Shōjo Sexuality in Post-War Japan: Parody and Subversion in Kurahashi Yumiko’s Divine Maiden

Abstract

Love, sex and marriage are recurrent themes in Kurahashi Yumiko’s literature, especially in her early works. In the novel Divine maiden (1965) she approached those topics from a different perspective, through the form of shōjo shōsetsu (girl’s fiction): she even went so far as to define Divine maiden as ‘the last shōjo shōsetsu’. The protagonist of this novel is a young girl, Miki: the story revolves around Miki’s incestuous relationship with her father, as it is depicted in her three diaries, read by a male narrator. Even though incest is a recurrent theme in Kurahashi’s work, it has been pointed out that the incestuous relationship between father and daughter could be considered shōjo shōsetsu’s grand finale. However, not much attention has been paid to the relationship between Divine maiden and shōjo shōsetsu as a literary genre; moreover, the meaning of love, sex and marriage in the novel has been left unexplored. This paper aims to analyse the girl’s sexuality depicted in Divine maiden in the context of post-war Japan’s junketsu kyōiku (‘purity education’); through an analysis of Miki’s diaries, I will explore the way Kurahashi has parodied the concept of ‘democracy’ in relation to the ideal of ‘pure love’.