling was neither legally required nor free) to her later nationalist support of
Imperial Japan's Fifteen-Year War (and not without reason), the desire to get out into the wider
world is palpable in later Hanamonogatari stories such as "Pear Blossom".

A few further notes: Although the author Uno Chiyo always laid claim to being the first Japanese
woman to cut her hair short, Yoshiya was also an early adopter of the style, which marked its
wearer as scandalously "modern", unfeminine, or both. Arranged marriage was still the norm for
Japanese women at this time, although marriage and divorce were somewhat easier than they
would become — in other words, marriage and children were something of an inevitability
unless you took specific paths to avoid it. Although I've followed Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase in
playing with the potential plurality of "witch", I see the landscape of "Pear Blossom" as more
ephemeral than fragile and have translated accordingly. Finally, I have largely retained Yoshiya's
em dashes, ellipses, and line breaks, in order to preserve the sense of fragmentation and of
words that cannot be said.
Pear Blossom

Two girls climbing up an old tower — in the interior gloom —

They took precarious steps up the narrow stairs.

"███████"

The Prussian-blue sleeves of the girl ahead were tied with a long bright scarlet sash; the kimono
of the girl behind — a nightingale-brown, like a rusted nail — with a sash of down-feather white.
They both wore white tabi and grass sandals, with crimson sandal straps……

"It's dangerous. Should I hold your hand?" The girl in the red sash looked back down at her
companion.

"No, I'm alright." The girl in the white sash smiled at her.

"But so you don't fall…." Half smiling, the girl in the red sash held out her hand.

Such a beautiful hand, and arm, as white as ivory, but the heat of its pumping blood—

"It's alright, you won't fall."

The girl on the lower step shook her head slightly. The ends of the shining black hair that she
had cut short with no hesitation brushed against her collar.

"But—if—I shouldn't."

The slender fingers of that still-outstretched lovely hand grasped the hand of the girl in the white
sash.

It was the fading end of spring.

The lukewarm air — stagnating in the faint light that leaked through into the old tower. —The
two girls, a little warmed by their entwined fingers, held a tender, excited emotion in their hearts.

At last, they reached the top of the tower.

"It's taller than it looked from outside."

"Yes."

They stood side-by-side at the peeling once-vermilion railing.

The late spring setting sun now cast the tower's shadow at a long slanting angle.

The girl in the white sash raised a hand to shade her eyes.

"Look—the river……the river……" The girl in the red sash pointed, far into the obscure
distance……

Like a swarm of white clouds—

"……from the high rooftop / I climbed with you / the land of spring / its distant white river / and
the ringing morning bell……like a crystal song…….isn't it?......" The girl in the red sash recited,
as though in a trance……

The girl in the white sash burst out laughing.

"......No! You must be nearsighted……those are pear blossoms—there's a pear orchard over
there."

The girl in the red sash blushed, and laughed. "Well—"

"But……I'd like to be shortsighted too. I envy you: the faint eyesight paints wonderful visions."
Having said this, the girl in the white sash laughed again.

"The pear blossoms……aren't they beautiful……so white and hazy……" The girl in the red sash
stared at that distant crowd of flowers.

"Yes—but they look so ephemeral—as if before you even got close, they'd disappear," the girl in
white said—.

"Look—the moon—" exclaimed the girl in red.

"The moon—oh……the flowers are ephemeral, and the moon above them more fleeting
still……"

The girl in the white sash — she hummed quietly.

"And us……?"

"—I don't know……"

One year later.

Again the pear blossom season—

A single girl climbed the stairs of the old tower.

A nightingale-brown kimono and a white sash. —One half of the pair who had ascended a year
ago. She looked the same as she had that day—except for her thin and gaunt face. —Some
sorrow had assailed her—

Breathing heavily, she scaled the stairs. But of the gentle hand that had once guided her up,
there was no sign.

Of that day's warm excitement within the dim air of the tower, there was now only a faint chill.
—At last, she reached the tower's height.

The peeling red guardrail, faded by the weather, remained.

She approached the railing—she looked across to the pear flowers, like a wide spread of
billowing white clouds—. Just like the year before, —and the same late spring sunlight, which
she again raised an arm to shade her eyes against.

"Look……the river—the river……"

The young girl in the red sash who had spoken these words was already gone — she was no
longer on this earth.

"Look—the moon—"

She had called.

"The moon—oh……the flowers are fleeting, and the moon above them more fleeting still……"

"And us……?"

"—I don't know……"

The words they had spoken to each other on that day. A year later, the girl in the white sash
stood terribly alone on the tower's height. The pear flowers across that distance—and that same
dim evening moon……

She stood there staring, as if drawn by a magnet. Her eyes misted over—the shadows of last
year's pear blossoms—the faint face of her dead friend that welled up before her—the lightly
fluttering Prussian-blue sleeve—streaming back up towards the height of the tower—

"███████"

The girl on the tower had screamed.

She had screamed what must have been the other girl's name……

Across the dark gaping distance, the blue sleeve fluttered like the shadow of a flower, and the
white hand inside it flung up towards the tower, beckoning—

The red sash among the dim white flowers was as bright as a lantern flame……

"███████"

She screamed her friend's name for a second time—and the girl on the summit of the tower
nimbly, lightly—fell.

The wind tore her white sash loose, and it was lost to the air.

"The witch's tower,"

they called it, and sealed its doors forever.

—The incident had happened in the late spring dusk, during the flowering season of the pear
trees.

A girl had thrown herself madly from the top of the old tower.

"The witches' tower."

They feared it.

But what kind of spell could have driven the beautiful victims of this tower to lose their
lives—that, there was no way of knowing.

Fleeting pear blossoms

more so
the moon above—
Alas! And their
transience, sorrow
chasing a dead friend's phantom
diving too into the shade of those flowers
the girl on the tower.

The key to those locked and peeling vermilion doors still rusts in silence, and the pear flowers
even now catch the sky's light in the fading spring, and the moon in the dusk—how it—