#itsmorio

[itsmorio]

What the Lilies Remember

Photo by Sumit Kant on Unsplash

Once upon a time, before girls could kiss each other in daylight and still trend on Pixiv, there was Class S.

Sounds like a wholesome tea club that occasionally got emotional, right? That was the point. In early 20th-century Japan, emotional intensity between girls was fine so long as it ended before marriage. You could adore your best friend, write her poems, swear eternal devotion under the wisteria... just don’t stay too devoted once a man shows up.

Enter Yoshiya Nobuko, the mother of refined yearning. Her 1910s–1920s collection Hana Monogatari (Flower Tales, and no, not the sixth installment of Nishio Ishin's insanely popular series) basically invented the template: two schoolgirls, a secret friendship bordering on love, a farewell at graduation, and the tragic promise to never forget each other. Society applauded, safe in the knowledge that the girls would grow up, marry, and forget anyway. Nobuko, however, didn’t forget. She spent her life with her partner, Monma Chiyo, in what newspapers politely called a “friendship.” The closet had curtains back then.

The term Class S (for sisterhood or shoujo) was the euphemism that made all this possible: intense, spiritual, pure, temporary. The whole thing was a cultural hall pass for queer longing, valid only until graduation. The girls were allowed to feel, but not to last.

By the 1960s and 70s, the mood shifted. The postwar Year 24 Group looked at that fragile framework and decided it needed more melodrama and fewer rules. The Heart of Thomas and The Rose of Versailles turned repression into European tragedy: boys who looked like girls, girls who dressed as princes, love so aesthetic it almost passed for religion. Desire left the dormitory for the cathedral.

And somewhere in all this, the word yuri sprouted. Literally “lily,” it started as code in Japanese magazines, used to tag stories of women’s love and to contrast with bara (rose), the label for gay men’s content. The flowers were metaphors: lilies for feminine purity, roses for masculine passion. Both bloomed where they weren’t supposed to.

Then the 1990s arrived and subtlety died a fabulous death. Revolutionary Girl Utena exploded the genre with swords, roses, duels, and queerness that looked you dead in the eye. Utena wanted to be a prince but also wanted to burn the whole fairy-tale system down. It was the moment yuri stopped being about “innocent friendship” and started interrogating who gets to define innocence in the first place.

The 2000s and 2010s kept the revolution spinning. Maria-sama ga Miteru revived the Catholic school aesthetic with delicate guilt and hidden vows. Strawberry Panic! made melodrama a spectator sport. Citrus dragged yuri into soap-opera scandal, and Bloom Into You (personal favourite? yes please, thank you) stepped quietly into realism, asking what happens when someone simply doesn’t fit any label at all.

Then came Yuri is My Job! where the fantasy finally ate itself. It’s a story about girls pretending to love girls for customers who want to believe in purity, while real feelings creep in through the cracks. It’s performance art about the performance of affection, a mirror held up to a century of Japanese audiences who loved the aesthetic of yuri but got squeamish about its reality.

This is, at best, a surface-level walk through a field that scholars spend entire careers cultivating. There’s so much more: doujin culture, publishing politics, Western import cycles, fan lexicons, the slow evolution of censorship itself. But the broad arc remains the same. From Class S purity to café roleplay irony, yuri has always been Japan’s favorite controlled burn, how far can desire go before someone calls it a phase again?

And, since this is my blog, I’ll end with a shameless plug. While Slippery When Wet isn’t tehnically yuri, it is the dropout cousin who lights a cigarette at the reunion and laughs at the word “pure.” But it carries the same heartbeat that started in Yoshiya’s pages a hundred years ago: what if the feeling does not fade when it is supposed to?

That is what the lilies remember.

[itsmorio]

Lust as a Language

Photo by ayumi kubo on Unsplash

Tokyo hums at night. You start to forget how quiet silence can be anywhere else. The vending machines sigh, the trains grind through Kita Senju, and in Yurakucho, smoke from the yakitori stalls drifts under the tracks, carrying small talk that sounds a lot like flirting. The city doesn’t speak. It overhears.

Lust isn’t chaos. It’s communication. Every touch says something. Every pause asks for translation. You can hear it in a laugh that lands too softly, or in the way someone doesn’t pull away when the crowd gets close. It’s a conversation made of breath and timing. In Japanese, hoshii means I want but also I lack. Every confession starts from that gap.

In Golden Gai, the alleys are too narrow to pretend you’re not listening. The bars smell like grilled salt and someone else’s perfume. A hand passes a lighter, a shoulder brushes another, and suddenly everyone’s speaking the same language without realizing it. Lust doesn’t shout here. It lingers. It waits its turn.

Kita Senju has a slower pulse. The trains echo over rooftops, and the station lights turn the air a kind of tender gray. You catch people walking almost in step, just close enough to feel each other’s warmth but not enough to reach. That’s what longing sounds like when it behaves.

And Yurakucho... God, that place never decides what it wants to be. Half salaryman sorrow, half soft confession. Under those arches, you see it all. People pretending to wait for friends, checking their phones, not leaving. Desire hides in small talk that goes on too long, in the moment before someone finally says, anyway, I should go.

People think lust is sudden, like a switch. But it’s slow. It builds through repetition. Through eye contact that lasts a second too long. Through restraint that starts to ache. It’s not the act, it’s the air before it. The almost. The not yet.

When I write about it, I’m not writing about sex. I’m trying to catch the space between what we mean and what we actually say. That’s where it lives, the pulse under the conversation, the part of you that wants to be understood but not caught. Two people guessing at each other’s grammar until something clicks.

Lust isn’t a confession. It’s practice. You learn it by mistake, by guessing, by listening. There are no fluent speakers, only people trying to get it right for once.

And still, Tokyo hums. Golden Gai drips. Kita Senju breathes. Yurakucho exhales. The trains keep moving, and we keep speaking, hoping someone will finally understand what we mean.

[itsmorio]

Back again

It’s been a while, but I’m back.

In tumblr, I mean. Not Tokyo.

I left after the Great Change, when dashboards turned into purges and everyone packed up their neon for quieter corners of the internet. It felt like watching a favorite alley get bricked over. I stayed away for years, convinced the mood was gone. But here I am again, testing the water, half expecting ghosts to answer. The place feels different now, quieter, a little scarred, but still humming underneath. And I've started writing again. Maybe that’s enough reason to start posting again.

Tokyo didn’t end the way I imagined. I thought I’d come home fluent, balanced, maybe writing about tea and quiet temples. Instead I left half-fluent, broke, and still smelling faintly of yakitori smoke. Some cities don’t let go.

I was a grad student once. A good one, maybe. Then I started watching Tokyo instead of studying it. The hostess bars, the train stations, the neon corners where people build small worlds just to make it through the night. I stayed too long. Took too many notes. Never really stopped.

So yes. It’s Morio. Back again. A little older, a little more cynical, still writing about the ghosts that linger under convenience store lights.

Expect Tokyo nights, queer hearts, and stories that taste like smoke and nostalgia.

image source: Erik Eastmen (2017, unsplash license)