The subject of this book is one that is baffling to outsiders, but visible on the streets of Tokyo, especially the more fashionable parts, and in fiction, dress and culture for young women. It began in the 19th century, as Deborah Shamoon very carefully explains.
The shojo are the focus of her attention. She says the word can best be rendered in English as "girls," ranging from "the modern girls (moga) of the 1920s to the gyaru (gals) of the 1990s." But the roots of their culture are found in social changes of the Meiji Era, when Japan embraced modernity and opened up to new ideas. One of these ideas, which came through literature in part, was the concept of ren'ai, or spiritual (romantic) love, which displaced the iro or sexual attraction (lust) of the Edo Period.
Together with this came new opportunities for education, delaying marriage among girls of the richer classes. How these girls were viewed is shown in the novels of the time — themselves a new, experimental genre. The author carefully analyzes and deconstructs these stories, to reveal the ambivalent ways in which young women were perceived. Described predominantly by male writers, they appeared as both newly fascinating objects of desire, and a terrible threat to the social fabric, depending on the writer's point of view.