Are you are the kind of person, like myself, who reads everything in a book? I begin with the beginning reading the introduction, any foreword and, if I’m diggin’ the book, read right through notes, glossaries and even acknowledgments. Well if you, like me, love to be nosy and see who the author thanks and what secret messages are in there, and you have picked up a copy of By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga, you will see among the people I thanked, Rachel Thorn, scholar, translator, and gentlewoman.
Rachel Thorn is one of the preeminent scholars of shoujo manga. While not all her work is available in English, you can find quite a lot of interesting essays on her blog (which still uses her deadname and is now some years out of date, so don’t be surprised.) Rachel is a professor of manga studies in Japan and is an old friend. SO, when I received an email with some commentary on By Your Side, I stared at the email nervously. Actually, no, I didn’t, because Rachel is a lovely human and made sure there was kind commentary in the subject line. ^_^ She did have some small changes to suggest and the name of a manga I hadn’t before heard that had a proto-Yuri story from before Shiroi Heya no Futari, the manga I tend to refer to as arguably the first Yuri manga.
Having now read her suggestion, I could recognize some early echoes of Yuri, so today we are talking about Secret Love, by Yashiro Masako. “Secret Love” is a one-short story in a collection of the same name that was published in 1978.
The story begins with a girl telling us that her first love was a beautiful girl. Atsushi-chan, our protagonist, is at school, painting Fuyuko. Atsushi has short dark hair and keeps to herself in the art room. Fuyuko is the star of the school, with many admirers. Because she is close to Fuyuko, the other girls do not care for Atsushi and avoid her. With her introverted nature, Atsushi is fine with that, but does not like the whispers she hears about how strange she is and how she is too close to Fuyuko. She also does not like to hear that Fuyuko may have a boyfriend. She spends a lot of time mooning over the feelings she has for Fuyuko for which she knows no name and has no outlet other than her painting.
One day Atsushi meets a young man on the street who tells her he’s trying to become a great photographer, He asks for her name but Atsushi tells him no and runs off. The next day when she’s painting, the guy comes to visit Fuyuko in the club room. Atsushi is livid that Makio has horned in or her time, but when he starts to snap her photo, she becomes hysterical, even threatening him with her palette knife, and collapses.
When Atsushi regains herself, Fuyuko apologizes, but it’s Atsushi who feels that she did wrong. She seeks out Makio and apologizes to him and he returns the favor, apologizing that her didn’t ask permission. Honestly…I loved this bit where everyone recognizes where they stepped out of line and hurt someone else, even if it was unintentional.
Fuyuko, clearly in love with Makio, asks Atsushi to take some Valentine’s Day chocolates to the photographer, but when he finds that they are not from Atsushi herself, he rejects them. Fuyuko becomes jealous of Makio’s interest in Atsushi and causes an accident in the chemistry lab that could have hurt Atsushi. Appalled at herself, Fuyuko runs away.
Atsushi and Makio track Fuyuko to the ocean, Makio goes in to save her, but he is too late. In the final panel, Atsushi tells us that, after the incident of Fuyuko’s death, Makio ran away to some other town and she has not spoken to him. But Fuyuko smiles, eternally beautiful, in the portrait Atsushi painted of her.
There are some obvious connectors to early Yuri here, the main one of which was that Atsushi’s feelings as a kind of pathological illness that cause her to react with hysteria and violence to Makio. Like so many other hysterical Yuri characters, her reaction could be understood as that of an abused child, reacting not just to Makio’s maleness, but to the idea of being photographed – even though we know that the mental instability here was specifically being tied to her feelings for Fuyuko. This story was also set in a all-girls school and Atsushi was boyish in the sense that she had short hair. More importantly, she also had a “dark” brooding, intensity to her feelings for Fuyuko. Fuyuko is the perfect cheerful lighter-haired partner with ribbons in her hair, thus making them a close fit for what would become the iconic Yuri couple.
The manga artist was best known for her Yoko Series (according JP wikipedia) which went for many volumes with “detailed depictions of everyday life, fresh eroticism, and a wide range of styles” and she influenced Moto Hagio and other artists.
The story looked and felt more like something from the 1960s, than the 1970s, with tight panels and dialogue and simple art. The whole thing felt very pre-Sexual Revolution/49ers in a way that Shiroi Heya no Futari, with it’s psychedelic backgrounds and hip clothes, does not.
Ratings:
How do I even rate this? It’s like a heavy dose of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening combined with a school girl drama. Mei from Citrus would feel right at home, though.
Art – 8 very of a specific style that speaks of the age just before the Magnificent 49ers
Story – 7 Full of unexplored trauma that in a modern manga would feel overblown
Characters – 7 One hopes that Atsushi was able to find herself and be happy, eventually. She’d be just a little older than me. ^_^
Service – 0
Yuri – 7 Unfulfilled longing and loss, a classic Yuri story
Overall – 7
As this is a one-chapter story and Shiroi Heya no Futari was published as a full volume (again, thank you Rachel,) I’ll stick with that one as my “first,” but… I agree that Secret Love is another important piece of our Yuri past. ^_^
