Scholarly record

CHILDREN STORIES AND THEIR HEROINES AS THE REFLECTION OF THE JAPANESE MODERN SOCIETY

Aida Suleymenova

Abstract

The famous contemporary girl-oriented fiction, manga and anime production, the so-called culture of mini-komi (small informal communication networks) has their own origin - in mass media and Japanese literary works of the first part of the twentieth century. The tanka poet, writer and feminist leader Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) wrote some children stories whose heroines, little girls, differed from the mainstream of the young adult fiction. There are such stories like "One year from the life of Tamaki" ("Tamaki no ichinen", 1912), "The eight nights" ("Yottsu no yoru", 1914), "My childhood" ("Watashi no oitachi", 1915). Some of her works were published individually, some ones - in the serial form for girls- oriented magazines. The presented personages had attractive appearances to keep popularity among the audience, they were active and curious adventurers and their features were different from the stereotypical images of a placid, mild and complaisant Japanese maiden ("otome-san"). For example, it is worth rereading the kaleidoscopically changing galleries of girls in the book intermingled with Yosano Akiko's recollections on her childhood in the Sakai, the city near the contemporary Osaka (“My Childhood”). The paper deals with these images at the intersections of genres and interdisciplinary background of the image of the modern girl (literary, cultural and visual approaches to this image).

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