Novels written on women-loving-women can be broadly grouped into three categories: ones about lesbians or bisexual women written by mainstream, heterosexual authors; ones whose characters are romantically and/or sexually interested in other women but do not identify as gay; and ones by out lesbian or bisexual women whose characters also identify as such (Summerhawk, Hughes ed. 2008). Itō Akari’s Namae mo yobenai (2015) can be classified as part of the second category.

Three of the characters appearing in the novel are perceivably queer: Ena – the main heroine, who struggles with haphephobia but finds happiness in a relationship with a woman, Ena’s best friend – the gender non-conforming Melissa, who works as a man but only wears gothic lolita clothes in their free time, and Ena’s lover – a woman in many ways devoted to her husband. None of them, however, identify themselves as LGBTQ+.

This is not unusual in literary works and media, especially regarding lesbians and bisexual women. Kuroiwa (2016) notes that while gay men appearing on the pages of mainstream novels quite often either identify themselves as gay or are called so by others, that is not the case for women-loving-women. At the same time, Japanese popular culture quite often employs a variation of the stereotypical ‘gay best friend’, the onee-kyara, whose characteristics do in part match Melissa’s.

The question I would like to pose in my paper is whether the lack of identities in Itō’s novel is unconscious stereotyping or is it a conscious choice that echoes the characters’ disorientation within a heteronormative society.