Pathway to Japanese Literature

Dawn (1860–1900)

In 1868, the final resistance of the Tokugawa shogunate, which had been backed by French capitalism, was crushed.
In 1869, with the feudal unification that had blanketed all of Japan remaining intact, the Meiji government was established over it.

Works such as Yukichi Fukuzawa's *Kyūri Zukai* (1868), *Sekai Kunizukushi* (1869), and *Gakumon no Susume* (1871) began resounding as bells rousing Japan's new cultural dawn.

Throughout three centuries of Tokugawa rule, women's voices in culture and literature had been utterly silenced.
Edo-period literature counted a few female haiku and waka poets among its ranks, with historical works like Araki Date Urakujo's *Pond Scum* and *Whereabouts of the Moon* merely surviving as Genji-imitation tales.
The so-called Restoration heroines confined their literary expressions to "imperial reverence" tanka poetry.
These elder sisters remained unaware that their "Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians" slogan—though styled a restoration of monarchic rule—in truth signaled transition to a semi-feudal capitalist order enshrining the emperor as absolute sovereign.

The active women of early Meiji who began moving forward based on an awakening to human rights—expressed in the principle “Heaven creates no one above or below others”—centered their efforts on criticizing feudal society through Christian education and reforming customs. Following the era’s prioritization of “practical learning” over literature, women’s activities coalesced into a New Life Movement. From the Fujin Dōhōkai (Ladies’ Companion Society) and Fujin Sokuhatsu-kai (Women’s Pompadour Society) to the Fujin Amimono-kai (Women’s Knitting Society) and Kyōfūkai (Purity and Reform Society), diverse women’s associations emerging nationwide grounded themselves in gender equality ideals while pursuing Puritanical “domestic purity.” These autonomous movements aligned not only with the 1872 Prohibition of Human Trafficking Law and equal compulsory education ordinances for men and women, but also with Fukuzawa Yukichi’s advocacy for monogamy and anti-prostitution reforms, alongside Mori Arinori’s essay “On Wives and Concubines” in *Meiroku Zasshi* opposing the custom of “authorized wives.” Yet women’s semi-servile conditions persisted even as nineteen-year-old Kishida Toshiko—later wife of Liberal Party leaders Nakajima Nobuyuki and Chōjō—joined the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement demanding universal suffrage and parliamentary governance. [Shōen (mother of Nakajima Aircraft Manufacturing director Nakajima Chikuhira) and Kagayama Eiko (later Fukuda Eiko; *The Half-Life of a Concubine*, Kaizō Bunko), a substitute elementary school teacher, argued in political speeches for “natural rights to freedom and equality” and destroying “women’s age-old oppressive customs.”]

The activities of women’s rights activists at that time lacked the conditions necessary to reach down to the foundations of ordinary women’s lives.
This is evident even when examining the style of the essays Kishida Toshiko wrote for *Jogaku Zasshi* (Women’s Education Magazine) and similar publications.
Her essays—written in a Sino-Japanese classical style so dense that even with phonetic glosses their meaning remained impenetrable—interlaced English poems quoted verbatim in their original language; as a kind of woman politician, she had yet to awaken to a genuine social consciousness capable of permeating the daily realities of ordinary women and appealing to their self-awareness.

In 1888, Tanabe Ryūko (Miyake Kaho)’s *Yabu no Uguisu* marked the first step toward somewhat literary-like literature created by women.
In the early Meiji period, the ethos of “practical utility and practical learning” became entangled with the tradition since the Tokugawa era that had belittled novels as frivolous literature; figures like Kishida Toshiko argued that literary work was suitable for women on the grounds that they could write while keeping a notebook in kitchens or tearooms.
“What praise for virtue and literary talent!”
It was an era when women writing novels was considered and spoken of as mere “scribbling at the study window.”

*Yabu no Uguisu* was written under the influence and imitation of Shōyō Tsubouchi’s *The Character of Modern Students* (1885).
*Yabu no Uguisu* vividly reflected the household and social atmosphere of upper-class bureaucrats that constituted her living environment at the age of twenty-one.
The upper-class young lady in Western attire heading to soirées understood nothing of the reactionary policies of the ruling class at that time—how on the eve of the Meiji 23 (1890) Imperial Diet’s opening, the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement was suppressed, 570 individuals were exiled “beyond three *ri* from the Imperial Palace,” and all assemblies were prohibited under the Peace Preservation Law.
She found herself enlightened more by “the gentlemen’s conversations” than by discussions among women.
Ryūko directly reflected the social and gender views of the ruling class espoused by those gentlemen in *Yabu no Uguisu*.
The advancement of women within a semi-independent, semi-subservient framework—which held that it was desirable for women to support men, manage households, and simultaneously pursue specialized occupations suitable for them—was the ideal espoused by the wise heroine of *Yabu no Uguisu*.
For the young upper-class women of Ryūko’s time, the path to the concept of “natural rights” that women of the People’s Rights era had embraced was now blocked.
Regarding that era, they began to be educated to view it with contempt as “a time when women’s social conduct had greatly deteriorated.”

It should be noted that *Yabu no Uguisu*—written under the influence of *The Character of Modern Students*, which drags a feudal tail—possessed a literary world entirely divorced from Futabatei Shimei’s *Ukigumo*, a work published the previous year that approached the essence of the modern novel.
Moreover, it draws attention to how Hanaho’s environment remained utterly insensible to the intellectual movement represented by Kitamura Tōkoku—who was her exact contemporary—as he agonized over the era’s social contradictions with a young man’s fervor, vehemently rejecting both the servility and thoughtlessness of *The Character of Modern Students*’ semi-feudal life-attitudes while pursuing the nobility of the human spirit.
In the sense of being the first novel written by a woman and recorded in literary history, *Yabu no Uguisu* was by no means at the forefront of modern spirit in the essence of literature.
It served as a casual literary diversion that revealed the level of compromised common sense among educated women of that era.

