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There is a common pattern in shoujo romance-dramas for the initial focus to be on the heroine and her issues but as the story progresses and these get resolved, to switch over to the hero and his issues, which are resolved in the series climax. Sometimes the balance is half and half, sometimes it tilts one way or another. A classic example is KareKano/His and Her Circumstances, which the author explicitly breaks into Miyazawa and Arima arcs. It's not a universal thing, of course, but the pattern is frequent enough to get noted.
As is that this sort of narrative shift happens markedly more often in shoujo (for teenage girls) than other demographics. I don't know how often this sort of flipping happens in josei romances (for young women), as I don't have enough data, but what I've seen suggests that more commonly, if it ends up being about the hero, it's about him from the start. Shounen (for teenage boys) tends to be all about the boys all the time, except when it's all about girls and What They Are Up To, while seinen (for young men) seems to start as it means to go on.
In the love poems of the Kokinshu, the shift goes the other direction: over the course of the generalized affair depicted in books 11-15, the initial love-longing poems are mostly from his point of view, the consummation and more or less happier parts are roughly equal his and hers, and the drifting apart and heartbreak are largely from her viewpoint. It is true that the Japanese to some extent inherited the trope of the lonely lady's lament from Chinese poetry, but that still doesn't explain all of it -- not when how the trope was expressed, not to mention all the other phases of the affair, came from native tradition.
What I can't tell is whether this arrangement is original to the editors (the way they first presented cherry blossoms as the premier spring flower), a general pattern for their time, or goes further back in history. I have a suspicion there's no evidence, given that as far as I know this is the earliest Japanese narrative of a complete love affair, as opposed to just snapshots in the form of single poems or an exchange.
Interesting to contemplate, though.
---L.
As is that this sort of narrative shift happens markedly more often in shoujo (for teenage girls) than other demographics. I don't know how often this sort of flipping happens in josei romances (for young women), as I don't have enough data, but what I've seen suggests that more commonly, if it ends up being about the hero, it's about him from the start. Shounen (for teenage boys) tends to be all about the boys all the time, except when it's all about girls and What They Are Up To, while seinen (for young men) seems to start as it means to go on.
In the love poems of the Kokinshu, the shift goes the other direction: over the course of the generalized affair depicted in books 11-15, the initial love-longing poems are mostly from his point of view, the consummation and more or less happier parts are roughly equal his and hers, and the drifting apart and heartbreak are largely from her viewpoint. It is true that the Japanese to some extent inherited the trope of the lonely lady's lament from Chinese poetry, but that still doesn't explain all of it -- not when how the trope was expressed, not to mention all the other phases of the affair, came from native tradition.
What I can't tell is whether this arrangement is original to the editors (the way they first presented cherry blossoms as the premier spring flower), a general pattern for their time, or goes further back in history. I have a suspicion there's no evidence, given that as far as I know this is the earliest Japanese narrative of a complete love affair, as opposed to just snapshots in the form of single poems or an exchange.
Interesting to contemplate, though.
---L.