Divine Right of the Girlboss Downline

When I was growing up in the late 2000s as what people call a “transfeminine” person, an identity that I would later start, and then stop, publicly claiming for reasons that I do not care to discuss, I watched an awful lot of bad anime. I watched plenty of good anime too, and as I wrote in my essay “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” I think a strong argument can be made that the medium, and especially its fandom, were better and healthier fifteen years ago than they are now. Even so, plenty of crap was being put out in the 2000s, some of which was uninteresting, stagey, quasipornographic schlock. There was plenty of stagey, quasipornographic schlock that was interesting, too—I still wholeheartedly enjoy Black Lagoon, and I’m told even Elfen Lied holds up if you watch it in the right frame of mind—but that is not what I want to discuss right now. What I want to discuss is a deliberately sedate, very conservative series, one that is shockingly long for how little happens in it and was shockingly popular for how niche one would expect its appeal to be. I speak of Maria-sama ga miteru, usually translated Maria Watches over Us, a hypnotically slow-paced and minute series about not-quite-lesbian not-quite-Catholic students at a posh girls’ high school. It aired in four seasons between 2004 and 2009, it adapted the first two-thirds or so of a serialized novel series with the same title that came out between 1998 and 2012, and I find little to say in its favor except that it commits to its offputting premise wholeheartedly and understands the characters and relationships that result exceptionally well.

            Maria-sama tells the story of Fukuzawa Yumi, a scholarship student at Lillian Girls’ Academy, a Catholic high school in a leafy suburb of Tokyo. Lillian has what is called the “sœur system,” an institutionalized mentorship organized into linear chains that take on romantic overtones sort of like the chain marriages in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. An older girl will offer a rosary necklace to an underclasswoman, and if the underclasswoman accepts she will become the older girl’s petite sœur (French for little sister). The maximum number of active members in a sœur lineage at any time is three, the number of years in the Japanese high school curriculum, but many alumnae maintain close friendships, and in a few cases more, with their former sœurs for their entire lives. The system has been going on for about a century—the school was founded in 1905 and the series appears to take place around or a hair before Y2K—and has implications for how Lillian is run since three sœur lines monopolize the Yamayurikai, a student government that appears to regulate most aspects of extracurricular life. In the first season of the show—the first few novels in the series—Yumi becomes the petite sœur of the beautiful, aloof, aristocratic, short-tempered Ogasawara Sachiko, who inducts her into the Yamayurikai. The series then develops Sachiko’s grande sœur (the phlegmatic Mizuno Yōko) and the members and associates of the other two Yamayurikai lineages. The overall structure is a bildungsroman in which Yumi learns to confidently wield social power within this system despite her relative humble class status and initially poor self-image.

            I generally take it on faith that other people find some or most elements of this premise offputting. I don’t, because it is a pitch-perfect throwback to a body of pop literature and ephemera that I have studied extensively and about which I am enthusiastic academically and professionally. This is the Japanese women’s and teen girls’ magazine and serialized novel literature of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, from roughly 1900 to 1960. Key figures in this milieu would include the artists Takehisa Yumeji and Nakahara Jun’ichi, the translator Muraoka Hanako (famous for her efforts to translate Anne of Green Gables into Japanese despite the wartime government’s denomination of it as “enemy literature”), and above all the writer Yoshiya Nobuko. Yoshiya, a more-or-less-out lesbian herself but one who attained wealth and fame by not shocking the establishment overmuch, specialized in writing about what in the West was called romantic friendship; much of her fiction about the subject is almost identical to Maria-sama in narrative focus, theme, and tone. (Stylistically Yoshiya was a bit bolder; she wrote in an excited way full of exclamation marks, Western loanwords, and nonstandard use of onomatopoeia and phonetic glossing, a style that most literary critics in Japan despised then and despise now. I have translated Yoshiya’s prose and she does not make it easy.)

            Anyone who has read George Orwell’s excellent essay “Boys’ Weeklies” should be able to imagine what this body of literature was like in a roughly accurate way. It had memorable but not particularly complex characters, an aesthetic and semiotic repertoire stressing stability and comfort, a preference for very sedate and low-stakes storytelling, and a tendency to provoke moral panic among the parents and grandparents of its readership whenever its messages seemed insufficiently oriented to social control. Part of what the Maria-sama series is interested in paying homage to is, thus, a defunct understanding of the world in which, as the Orwell essay puts it, “Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.” A quick overview of the main characters, and what their storylines seem to be intended to tell the audience, makes this clear.