While *Yabu no Uguisu* was fundamentally as described, the fact that this single work captured public attention opened up possibilities for literary activity among several other talented women.
Kimura Akebono’s *Women’s Mirror* was serialized in the *Yomiuri Shimbun*, followed by Shimizu Shikkin’s *The Broken Ring*, translations by Kitada Usuhyō, Tazawa Inafune, Ōtsuka Kusuo, and Koganei Kimiko (Mori Ōgai’s sister), Lermontov’s *Bathhouse Notes*, Hinderman’s *Honorary Madam*, and Wakamatsu Shizuko’s masterful translation of *Little Lord Fauntleroy*.

The education of these women writers was likely a few steps ahead of Hanaho's inner world and under the influence of European literature.
However, in the reality of their lives, their literature was crushed under the weight of their daily existence as women.
Though their literary aspirations were tenacious and single-minded, within the social environment of the time, women’s literary work remained confined to the realm of side pursuits.
This is also evidenced by the absence of any collected works remaining after the death of Ōtsuka Kusuo, who authored numerous pieces.
This is further evidenced by Tazawa Inafune’s suicide after being unable to endure the criticism she suffered from society regarding her romantic affair with Yamada Bimyō.

The first woman writer to take up novel writing as a profession for her livelihood was Higuchi Ichiyo. The circumstances of Ichiyo's difficult life were widely known. Works such as *Troubled Waters* and *Child’s Play* continue to live on today as classics. These lyrical works—completed with their distinctive charm—could be said to have crystallized upon Ichiyo, a single talented woman writer, the convergence of certain aspects of Ken'yūsha literature by Kōyō and Rohan (which was already becoming a relic of the past just before Meiji literature underwent great changes through naturalism’s introduction) and the romanticism of *Bungakukai* associated with Tōkoku and Tōson.

Ichiyo, while dragging along feudal customs and human sentiments on one hand, depicted in a style blending classical elegance and vernacular realism—inherited from the literary context of Kōyō and Rohan—the romantic entanglements, parent-child dynamics, and conflicts of immature hearts among people relegated to the lower strata of Japanese society, which was rapidly capitalistizing at the time.
Her curvilinear style, suffering and rebelling against an unmanageable world, was illuminated by the flames of women’s hearts and lives that burned with stifled resentment and grudges, creating a literary world none of the preceding women writers had been able to depict.
Ichiyo’s world was ancient yet fresh, yet ultimately circled back to antiquity, finding its conclusion there.
This constitutes a fascinating historical element observable throughout her entire body of work.
This characteristic is also evident in Ichiyo’s attitude toward the circumstances surrounding her relationship with Hanai Momosui—a romance that was and yet was not.
The old elements that resonated as a unique nuance in Ichiyo’s literature were none other than the people’s truth that lived and flowed through every corner of contemporary commoners’ lives.
The characters in her works devoted their hearts and bodies as they struggled against those constraints.
In this sense, Ichiyo’s works maintain an enduring vitality in the present day while supporting old sentiments through their very classical-literary hybrid style.

Short Wings (1900–1916)

*Myōjō* was first published in 1900.
Kuroda Seiki, Okada Saburōsuke, Aoki Shigeru, Ishii Hakutei, and other painters who pioneered Western-style painting in Japan formed the "New Poetry Society" centered around Yosano Tekkan.
Two years prior, *Bungakukai* had ceased publication.
Tekkan dismissed the romantic era of Tōkoku, Tōson, and others as a feeble romanticism of art for art’s sake, steering *Myōjō* toward what he called the “wild male deity” romanticism.
The essence of Tekkan’s romanticism was of the same nature as Chogyū’s romanticism, which had been recognized as “the romanticism of the ruling class.”
Behind such transformations in Japanese romanticism lay social circumstances: through the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, Japan became a colonial owner of Taiwan and Korea, received an indemnity of 300 million yen, and propelled its industrial revolution forward.

In 1897, Tekkan’s poetry collection *Tenchi Genkō* emerged as Japan’s first triumphant herald in Asia as an aggressor.
Born as the daughter of a confectioner in Sakai, Yosano Akiko—who read *Bungakukai*, was drawn to *Myōjō*, and published *Midaregami* (1901)—had no way of recognizing how the nature of romanticism kindling within her as both woman and human differed from Tekkan’s “wild male deity” romanticism.
At twenty-three, Akiko became enamored with *Myōjō*, fell in love with Tekkan, and married him; yet *Midaregami*, born of that era, liberated love encompassing both heart and body through a boldness earlier romantics dared not approach.
*Midaregami* shocked contemporary Japan by asserting bodily beauty alongside matters of the heart in love.

Licensed quarters were depicted in *The Character of Modern Students*.
In *Yabu no Uguisu*, so-called male-female interaction and marriage between mutually chosen partners had become the limit.
In both Ichiyo’s life and her literary world, “love” remained something achingly tender yet terrifying.
Kōyō considered it “shameful exposure before others” for writers to treat their own romantic affairs as literary material.
Tōson’s *O Sayo*
The realm of *Tsuge no Ogushi*—how different a lyrical world it formed compared to the wholehearted commitment of the woman celebrated in *Midaregami*.
*Midaregami* marked the first appearance in modern literature of a woman asserting affirmation of her own body.

