I read Nobuko Yoshiya's Yellow Rose. Certainly worth reading if you're interested in yuri history and an enjoyable story on its own.

I kind of assumed it would be more ambiguous about the nature of the women's relationship, but no, there's Sappho, kissing, plans to move to America together, and no outgrowing any of it. There's even a rather poignant passage about the sadness of being someone "who loves their own sex" in a conservative society.

I loved the air of refinement the story had. There's Yeats, Sappho, Japanese poetry and Meiji intellectuals. It's pretty wild that middle schoolers were reading something like this in the 1920s, and it was generally considered low art.

Another surprise was the older woman being the POV character. She's a young high school teacher named Misao Katsuragi (the Eva character is not named after her, but fun coincidence), who starts a relationship with a student.

The story is about her catastrophic failure of nerve: despite talking a good game of opposing marriage, loving another woman so much you'd be willing to die and plans to live together, she's unable to resist her girlfriend's parents asking her to convince the girlfriend to accept an arranged marriage. We never see the scene, but what a betrayal it must have been. She can't even kill herself afterwards, just disappearing into a menial existence in America.

Anyway, you can find it on LibGen, but it's just a few bucks on Amazon. It includes a longish scholarly introduction and pages of notes.