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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'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender, particularly the figure of theshōjo, plays a crucial role in the creation of heroes and the development of plots in Japanese popular texts. This paper focuses onThe Cat Returns(Neko no ongaeshi) (2002, dir. Morita Hiroyuki), one of the lesser-known films produced by Studio Ghibli. A socio-political reading and gender-sensitive analysis reveals that this film offers a deep and critical commentary on the gender order in contemporary Japan. Moreover, with its teenage girl protagonist Haru, it presents an exceptional case of ashōjo-centred anime that does not fit conventional genre characteristics. Through Haru’s refusal to become a wife in the Cat Kingdom the film criticises the expectation for young women to prioritise the pursuit of romantic relationships (ren’ai), and rejects the ideal of the Japanese housewife (shufu) as an existence of dependence in a semi-feudal social gender order. This paper views Haru’s coming-of-age story through major gender theories, and interprets the plot as a critique of what Ueno Chizuko and Nobuta Sayoko (2004) called the ‘Marriage Empire’ in Japan. We argue that the anime reflects shifting ideas on gender and at the same time presents an exceptional treatment of the need for young women to confront the social changes and gender role expectations of contemporary Japanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Japan the average age of first marriage continues to rise steadily, and people are spending a greater proportion of their adult life single. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of singles express desire to marry one day. The reasons for the rise in late and non-marriage are varied and complex, but difficulty in finding an appropriate or compatible partner has emerged as one of the key issues. Against this backdrop, thekonkatsu(‘marriage-partner hunting’) industry has emerged, ostensibly to assist singles to find marriage partners. In this paper, we examinekonkatsupopular literature, online matchmaking sites and the perceptions of single women andkonkatsuworkers to consider the ways that contemporary discourses of gender and marriage are reflected, (re)produced or challenged. The ‘male-breadwinner family’ model, based on the functional roles of ‘supportive wife’ and ‘provider husband’, is increasingly both undesirable and untenable for single Japanese women and men. However, values and norms pertaining to gender and marriage as portrayed in matchmaking sites and in somekonkatsuliterature remain remarkably unchanged. In this context, single women’s ambivalence towardskonkatsumay reflect both ambivalence to marriage as a goal per se, and uneasiness with the gendered roles in marriage purveyed bykonkatsudiscourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the changing definition of marriage for young women in Tokyo over the last 10 years. Based on fieldwork research conducted in Tokyo, I examine why women are delaying or refusing marriage, arguing that women’s decisions can best be understood in relation to work. I discuss how young women negotiate their conception of marriage by articulating their desires for self-realization, a career, and participation in society, within the context of a flexibilization of work and the transformation of family in contemporary Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]