It is regrettable that Akiko’s flame of life and poetic vitality gradually faded after a few short years, and that she could not nurture and elevate the spontaneous spark of sensuality within her poetry.
Until she closed her long life in 1942, Akiko remained truly prolific both in literary activity and as a mother.
In the process of transitioning from *Midaregami* to *Shundeishū* (1911),

O sorrowful heart, how loudly memories resound on the tenth day of ten years.

Though I never thought to cling to this transient happiness, unwittingly it entwines my heart.

A wife of seventy-six years,

Poems imbued with deep implications also emerged.

To raise the many children born one after another and maintain her increasingly difficult life with her husband Tekkan as both mother and wife without collapse, Akiko had to channel all her strength even economically.
In addition to tanka, she began writing essays.
In her essays, Akiko candidly recounted her daily life as an unfulfilled housewife and mother, rooted in lived experience.
Akiko’s political essays were read as rare social and political statements by women of the time.
However, her tanka world was not permitted to approach such aspects of reality.
It must be noted that Yosano Akiko’s poems persisted in remaining within the symbols and nature appreciation society had come to expect.
There must have been various reasons for this.
The fact that Akiko lacked her own creative methodology undoubtedly contributed to the difficulties in her development.

In 1904, Yosano Akiko’s new-style poem *“Kimi Shinitamou koto nakare”* (“Thou Shalt Not Die”), created while “lamenting her younger brother in the besieged forces at Port Arthur,” begins with its first line—“Ah, younger brother, I weep for you”—and concludes with “Thou shalt not die” amid profound sorrow.
“Did our parents make you grasp a blade and teach you to kill people? Did they raise you until twenty-four only to say, ‘Go kill and die’?”
“Thou shalt not die.”
“The Emperor in battle does not deign to go forth himself.”
“To have you shed others’ blood in exchange and die like beasts—is this what they command?”
“Consider the maiden’s heart that was parted even in October.”

This poem came under fierce attack from patriotic poets led by Ōmachi Keigetsu when first published in *Myōjō*. Afterward, it was excised from Akiko’s collected works for over forty years. When Japan’s power was disarmed through defeat in the Pacific War—where “the August Sovereign” did not deign to appear—in 1945, “Thou Shalt Not Die” was revived with fresh emotion. This work shows how Akiko appealed through “household” sentiment rather than addressing aggressive warfare’s essence: parental lamentations (“As heir to our proud ancestral house, you must not die”) and a young bride’s plea beneath shop curtains (“If you were not my sole support—ah, whom else could I rely upon? You must not die”). During fourteen years from 1931 onward—when the Emperor commanded wars and people were forced to honor beastly deaths—what protest songs did this poetess who once sang against dying compose? Yosano Akiko amused herself writing decorative thirty-one-syllable verses at villas of welcoming disciples and friends across regions.

The fact that Mizuno Senshi—a woman writer who emerged as a disciple of Katai during the flourishing era of Naturalism and continued striving through her steadfast qualities—authored works such as *The Collar of Kagurazaka*, *The Road*, and *The Drunken Merchant* during the rise of humanitarian literature remains profoundly significant to observe.
Nogami Yaeko, who began with the sketch-style prose of *Hototogisu*, also opened a new humanistic dimension in women writers’ literature through works such as *Two Small Vagabonds* in later years.

The method of Naturalism’s “explicit descriptions” could not develop that very explicitness into social novels as it had in France, given Japan’s social environment where writers as petit-bourgeois had been continually shut out from economic and political spheres.
The transition from Tōson’s *Hakai* to *Ie* spoke to this reality.
The family system—unable to endure the feudal and patriarchal pressures constricting it—became the origin of the I-novel through self-examinations that could only be directed inward by those young generations who had rejected its framework.

The circumstances of women writers remained filled with protest as women still forced into subjugation by men. Therefore, for them, rather than attempting to imitate the carnal descriptions of early Naturalist writers, it was natural that they felt more strongly the human protest against customs affirming women’s passive position—women who must be made into objects of carnal desire depicted as something so vile. Kotera Kikuko employed naturalistic methods to depict sensual interactions between gynecologists and their patients, but even this writer could not portray women as mere lumps of flesh. Could it be that this phenomenon holds a meaning surprisingly deeply connected to the very humanity of literature itself? The interpretation that women cannot depict women as male writers do and men cannot write them simply because women’s artistic abilities lack objectivity and are weak is insufficient. The capitalist social system was maintained under conditions that made it impossible for women to exist as full human beings. In the era of Naturalism—the first step wherein new historical forces began challenging capitalist society—particularly in a belatedly modernized society like Japan where women were oppressed, it became inevitable that women who wrote could not bypass protesting both the feudal petit-bourgeois morals against which men themselves protested and the feudalistic attitudes those men held toward women.

That the so-called "High Treason Incident" involving Kōtoku Shūsui and others—which occurred in August 1910—was a large-scale fabricated event exploited to suppress rising labor movements and protect absolutist power stands clear before all today.

In the circumstances of that time when even uncovering the truth of this incident was forbidden, the "High Treason Incident" not only drove underground the socialist movement popularized by Katayama Sen, Sakai Toshihiko, Nishikawa Kōjirō, and Yamaguchi Kokken but also exiled Nagai Kafū—who had recently returned from France—to the lowly realm of gesaku writers in his literary career, while serving as a driving force that framed Japan’s humanitarian literature movement centered on *Shirakaba* into a supra-class world genius ideology stripped of social momentum. And on another front, the "I-novel"—a Japanese variant of the Naturalist literary movement—would be brought to completion by Shiga Naoya until it became mainstream in modern literature.

