That Thing Called Love:Identity Crisis

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Identity Crisis
Photograph by Jodi Cobb

Parting a crowd at a Tokyo subway station, a woman heads to the street dressed as a Victorian doll, a popular look for youth worried that love and happiness end at adulthood. On weekends dozens of similarly dressed women gather in Tokyo's Harajuku neighborhood, epicenter of this Lolita phenomenon, named for the precocious preteen heroine of Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 classic novel. The Lolitas usually say they're just having dress-up fun, but some observers see a deeper, darker motivation: The prospect of marrying and staying home as a bored housewife, the fate of many Japanese women, is scary enough to make some women cling to childhood and refuse to grow up.