Also written: Hana no 24-nen Gumi, Magnificent 49ers
The generation of women shojo creators born around 1949 who transformed girls' manga in the 1970s. Filed under 9, the closing.
9The letters of this term total 54, a 9 — the number of endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles.
The Year 24 Group (花の24年組, Hana no Nijūyo-nen Gumi) is a loose label for women manga artists born around Shōwa 24, the year 1949, who rose to prominence in the early 1970s. It was never a formal collective; critics and fans grouped them together after the fact.
Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya and Yumiko Ōshima are at its core, and Riyoko Ikeda is often included. Until their generation, much shojo manga had been drawn by men; these were women making manga for girls about what they themselves wanted to read.
They brought psychological depth, literary structure and difficult subjects into girls' magazines: science fiction, European historical settings, death, sexuality and identity. Takemiya's Kaze to Ki no Uta and Hagio's The Heart of Thomas, both set in boys' schools, are the forerunners of the boys' love genre.
Much of what shojo manga became, its interiority, its page layouts built around emotion rather than action, and its willingness to be serious, traces to this generation.
Set against the Pythagorean table, the term totals 54. Reduced, that is 9. The weight sits in “Group”, which carries 32 on its own and reduces to 5.
The 9 governs endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles. The reference files it as a completion. It is a lens rather than a verdict, but it is a consistent one: the 9's sense of a cycle closing and something being released is the pressure under this entry.
Beneath the 9 sit two smaller figures: 6 in the vowels, 3 in the consonants. Responsibility underneath, expression on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The Closing asks one thing of everything on it: work out what survived the ending. The 9 sentimentalises. An ending is not automatically a meaning, and the reference tries not to pretend otherwise. The other entries that reduce to 9 are collected on The Closing.