The Bluestocking Society movement initiated by Hiratsuka Raichō, Odake Kōkichi, and others—though its essence remained confined to bourgeois women’s liberation—was supported by progressive critics of the time such as Ikuta Chōkō, Baba Kochō, Abe Jirō, Takamura Kōtarō, Nakazawa Rinsen, and Uchida Roan, creating significant social ripples. This too was a trend among the progressive intelligentsia who could no longer express the people’s developing will through political and labor movements.

The magazine *Seitō* declared, “In the beginning, woman was the sun.” It was published under Raichō’s ideal of allowing women’s genius to be expressed through “spiritual freedom.” *Seitō* encompassed contributors from Kimiko Koganei, Shigure Hasegawa, Yachiyo Okada, and Yosano Akiko to Ichiko Kamichika—still a girl at the time—Kikue Yamakawa, Kanoko Okamoto, and others, while Senuma Natsuha published a translation of Chekhov’s *The Cherry Orchard*. Nogami Yaeko’s translation of the biography of Sonya Kovalevskaya was also published in this magazine.

The term "New Woman" was born.
It was an era when even smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol, and visiting Yoshiwara were considered expressions of women’s liberation.
The feminist ideas of Ibsen and Ellen Key were embraced, but *Seitō* ultimately submerged into the waves of history due to Raichō—who had married Okumura Hiroshi—separating from the magazine’s work to seek domestic peace, coupled with Itō Noe, her successor, uniting with the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae and causing a major life collapse involving Kamichika Ichiko.

It is noteworthy that the humanists of *Shirakaba*, which emerged contemporaneously, maintained a certain distance from the *Seitō* group throughout.
In the works of this period by the *Shirakaba* group—centered around upper-class youths from Gakushuin—two aspects of their interactions with women could be discerned.
On one hand, they expected young ladies of their own class to comprehend their ideas and devote themselves to supporting this awakening of humanism; simultaneously, on the other hand, they did not refrain from indulging in feudal revelries in Yoshiwara, consorted with prostitutes, and engaged in sexual liaisons with maidservants and young masters.
The male chauvinism of upper-class men and their unconscious despotic habits—strongly coexisting with the Shirakaba group’s humanism—crudely dismissed the speech and daily upbringing of women accustomed to their ways. One can easily imagine with wry humor today how the Seitō women, who championed women’s liberation through voices still ringing with their native regional accents, must have been exasperated by this.

Tamura Toshiko’s works emerged as if physically resisting both the swift sunset of Raichō’s declaration—“In the beginning, woman was the sun”—and the smoldering remnants of Akiko’s passion.
Tamura Toshiko, who had studied under Rohan using the pen name Roei, eventually broke through Rohan’s literary constraints and won the 1909 Osaka Mainichi Shimbun prize with her full-length novel *Akirame*.
Three years later came the publication of her short story “Demon.”
*“Oath”* and *“The Woman Author”*
Works like *The Mummy’s Lipstick* and *The Branding Iron Punishment* freely depicted women’s selfhood—previously advocated in fragmented forms by *Seitō* affiliates—through carnal desire.
*Akirame* was written amid growing domestic tensions with her husband Tamura Matsuo, who had been losing both his vitality for life and creative drive.
Though initially writing under Matsuo’s mixed encouragement and coercion, Toshiko later “discovered her own strength through self-reliance and began moving forward.”
With each work, Toshiko solidified her literary standing and financial independence.
And upon realizing nothing but herself could control her, she simultaneously portrayed a woman’s self striving to escape male domination in both life’s sensual moments and literary depictions.

Tamura Toshiko’s vividly colored, intensely heated world of men and women—in its unwavering focus on women’s selfhood as its central theme—possessed a ferocity akin to the then-popular novels of D’Annunzio. Yet on one hand, there clung to her works passionate obsessions and decadence reminiscent of late Edo-period *ninjōbon*-like tales—an atmosphere stemming from her upbringing in a bills broker’s household in Asakusa. To love whom one desires to love is “my will,” and that is by no means doing something wrong. Rather than submit to the rights of a husband whose love had cooled and apologize, she kindled a fierce feminine passion to love her man through to the end and suffer the “branding iron punishment.”

Advancing from the realm of *Midaregami* to assert a woman’s selfhood in love could be seen as a modern element in Toshiko’s literature.
However, when one closely entered the world of her works, it became apparent that both the substance of what she called “loving a man” and the reality behind her declaration “this is my will” proved unexpectedly unsteady—a solitary understanding.
Even if she were to love a man by her own will, where had been the foundation of Toshiko’s choice in selecting such a man?
Toshiko had her heroine declare:
“It is precisely to ‘the heart of a familiar man who weaves patterns even upon my emotions that flutter like my crimson obi’ that I am drawn.”
“Rather than pointlessly having my worth diminished by society by being with someone like you, remaining single and independent—cherishing what I love in private while outwardly working alone—might be far more ideal than you could ever know.”
“If you don’t know how to delicately captivate a woman’s heart, you can’t get women to support you.”
“That’s also men’s technique, after all.”

In what new humanity and morals could relationships formed at such an angle possibly reside?
Did they not realize that merely granting women economic capability did nothing but invert the positions of men and women?
Tamura Toshiko appears not to have been troubled by such reflections in her literature.
No matter how intense an atmosphere it may have had, the monotony of a world of love and desire cut off from social life could not help but deplete both life and literature.
Her sense of self, driven from the realm where self-discipline had hardened into mannerism, lacked the structural integrity to advance down new paths.
Toshiko’s literature—like Chikamatsu Shūkō’s *The Maizuru Love Suicide*—
She began writing romantic tales such as *“Kosan Kingoro”* alongside Mikihiko’s Gion-themed works.
At the time, journalism was dominated by literature of passion that Akagi Kohei denounced as "decadent literature" and attacked.
Within Toshiko’s spirit as both a person and a writer existed something that could not fully decay into being merely a passion-obsessed woman author.
Around 1918, she left for America in pursuit of her lover.

