Yuri (genre)

Yuri, also known by the wasei-eigo construction girls' love, is a genre of Japanese media focusing on intimate relationships between female characters. While lesbianism is a commonly associated theme, the genre is also inclusive of works depicting emotional and spiritual relationships between women that are not necessarily romantic or sexual in nature. Yuri is most commonly associated with anime and manga, though the term has also been used to describe video games, light novels, and literature. Themes associated with yuri originate from Japanese lesbian fiction of the early twentieth century, notably the writings of Nobuko Yoshiya and literature in the Class S genre. Manga depicting female homoeroticism began to appear in the 1970s in the works of artists associated with the Year 24 Group, notably Ryoko Yamagishi and Riyoko Ikeda. The genre gained wider popularity beginning in the 1990s; the founding of Yuri Shimai in 2003 as the first manga magazine devoted exclusively to yuri, followed by its successor Comic Yuri Hime in 2005, led to the establishment of yuri as a discrete publishing genre and the creation of a yuri fan culture. As a genre, yuri does not inherently target a single gender demographic, unlike its male homoerotic counterparts yaoi (marketed towards a female audience) and gay manga (marketed towards a gay male audience). Although yuri originated as a genre targeted towards a female audience, yuri works have been produced that target a male audience, as in manga from Comic Yuri Himes male-targeted sister magazine Comic Yuri Hime S. The word yuri translates literally to "lily", and is a relatively common Japanese feminine name. White lilies have been used since the Romantic era of Japanese literature to symbolize beauty and purity in women, and are a de facto symbol of the yuri genre. In 1976, Bungaku Itō, editor of the gay men's magazine Barazoku, used the term yurizoku in reference to female readers of the magazine in a column of letters titled Yurizoku no Heya.