who,
thanks to a black cat Luna and a special brooch, 
girl,
who can further be transformed into a "Super Sailor Moon" version
.
1) because shojo are not adults, they can perceive things that those in control of the society cannot;
2) because they are not young men, they can see things that those who will one day rule society cannot see; and
3) because they are no longer children, they are fully aware of who controls Japan.
In order to make some sense of shojo manga, it is necessary to first frame them within the larger context of manga in general and Japanese society as a whole; in the U.S. there is no counterpart whatsoever to this medium...In the U.S., comic books are stories of the super-powered brawling of muscular men in tights, and are read mostly by young boys and a small but dedicated following of adult men. Only a handful of women and girls read comic books, and a cursory examination of a representative sample of comic books reveals why this is the case: American comics are decidedly masculinist, despite the efforts of some artists and publishers to bring "women's lib" into the world of the X-Men (who are not all men), Batman, and all the other Something-Or-Another-Men. The fundamental premise of the American comic book--superheroes foiling the evil plans of supervillains by means of physical force--is hardly conducive to feminist revision, or even feminine revision.
Contrast this with Japan, where one-third of all publications are some form of manga; where the best selling manga magazine--which is far and away the best selling magazine of any kind in Japan--claims a circulation of over six million; where about a third of Japanese in their thirties, half of those in their twenties, and nearly seventy percent of those between sixteen and nineteen years of age say they like manga; where about forty percent of all Japanese sixteen or older read manga regularly; and where subject matter runs the gamut from history and science fiction to gourmet cooking and golf....What distinguishes shoujo manga from the popular shounen, or "boys'," genre of manga, is an emphasis on relationships over action. Even shoujo manga that take the form of science fiction, fantasy or historical pieces are primarily concerned with the complexities of interpersonal relations, romantic and otherwise.
One of the judges for the Kaien prize, senior novelist and critic Nakamura Shin’ichiro, said of Kitchen that
This is a work written on a theme, and with a sensibility, that the older generation of which I am a part could not have imagined. It is the product of an abandon completely indifferent to literary traditions. Its naïve rejection of the very question of whether it does or does not conform to conventional concepts is precisely what makes it strike me as a new sort of literature. (Mitsui and Washida 1989: 143)
Nakamura, while guarded in his praise, is nonetheless generous in thinking of Banana’s writing as ‘literature’, in Japanese more than English a high-cultural appellation. Others have wondered. She has been labeled the cutting edge of the new Japanese ‘minimalism’, ultimate in the sense that she is the perfect pop-cultural disposable (tsukaisute) author, like the manga comic books with which she is legitimately compared. The ‘rejection’ to which Nakamura refers includes the entire high-cultural pantheon: Banana’s debts, she tells us are to horror-novelist Stephen King and manga writer Iwadate Mariko.…
Critics, however, often view Banana and her success as final confirmation of a fundamental shift in how one is to understand ‘culture’ in Japan since the early 1970s, particularly ‘literary culture’. Nakamura’s bewildered and back-handed praise is one register of how Banana represents what older generations of writers have dreaded: the victory of the popular, which is to imply non-oppositional, culture over the critical potential long (if anxiously) associated with junbungaku, or ‘pure literature’. Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo, a prominent critic on the left for intellectual literature committed to social change, has bemoaned nearly two decades or irrelevancy of serious fiction for reading audiences in contemporary Japan. In the widely reprinted essay ‘A Novelists Lament’ that appeared on the eve of Banana’s debut, Oe complained that ‘Japanese intellectuals, including students at the major metropolitan universities, no longer look to serious literary writing for new models of the future’. What Oe means when he uses words such as ‘serious’ and ‘models’ are the discourses of his own New Left generation raised on Sartre, Mao and James Dean and committed to the romance of the artist as high-brow disaffected rebel. Banana and a host of other young writers today such as Tawara Machi, Murakami Haruki and Takahashi Gen’ichiro comprise in the words of pop musician Namba Hiroyuki the ‘pure literature of the manga generation’ in a reference to the comics that fairly dominate the print side of Japanese popular culture today and which raise the ire of many critics.