The assertiveness toward men that Toshiko—due to her immature social awareness—mistakenly emphasized as an expression of female selfhood later manifested almost identically in Miyake Yasuko.
After Dr. Miyake Tsunekata’s death, Yasuko—liberated from the stifling domestic life she had endured—wrote *On Widowhood* in defiance of the Miyake family’s surveillance under their elder, Hanaho.
She openly declared war against the feudal prejudices that had long been directed at women who had lost their husbands.
Through this book, Yasuko succeeded as an enlightened women’s critic and writer.
Yasuko, who ended her life well before turning forty, once remarked when criticism arose over her loving a young man in her later years: “Why is it wrong for a woman to cherish a man, just as a great man cherishes his mistress?”

The words of Toshiko and Yasuko spoke to the tragedy of Japanese society where women had little freedom.
At the same time, they spoke of the tragedy that “freedom of love” inevitably became distorted within the contradictions of capitalist society.

From Ichiyo onward—Akiko, Raichō, Toshiko—how brave these women have been in striving to soar.
And with what insurmountable force must their wings have been broken.

Natsume Sōseki was a literary figure acerbic toward women. Ever since women’s incorrigible irrationality was depicted in a caricatured manner in *I Am a Cat*, the realistic female characters appearing in his realistic works up through *Light and Darkness* had been portrayed as harboring an inexplicable “self” to men within their hearts and viewed as beings who resorted to petty schemes at every turn. However, in his romantic works such as *Kusamakura* and *Koto no Sorane*, Sōseki envisioned young women so self-conscious and cultivated—to the point where their very refinement made them seem disagreeable—as if they could not have been found in the reality of that era. If real people were to model themselves after those heroines, that person would likely be none other than Raichō.

While Sōseki—influenced by British literature, particularly figures like George Meredith—had discovered self-consciousness at the core of male-female conflict, he stopped short of analyzing why this self had become an unnatural knot within Japanese domestic life, manifesting in irrational ways.
In Sōseki’s life and literature, feudal and modern elements intertwined with a forthrightness distinct from Mori Ōgai’s case.
He could acknowledge George Eliot’s esteemed position among women writers in English literature.
Yet when asked about Tamura Toshiko and others beginning their activities, his response proved characteristic of both his era and personal disposition.
Sōseki articulated a valid perspective: as educational and professional skills gradually equalized between genders, a novel’s value should not hinge on its perceived femininity or lack thereof.
However, he continued thus:
“While one must separate author from work—that’s one matter—there’s no harm in stating regarding the author herself that taking a woman who writes such extreme things as a wife would be troublesome. This cannot be denied on the work’s level.”

In this manner, while Sōseki became ensnared in contradictions, Arishima Takeo advanced to the point of capturing—through the protagonist Yōko in *A Certain Woman*—the problem of women’s adverse social conditions that earlier courageous women writers had been unable to resolve within the spontaneous limitations of their own lives and literature.
However, in *A Certain Woman*, the protagonist Yōko ultimately failed to grasp the social moment that could rescue her from the anguish of being parasitic on the corruption of the leisured class.
Alongside Yōko, the author Arishima Takeo himself was also unable to make the leap necessary to grow as a progressively conscientious member of the intelligentsia in both his life and literature.

Nakajo (Miyamoto) Yuriko embarked on her difficult career as a woman writer in 1916 with *Poor People’s Group*.
Though traces of this author’s youthful naivety—still at a girl’s age—can be glimpsed in her work, her observations of the impoverished tenant farmers’ lives in a cold Tohoku village and reflections on existence as the landlord’s granddaughter were permeated with a realistic sense of life in their unadorned simplicity.
At a time when works by women writers seemed confined to tales of male-female entanglements, *Poor People’s Group*—combining a fresh sensitivity to nature with socially engaged subject matter—signified a new emergence alongside its humanitarian themes.
The emotional experiences of life and literature of Nogami Yaeko, Nakajo Yuriko, and others were completely divorced from the influence of *Ken'yūsha* literature.

Whirlpool (1918–1932)

The First European Great War that began in August 1914 ended in November 1917.
As a result of this great war, a proletarian government was established for the first time in the world.
Imperial Russia became the Soviet Union.
The absolutist monarchies of Germany, Austria, Hungary, and others collapsed.
This world-historical upheaval roused the voice of democracy in Japan as well, awakening both the labor movement and the proletarian cultural and literary movements.

The Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923 saw socialist and Korean laborers massacred by authorities who exploited this natural disaster to suppress mass movements; Ito Noe, who had been active in the Bluestocking Society, was killed alongside Osugi Sakae by military police.
However, the proletarian art movement that had sprouted through *The Sower* (1921) saw—through the subsequent gradual development of socialist theory—the tasks of the working class in economic, political, and cultural creation clarified alongside their path to victory, while the distinction between anarchism and communism became sharply defined, culminating in the 1928 publication of the journal *Senki* (*Battle Flag*).
Kurahara Korehito’s path toward proletarian realism subsequently came to indicate the fundamental direction for proletarian art’s creative methods.

