Ambiguously queer: interrogating youth and queerness in Kyoto Animation’s adaptation of Sound! Euphonium

Found across a wide variety of genres, youth is a popular setting for media in Japan. Often focused on school club activities, narratives set during adolescence feature intense relationships between members of the same sex that toe the line between homoromantic and homosocial. The language used in the texts and by the creators often supports both readings, with the audience left to draw their own conclusions based on how they understand youth. While previous scholarship has looked at queerness in youth-focused texts, less has been written about how the association a text has with youth affects queer readings of the language of the texts. Through a textual and discourse analysis of the anime Sound! Euphonium (2015–2024), as well as published interviews with creators and online fan discussion about it, this article interrogates the relationship between queerness and youth in the Japanese media. I argue that youth has a normative effect in the Japanese media sphere, obfuscating the existence of queer readings by providing a normative explanation for even the queerest of language. I further suggest that Sound! Euphonium more widely reflects the ambiguity that pervades representations of queerness during female adolescence in the Japanese media.