            Each of the three Yamayurikai families gets a somewhat different set of plot emphases, although all of them ultimately support and comment on Yumi’s journey to maturity in one way or another. Yumi and Sachiko’s lineage, the Rosa chinensis lineage, gets plotlines dealing mostly with emotional self-regulation and, to an extent, class distinctions. The Rosa gigantea lineage, consisting of Satō Sei, Tōdō Shimako, and later in the series Nijō Noriko, is generally angstier and gets most of the storylines that deal with religion per se; the only point in the series at which Lillian’s Catholic identity is stressed over against other religions present in Japan is an episode that has Shimako and Noriko get outed as sharing an interest in Buddhism. (Shimako is from a Buddhist priestly family; Noriko has an autistic-seeming special interest in Buddhist statuary, an art form with which suburban and small-town Japan is positively teeming.) The Rosa foetida lineage, consisting of Torii Eriko, Hasekura Rei, and Shimazu Yoshino, live in a psychic universe somewhat closer to what most people probably think of as normal high school experience; they are concerned with sports, health problems, and learning how to delineate their sœur system commitments from other types of relationships. That the series treats all this as ultimately secondary compared to Yumi and Sachiko’s generally more refined and genteel worries is traditional for the genre and part of its generally conservative worldview.

            This brings us to one facet of Maria-sama ga miteru of which I took special note when I rewatched it with my roommate over the past year, which is the show’s peculiar political stance. It is—I am not going to mince words here—thoroughly extreme-right, but it represents the extreme right in a hypothetical world in which the center is the radical feminist commune from “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” This is reflected in its infamous (in some circles) paucity of actual lesbian relationships, although as I will discuss further on in this essay there are multiple major characters who do actually seem to be lesbians in the normal sense as well as in the sense of partaking in Lillian’s institutionalized situational sexuality. The fact that the situational sexuality is institutionalized is the main way in which the series touches on politics. It is not interested in usual Japanese rightist gripes like World War II apologia and support for the sexual double standard—quite the contrary; the narrative implicitly but quite strongly disfavors men, once they start actually showing up in the Maria-sama universe, which takes some time—but it is intensely interested in questions of political legitimacy. Its stance on those questions is close to unreconstructed divine-right royalism; the linear passage of membership in the Yamayurikai through the sœur system, which in this context operates much like the early Roman Emperors’ practice of adopting their intended successors, is presented as right, stable, morally and culturally appropriate, and more important than the wishes of the individual characters. Two plotlines have characters outside the three ruling sœur lines run for the Yamayurikai and get crushed; both characters are sympathetic but they are presented as having personal dysfunctions that impel them to run against the Leviathan’s chosen avatars. Shimako, the “insider” candidate in the first of these two plotlines, does not even want the position, but it is not up to her; she heads the body politic whether she likes it or not, and if she does not like it, she should not have accepted Sei’s rosary in the first place. All of which is to say that, in the show’s moral imagination, Lillian Girls’ Academy succeeds where the ancien régime failed, because it is small enough to enforce the succession through interpersonal relationships and because France had the misfortune of being ruled by people with cooties.

II.

One way in which Maria-sama “liberalizes” relative to its early-twentieth-century foremothers is in its diminished degree of interest in shunting its characters into adult heterosexual relationships. This is, to many tastes, damning with faint praise; I have close lesbian friends who find the series infuriating since it is indisputably beyond coy about the relationships between girls that it depicts. Even so, whereas quite a few of the stories in, for instance, the early Yoshiya anthology Hana monogatari end with girls getting up and “graduating” to heterosexuality (Yoshiya did not, of course, do this herself), or even focus to begin with on married adult women reminiscing on their girlhood loves, Maria-sama depicts those loves while they are happening and ends with most of them intact. To a somewhat lesser extent this is true even of the books, which cover more time and thus transition more of the characters into adult life but still show little interest in rushing to pair them up at the end. Yoshiya might have felt the need—or, to be fairer to her, might have been made to feel the need—to have Yumi meet a nice man and settle down at the end of the series, or in some kind of epilogue. Konno Oyuki, the woman who wrote the Maria-sama novels, does not do this.

            In fact, in one episode of the show’s fourth and final season, “The Sigh of the Red Rose,” Yumi has a remarkable conversation with Sachiko’s arranged fiancé Suguru, a gay man who does not love her. (The novels establish that Suguru is bisexual and simply happens not to love Sachiko in particular, but in the show he does seem to be gay.) The conversation is elliptical, and words like “gay” or “lesbian” are never used for Yumi herself, but Suguru makes it clear that he sees a commonality between Yumi and himself, a disposition towards love that they share and that many of the other characters seem on the surface to share but in fact do not. When she asks him what, ultimately, he is to her, he says that he is her dōshi, a word that means “comrade” in senses like brother in arms, kindred spirit, or extended family member. It does not take a quick spin through Psychopathia Sexualis to figure out what is happening here—although, conversely, the fact that the conversation is still allusive and euphemistic raises ultimately unanswered questions about how comfortable the series is with its own subject matter.