*Senki* featured Tokunaga Naoshi’s *The Street Without Sun*.
Kobayashi Takiji’s *March 15, 1928*.
Nakano Shigeharu’s *The Tale of Iron*.
In addition, representative works of proletarian literature began to appear.
It was around this time that Kubokawa (Sata) Ineko emerged as a proletarian woman writer with her work *From the Caramel Factory*.
This work—which explores through realistic and flexible prose both the unstable lives of urban lower-class citizens surrounding a thirteen-year-old girl clad in a red cloak commuting to a caramel factory and the reality of child labor—opened a new, somber phase in proletarian literature of the time.
Subsequently, Ineko depicted the lives of working girls and women in works such as *Omedetō* and *Restaurant Luoyang*.
As the proletarian literary movement advanced alongside the rising class consciousness and organizational formation of the working class, her creative works developed through *April 16th Morning*, *Tears of a Forewoman* (1930), *Farewell* (1931), and *What Is to Be Done?*
(1931) *Course* (1933) *Swept Away*
(1934) and continued to develop.

The Japan Proletarian Writers' Alliance included Kubokawa Ineko alongside Matsuda Toko and Hirabayashi Eiko; the poet Kitayama Masako (Satō Sachiko), Ichida Aki, and Kimura Yoshiko; translator Matsui Keiko; and Nakajō Yuriko—who had completed *Nobuko* in 1927 and subsequently went to the Soviet Union to participate in the proletarian literature movement from 1931 onward. Yuasa Yoshiko specialized in Russian literature. Although she had not yet published any works, Tsuboi Sakae made significant contributions as a behind-the-scenes force for *Senki*. Just as with *Senki*, *NAPP* reflected cultural and literary demands of the working class across Japan, with women writers appearing through submissions spanning all production sectors and regions. In 1931, *Women’s Battle Flag* evolved into *Working Women*, published by the Japan Proletarian Cultural Federation. The editing was conducted by members from proletarian theater, art, music, film, education, Esperanto, and medical organizations within the federation. Yamakawa Kikue and Kamichika Ichiko—contributors to *The Sower*—abstained from the proletarian movement due to their political stances. Hirabayashi Taiko gained attention in 1927 through *"In the Treatment Room"* in *Bungei Sensen*, powerfully depicting a proletarian woman navigating anarchic economic conditions and gender relations alongside works like *"Throw It Away!"*. She remained in the Anarchist camp during theoretical conflicts with Bolshevism, advancing through the proletarian literary movement while consistently positioning herself against *NAPP* to demonstrate her distinctive qualities as a woman writer.

The Japanese Communist Party, born in 1922, was an illegal organization; nevertheless, the fact that the working class's economic, political, cultural, and literary movements came to develop in interconnected ways provided the possibility for Japan's socially driven literary aspirations—which had been stifled since the Freedom and People's Rights era—to grow with more advanced awareness.
For example, was Kubokawa Ineko's emergence—bringing forth one excellent class-conscious work after another that had never before been seen in modern literature—merely a coincidental blossoming of her talent?
Meanwhile, Nakajō Yuriko (Miyamoto Yuriko), while being buffeted by the tides of proletarian cultural and literary activities, wrote *Crossing New Siberia*—
Why did she come to energetically introduce the realities of life and literature in the socialist society of the Soviet Union and begin writing critical works such as *Wintering Buds*?

The fact that the Japan Proletarian Writers’ Alliance had included a Women’s Committee within its organization held significant meaning for modern literary history.
The proletarian literary movement clearly grasped the reality of women of the masses—who were constantly oppressed and exploited both in production and cultural spheres under capitalist society—and understood their liberation as a practical issue constituting half the task of liberating all people.
For the struggle of Japan’s laboring masses who had to sustain their existence through semi-colonial wages, the persistent presence of women workers of the masses as a more readily exploitable labor force—an industrial reserve army—constituted a critical issue.
The labor movement’s demands—for an eight-hour workday system and equal wages for men and women in the same occupation—in the cultural sphere led to the fervent desire for women to receive education equivalent to men’s.
Unless efforts were made to improve the position of women doubly burdened by workplace and home, women would merely continue living a subhuman existence.
This visceral understanding gradually rendered meaningless the popular novels of Kikuchi Kan, tinged as they were with feudal views of women.
The world of Tamura Toshiko’s works—where men and women of unclear economic foundations devoted all their human energy to entanglements solely through their gendered roles—now seemed distant.
The era of *Bluestocking* came to be perceived by younger generations of women as but a legend from times long past—a tale in which such rainbows had once arched.

Just as the proletariat’s economic and political movements were grounded in a theory common to both men and women as laboring masses, proletarian literary theory constituted a class-based literary view that unified women writers and male writers.
The path Kobayashi Takiji advanced through *Absentee Landlord*, *Organizer*, *Factory Cell*, *People of the District*, *Yasuko*, and *Party Member* (published in the April-May 1933 issue of *Chūō Kōron* as *Transitional Era*) was, despite differences in stride, constitution, and angle, connected in some meaningful way to the literary advancement of Kubokawa Ineko and all other women writers.

However, within Japan’s social reality, there existed a painful duality for women; even in the homes of class-conscious workers and their unions, feudalistic elements entrenched as male custom persisted strongly.
The women workers employed in Japan’s textile labor were predominantly young girls, and rural women’s lives were valued even more transiently than a single cow.
For women’s creative power to be fully realized in proletarian literature and for such women’s voices to contribute to class-based growth, some method tailored to women’s unique conditions became necessary.
The Women’s Committee of the Japan Proletarian Writers’ Alliance emerged from this necessity.
For the lives and literature of colonial masses—a Colonial Committee; for youth masses exploited alongside women—a Youth Committee.
In past literature, various schools had emerged—Romanticism, Naturalism, Humanitarianism, Aestheticism.
Yet the Proletarian Literary Movement was not one of these Japanese bourgeois literary schools imbued with semi-feudal elements.
While bearing similar vestiges of feudalism, it arose from capitalist society and sought to establish a literature rooted in a worldview aiming to overcome Japan’s feudalism and capitalism while pursuing victory for the proletariat as a class.