…Narratives spun out of speeding sound-bites, this postmodern textuality that Banana was both raised within and now reproduces in her own work cannot be countenanced as fully literary in the view of critics nostalgic for the times when writers believed themselves engaged in the work of a critical introspection that prepares consciousness for the prospect of social change. Banana’s stories, given their idiomatic kinship with billboards, television commercials, pop songs and fashion magazines, appear to those critics as unconditional capitulation to the forces of commercialization so often cited as the nefarious agent behind the production of popular culture, a charge familiar in the west since Theodor Adorno’s famous essay on the depressing predictability of Tin Pan Alley’s music.
The apparent victory of popular culture emblemized by Banana’s success, and with its unsettling postmodernist traits, have produced apprehensive fears among those intellectuals convinced of modernist high culture’s unique stake in issues of human freedom and individual worth. But Banana has clearly generated an enthusiastic response among readers who heretofore lacked a body of fiction with which to empathize, and those readers are not solely adolescent women. One of her critics—both male and nearly middle-aged—has written of his and his wife’s startling, exciting experience of identification with the vacuous (‘nani mo nai’) sense of life represented in Banana’s books. Her fans are reportedly attracted to her works because they are ‘easy to understand’, written in a style both colloquial and ‘real’.( 277-79)In Kitchen, for example, Mikage reflects upon the present moment and its radical dislocation from the past:
Sometimes I realize that I used to have a family, a real family, but over time it grew smaller and smaller, until now I'm the only one left. When I think of my life in those terms, everything seems unreal. Time has passed, as it always does, in these rooms where I've grown up, but everyone else is gone. What a shock.
It's just like science fiction. This vast, dark universe.
One might speculate that Banana's characters choose to assimilate their experience in terms of popular culture (e.g., 'science fiction') because their pasts are only available in the form of its artifacts. Unlike previous eras, when often only our iconography was taken from the every-day and transported into the legitimated higher cultures we thought our authentic home, we and Banana can now be said to live in the popular. (288)
. . .In an essay pointedly entitled 'Family' (Famirii) she reflects:
Usually the world is a terribly difficult place to be, and lots of times we end up living our lives apart from each other. That's why the family is a fort built for us to flee into. Inside that fort both men and women become symbols, and there protect the home. I like that fact. I really think it's necessary, even when it's hard.
This defensive concept of family, a response to the stresses of a modern life that demands the participation of each person in differentiated, specializded and scattered tasks, is one in which both genders become 'symbols', which presumably means we act out roles (such as 'mother' and 'father') that are certainly useful and expedient in 'protecting the home', but are not by any means necessarily determined or inevitable for 'men and women'. (292)
…It is not unusual to hear popular culture today identified with a kind of macro-nostalgia in which there is no space we authentically occupy, and so that culture tries to fill the gap by manufacturing images of both home and rootlessness. (Banana’s works are an obvious example, but so is Little House on the Prairie.) Yet as Banana’s remarks on the modern family would seem to imply, the attempt can fail due to its sheer eclecticism, for if we can so easily invent and re-invent our cultural representations of ‘home’, then in fact we have effectively eliminated the need for the institution in the first place. Perhaps family values, in Japan as well as the United States, become a national issue only once they are irretrievable. (305)
My spirits began to lift. I had done all I could.
I knew it: the glittering crystal of all the good times we'd had, which had been sleeping in the depths of memory, was awakening and would keep us going. Like a blast of fresh wind, the richly perfumed breath of those days returned to my soul...
Truly happy memories always live on, shining. Over time, one by one, they come back to life. (100)
And later she says:
"I came here from Izu by taxi. You see, Yuichi, how much I don't want to lose you..." (101)
The endless sea was shrouded in darkness. I could see the shadowy forms of gigantic, rugged crags against which the waves were crashing. While watching them, I felt a strange, sweet sadness. In the biting air I told myself, there will be so much pleasure, so much suffering. With or without Yuichi. (104)