            The other example of overt homosexuality in this otherwise classically pseudo-gay series is better-known, comes earlier in the show, and raises that question even more dramatically and in a way that leaves even more unresolved because it is further removed from the core Yumi-Sachiko relationship. Sei, a major character in the first season who spends most of her time preparing for college and aggressively flirting with Yumi before becoming more peripheral once she graduates in the second season, gets called to the principal’s office for allegedly having written a pulpy novel called The Forest of Thorns. The Forest of Thorns is about a doomed lesbian affair at an all-girls’ Catholic high school that is obviously based on Lillian and writes in fervent, sometimes angry terms of the effect that one partner’s over-the-top piety had on the other when the former broke off the relationship. The teachers and principal suspect that Sei wrote this because the plot is very similar to an open-secret relationship that she had with a student named Shiori before meeting her eventual petite sœur Shimako. (Shiori is a common name for this type of character, for some reason; Revolutionary Girl Utena also has someone with that name who is dealing with internalized homophobia in a flaky, selfish, and destructive way.)

            It turns out that the actual author of The Forest of Thorns is someone else—an adult (indeed aging), very successful novelist who went to Lillian forty or fifty years prior and is still working through an experience there that was almost beat-for-the-beat the same as Sei’s experience with Shiori. This, again, raises questions about the sœur system and whether it masks significantly more dysfunctional homophobia-inflected dynamics between the girls at Lillian. The series, again, does not answer these questions. Instead the main effect of this storyline is to establish that Sei isn’t just a comedic slacker or a flippant sex pest but someone with actual reasons for her closeness to the much more sedate and thoughtful Shimako. They share an outsider status, Sei because she is gay in a more substantive sense than her schoolmates and Shimako because her father is a Buddhist priest and she knows little about Catholicism despite being interested in the religion. Sympathetic viewers might note that this is an affirming framing both of homosexuality and of interreligious contact, because Sei and Shimako are framed more approvingly than are the people who are suppressing or hassling them. Unsympathetic viewers, conversely, might note that representing Sei as a tragic eternal outsider is a treatment to which Shimako is not subjected; she is integrated into the Lillian community on mutually agreeable terms after a storyline in the second season dealing with her and Noriko’s shared Buddhist connections.

            What to make, then, of Maria-sama ga miteru’s enthusiastic reception at the time among audiences interested in lesbian anime, both in Japan and in the West? The simplest answer, at least as far as the West is concerned, is that lesbian anime of the 1990s and 2000s did not appeal to the same sorts of audiences as most other lesbian media; the anime fandom writ large already selected for weird, reticent, mildly asocial people who were often unlucky in love (I touch on this in “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” but it is not a primary concern of that essay), and people in that fandom who were interested in series with gay themes were no exception. As far as Japan is concerned, I think the throwback element goes some way towards explaining the appeal. An American TV series that deliberately aped the lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s would probably find a loyal audience pretty quickly as well.

III.

The Rosa foetida line—Eriko, Rei, and Yoshino—have storylines with perhaps a bit more distance from Maria-sama ga miteru’s political or sociosexual motifs. This is not because they are uninteresting characters, and indeed there is one exception to this: Eriko is the show’s only expressly heterosexual main character, who has a crush on an older man that is revealed early in the second season. (He handles it in a commendably age-appropriate way, especially for Japan, a country that has still not had a full-fledged #MeToo moment regarding adult-adolescent relationships.) She sees the sœur system in what is probably a significantly more “normal” way than the other Yamayurikai oligarchs do; to her it is a stylized and spiritualized mentorship system that is a fun part of her school’s culture but probably not one that will have much influence on her decisions as an adult. Other than this, the Rosa foetida mindset mostly revolves around less ideologized and less “sexy” but still very important subjects: Rei and Yoshino, who are cousins as well as sœurs, must learn to navigate and define different types of relationships, and Yoshino has health problems that for much of her life have given her peers an inaccurate understanding of her personality because they limit her physical activity level.