The “New Sensationalists” organized by Yokomitsu Riichi and Kawabata Yasunari constituted a group of writers who, though dissatisfied with past literary traditions, rejected proletarian literature.
Their works experimented with Expressionist and Futurist techniques, but this group ultimately disbanded within a short period.

Nakamura Murao’s essay “Who Is It? The One Who Ravages the Garden!”—a critique of proletarian literature—was famous in literary history.
It was noteworthy that Mushanokōji Saneatsu and others who had begun as humanitarian writers continued opposing the proletarian literary movement—the very movement that represented the concrete development of their own humanitarianism.
The contradiction wherein so-called “pure literature,” while increasingly having its essence weakened and being subordinated to publishing enterprises, saw its proponents cling obstinately to “literariness” and “artistry” in their struggle against the proletarian literary movement was particularly evident in Nakamura Murao’s case.
He himself, who preached artistry, was a writer of popular novels.

Hayashi Fumiko, who made her literary debut in 1929 with *Vagabond’s Song* in *Women’s Arts*, and Fujimura (Uno) Chiyo, who emerged in 1920 with the short story *The Painted Face*, possessed unique literary trajectories.
These two women writers proclaimed at the outset of their careers that their literature was born from circumstances where they—as propertyless women—spent their days mired in poverty, surviving through their frail strength.
This appeal resonated readily with the social sentiments of the time.
Simultaneously, they emphasized a literary guise of pitiable women through an ethereal demeanor akin to watching drifting clouds, while also highlighting how—no matter how impoverished—they bustled about preparing modest meals for men within those circumstances.
Through this universality of poverty and the appeal of some ephemeral, elusive feminine poetic sentiment entwined within it, Hayashi Fumiko—who began her career in poverty—passed through *Woman’s Diary* to reach the artistic realm of *Late Chrysanthemum* by the present day.
Uno Chiyo reached her literary zenith with *Irozange* in 1933 and eventually became president of Style Publishing House.

These two women writers followed a literary path distinct from Hirabayashi Taiko's by asserting their identity as women who did not engage with the proletarian literary movement.
The path they demonstrated represented a form of more advanced capitalism not seen in Tamura Toshiko’s life and literature.

Hasegawa Shigure’s *Women’s Arts*, first published in 1928, absorbed the extraordinarily broad energy of women—from writers such as Kubokawa Ineko, Nakajō Yuriko, Matsuda Toko, and Hirabayashi Taiko to Hayashi Fumiko, Masugi Shizue, and others—who, stimulated by the social atmosphere of the time, sought to express their vitality for life in some form.
*Women’s Arts*, which—as during the *Bluestocking* era—had contributions from figures such as Okada Yachiyo, Yamakawa Kikue, and Matsumura Mineko, came to be read by working-class women, and writings by women like Nakamoto Takako and Toda Toyoko, who addressed the lives of laboring women and union activities, also emerged.

Due to its radical nature, *Women’s Arts* came to reflect the works of women writers participating in the proletarian literary movement and the voices of union women, causing the magazine’s revolutionary fervor to intensify beyond what Hasegawa Shigure had hoped for.
In the spring of 1932, after severe suppression was imposed on the proletarian literary movement, *Women’s Arts* was discontinued and became a leaflet titled *Kagayaku*.
Thereafter, as the war of aggression progressed, *Kagayaku* was reorganized into what became known as the “Kagayaku Unit” in cooperation with the Imperial Army and Navy.

Following Shigure’s death in 1941, the “Kagayaku Unit” also naturally dissolved.

Twelve Years (1933–1945)

In January 1933, Hitler gained power in Germany, and in February, the Japanese government representative withdrew from the League of Nations.
Kobayashi Takiji was tortured to death at Tsukiji Police Station on February 20 of that year.
The Manchurian invasion initiated by Japanese imperialism in September 1931 expanded into the Shanghai Incident by January 1932, after which fascists and young military officers seeking to escalate aggression carried out the May 15 Incident, resulting in the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai and others.
In June, Sano and Nabeyama—Communist Party leaders imprisoned at the time—issued a statement supporting the aggressive war and the absolute authority of its commander, the Emperor.

Due to their shameful baseness, even those not directly connected to proletarian political parties or cultural/literary movements came to face complete suppression of their freedom to humanistically examine—criticisms of war voiced from conscience, critiques of Japan’s absolutist rule, and disparities in wealth, justice, and culture exposed by war’s reality within class society.
Japan became a nation of military police and thought police.

After spring 1932, even publishing the journal *Proletarian Literature* grew difficult.
The Proletarian Literary Movement—which had absorbed international achievements while advancing modern literature’s developmental stage over a decade—saw a dominant trend emerge where many people sought to negate, eradicate, and distance themselves from this current through their respective political and literary rhetoric.

The voices advocating a "literary revival" that averted their eyes from reality could bring to actuality was nothing more than an essay trend.
Following Uchida Hyakken’s *Hyakki-en Essays*, Morita Tama appeared with her *Cotton Essays*.

In 1934, the Japan Proletarian Writers’ Alliance was dissolved.

That autumn, Kikuchi Kan and other literary figures were compelled to attend the Army Special Grand Maneuvers. Between Hayashi Fusao, Kamei Katsuichirō, and the era's thought prosecutors emerged what became known as the "Literary Discussion Society".

