Foreigners coming to Japan from countries where manga culture is relatively undeveloped are inevitably struck by the incredible breadth of the great sea of Japanese manga, which claim even university students and intellectuals among their readers. But even those foreigners who recover from their initial astonishment to awaken to the pleasures of manga are often still puzzled by the genre of girls comics, or shojo manga. It seems that it is hard for foreigners to grasp the idea of a special genre of manga written for women readers, focusing on love stories, and executed in a unique style.

Broadly speaking, shojo manga share the following characteristics.

First, more than ninety percent of those who write and read shojo manga are women. Beginning in the late 1970s with the so-called "New Wave" works which I will discuss later, shojo manga acquired a certain number of male readers, but even so that readership has not expanded beyond a limited number of afficionados. Part of the reason why a special genre specifically for women has arisen can be found in the sheer vastness of the manga market as a whole. Another reason has to do with the fact that "girls culture" and "boys culture" have always occupied separate spheres in Japanese culture.

Second, the main themes of shojo manga include soap-opera dramas of mother-daughter relationships, stories of girls rising to stardom, and love stories. The narrative structure tends to be melodramatic and predictable, much in the same vein as soap-operas or Harlequin romances.

Third, the names, appearance, and situations of the characters in shojo manga are either imaginary or pseudo-Western in inspiration. Shojo manga are steeped in the Japanese fascination with the West dating back to the Meiji period--a characteristic which lends itself to the creation of a narrative space outside of everyday Japanese experience. The characters are drawn in highly exaggerated fashion, with enormous, sparkling eyes often occupying as much as one third of the face. Their hair is often blond and curly and their legs are long and extremely thin. They represent a kind of Japanese ideal of the Caucasian woman and for that reason often lack the high noses and ample breasts and hips of actual Caucasians.

Fourth, shojo manga have a unique set of semiotic codes. Unlike comics written for men, which advance in a linear fashion from one frame to the next, shojo manga employ an irregular narrative progression and make liberal use of modified frame shapes. There are frames without outlines, extremely long vertical or horizontal rectangles, portraits of the protagonists superimposed on top of several separate frames, and flowered patterns used as decorative backdrops behind the characters.

The use of images of characters superimposed over several frames and decorative backdrops is a style which dates back to the lyrical, stylish pictures popular in women's and fashion magazines since the prewar period. Shojo manga, however, are distinctive in that they have taken up this kind of expression to tell stories. In their world-famous sexological treatise Sexual Signatures: On Being a Man or a Woman, John Money and Patricia Tucker argued that male oriented pornography is characterized by direct depictions of the opposite sex, while pornography for women tends to route those depictions through the same sex. Something very similar might be argued for depictions of romantic love. In shojo manga, love stories are structured through the exaggeration and aestheticization of the protagonists who are the same sex as the readers.