            The episodes early on that establish Yoshino and her issues are some of the funniest in the show. A strong argument can be made that, uniquely for Maria-sama episodes, they would be among the funnier episodes in plenty of higher-energy anime as well. Yoshino, apparently a shrinking violet who relies on the strong and sturdy kendo player Rei to protect her from the mean old world, is actually a violent or violent-adjacent spitfire who loves historical novels and gung-ho motivational proverbs. The only reason she does not publicly behave in ways that comport with this is that she has a heart condition, which turns out to be easily fixed via surgery. (I have a close family member who has been to the hospital in Japan; although it does not have health care that is comprehensively free at the point of use the way Britain does, it still isn’t expensive or difficult to navigate, and even if it were, almost all of these characters except for Yumi are filthy rich.) The other characters find out about this because the school newspaper, the Lillian Ledger, runs a series of personality quizzes and everyone assumes that Rei’s and Yoshino’s answers got flipped by mistake. The Lillian Ledger in Japanese is the Lillian Kawaraban, a name that implies that it is a rag but an old-school rag, since kawaraban is a term normally reserved for the fly-by-night block-printed broadsheets of the Edo period. Comedy gold on all counts. I know people who hate the series in general but still chuckle at these episodes.

            There’s some good intentional humor with Eriko too, in the episode that establishes that she is interested in men and has a crush on an older science teacher (at another school, not Lillian). She is an animal lover who often goes to the zoo to look at charismatic megafauna such as elephants, which is where she meets the man on whom she develops the crush. They fall to talking about the charismatic megafauna par excellence of Earth’s prehistory—dinosaurs, of course—and he compares her to Hypsilophodon, a comparison to which she responds with the immortal line “I have never been compared to a dinosaur before! I am very pleased!” This isn’t for the obvious reasons, such as Hypsilophodon being known for ferociousness or being “badass.” To the contrary, although older interpretations about the taxon have it as armored in much the same way as the Ankyolsaurus, Stegosaurus, or Triceratops, by the time that the Maria-sama books were being written newer studies had shown it to be a small, beaked, grazing, relatively docile biped. Someone like Yoshino would be flattered for the usual reasons by being compared to an Ankylosaur or a Stegosaur. Eriko is simply happy to see her interests shared and validated. It is cute and would be downright adorable were not the line itself, even in context, so silly-sounding.

            The Rosa foetida line, despite having plenty happening that is worth discussing, nevertheless interests me a little bit less than the other two Yamayurikai lineages. In part this is because the abbreviated third season, which consists of five direct-to-video episodes that are themselves longer than the other seasons’ thirteen half-hour television episodes apiece, is the show at its most narratively dynamic (relatively speaking) and has less focus on them than usual. Then again, the third season is itself less distinctive and less characteristic of this particular series, for the same reason. Things like a hectic school sports festival or a class trip to Italy (on which Shimako reconnects with the girl who ran against her in the first of the two political-legitimacy storylines, who is studying to be an opera singer) happen in plenty of other school-life anime. So I am, I will admit, giving the Rosa foetida girls short shrift because they happen to be out of focus when the series is at its most conventional. This is not their fault and I would want to have more to say about them if not for the circumstances in which I am writing this essay—right before Christmas, and with a great deal of other writing to get done.

            This essay is going to end up a good bit shorter than “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” was. This is both for the reasons that I just gave and because that essay attempted a series of personal reflections, and even some amount of materialist historical analysis, of an entire medium and its fan culture, whereas this one is about a particular, very atypical, and now relatively obscure series within that medium. I don’t think I would recommend Maria-sama to most people. I rewatched it with my housemate, someone who is uniquely predisposed towards it demographically (as a Catholic lesbian) and temperamentally (as a civil servant with that profession’s attendant tolerance for “boring” experiences), and even she and I could only take so much of it at a time and took about a year to get through the whole thing. Yet being able to “recommend” it is not, I think, really the point. Orwell would probably not have “recommended” most of the material he discusses in “Boys’ Weeklies” either (he quotes some of it within the essay itself and it is truly terrible, far worse stylistically than anything in Maria-sama or for that matter in the girls’ magazine culture contemporary to Orwell), but he still presents it as worth cultural and genre discussion. Maria-sama isn’t necessarily bad, just written in a deliberately dated-to-hyperconservative way; as Orwell might put it, it is the Magnet to schlockier late-2000s anime’s Wizard. Nothing in Maria-sama suggests sadism, direct appeal to viewers’ prurient tastes, or reactionary political concerns in the nationalistic way that is unfortunately so common in other anime. Lillian Girls’ Academy is the Chalet School of anime, minus the shilling for upper-middle-class heterosexual domesticity, and I for one think that one could do a lot worse than rule by the sœur system downline. Nec pluribus impar!