However, in France and Spain, Popular Fronts emerged to resist fascism, while in Moscow from August 17th to September 1st of that year, the First All-Union Soviet Writers’ Congress was convened, bringing together “52 nationalities, 52 languages, and 52 literatures” under one roof.
From France, five individuals were invited: Romain Rolland, André Gide, Henri Barbusse, André Malraux, and Paul Couturier—the head of the French branch of the World Revolutionary Writers’ Alliance.
This congress demonstrated to the world that intellectuals and workers must truly unite to fight fascism and safeguard cultural freedom.
This served as the impetus for the International Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Culture to be held in Paris on June 3, 1935.
All writers opposed to fascism gathered.
Shinmura Takeshi, who was struggling to introduce progressive world cultural movements in Japan at the time, reported on this significant congress in the October issue of *Sekai Bunka*.
Komatsu Kiyoshi also translated the proceedings of this Congress for the Defense of Culture in an attempt to make some form of anti-fascist action possible in Japan as well.

The destruction of the proletarian literary movement was not merely that proletarian writers lost their organization and were scattered, giving rise amidst those hardships to works such as Ineko’s *Kurenai*, Nakano Shigeharu’s *Village House*, and Miyamoto Yuriko’s *Breasts*. Beginning with Kobayashi Hideo’s critical activities, the opposition to the proletarian literary movement caused intense chaos and stagnation even in the realm of “pure literature” that had sustained the existence of various factions. Miki Kiyoshi discussed Shestov’s “Literature of Unease,” and soon thereafter, people like Komatsu Kiyoshi and Funabashi Seiichi—dissatisfied with this “Literature of Unease”—began advocating for a “Literature of Activism,” a transformed version of France’s anti-fascism movement.

However, on another front, Watsuji Tetsurō devoted his scholarly knowledge to asserting Japan’s uniqueness by writing *Fūdo*, while Yasuda Yojūrō, Kamei Katsuichirō, and others of the Japan Romantic School showcased the essence of Japan’s ancient culture and ethnicity through the mythological age, Nara period, and Fujiwara period, and Yokomitsu Riichi began advocating the theory of the pure novel alongside Kobayashi Hideo.
This pure novel theory was said to represent a development from the I-novel—which was revealing its limitations—toward social literature, but in essence, it was a creative method that stripped away the author’s human and social subjectivity regarding the social reality reproduced within the work’s world.
The writer’s ego was routed.
This theory came to form the essence of genre fiction—which emerged later as a rejection of the I-novel—and the essence of middlebrow fiction.

Kubokawa Ineko’s works also gradually came to take up themes of personal male-female issues.
During this period, Okamoto Kanoko began her career with *"Tsuru wa Yamiki"* (The Crane Has Fallen Ill) and went on to produce many works—including *"Boshi Jojō"* (Mother-Child Lyricism), *"Rōjishō"* (Tales of an Old Courtesan), and *"Kawaakari"* (River Light)—until her sudden death in 1939.

Around the time when the Cabinet established the Information Bureau, Italy joined the Japan-Germany Anti-Comintern Pact, and the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement was launched, a new women writer emerged: Kawakami Kikuko.
Her *Gate of Ruin* represented a creative attitude that reflected, in inverse proportion to the atrophy of contemporary literature’s substance, the “vigorous artistic ambition” that writers subjectively championed.

A little before this, Koyama Itoko, who had debuted with a short story, had by this time begun producing works such as *Heat Wave* and *Oil Shale*.
Koyama Itoko was a writer who, as a woman writer up to that time, possessed a strong interest in and pursued social phenomena; even in these two works, she dealt with incidents involving Japanese engineers in dam construction set against unfamiliar foreign backdrops, as well as the development of artificial petroleum manufacturing technology and related personnel matters.
Koyama Itoko’s proactive stance could not free itself from the confines of the "production literature" of war collaboration.

The Japanese military forces that had invaded Manchuria and China between 1938 and 1939 grew increasingly frenzied, provoking the Zhanggufeng Incident and instigating the Nomonhan Incident.
Dozens of writers accompanied the "Wuhan Operation," and Hayashi Fumiko wrote about the then-famous "North Shore Unit."
Domestically, the National Mobilization Law was fully enacted, and abroad, Hitler’s Nazi forces invaded Poland, plunging Europe into fire and death.

For what reason was it recorded that women writers’ activity flourished more in such a year than in any other period of modern literary history? Kubokawa Ineko’s *Barefoot Girl*; Masugi Shizue’s *Heart of a Small Fish* and *Hatchlings* (short story collection); Ōtani Fujiko’s *Susakiya*; Nakazato Tsuneko’s *Shared Carriage*; Tsuboi Sakae’s *Almanac*; along with Yada Tsuyoko’s *Kagurazaka*, Yoshikawa Kiyo, Mori Michiyo, Enchi Fumiko, and other women writers of the time engaged in activity that could not be ignored within their literary careers. The 1939 Akutagawa Prize, Shincho Prize, and others were awarded to women writers. Journalism dubbed this year "the rise of women writers."

This phenomenon was, however, by no means a rise that promised future development for women writers.
For through their activities that year, women writers who had proven to possess a certain poster value were immediately mobilized by the Military Information Bureau and found themselves forced to serve as demonstrators of national unity spirit in all regions where the invasion forces were advancing.

The circumstances of this merciless downfall imposed upon women writers, persisting through five years of turmoil and social upheaval following Japan’s entry into the Pacific War in December 1941, led to the life-altering and literary exhaustion of not a small number of these writers.

In the 1930s, there were several overlapping reasons why the activities of women writers became prominent.
The first was that the majority of women writers, who had cautiously avoided the turbulent waves of the Proletarian Literary Movement and entrenched themselves in so-called "pure literature," came during this period to each demonstrate a certain level of literary accomplishment.
The second conceivable reason was that while theme-driven novels—stripped of their authors' human and social conscience by the pressures of the National Spiritual Mobilization at the time—had proliferated, women writers' literature was thought to barely retain the fragrance of literature.
Whether production literature, peasant literature, or novels written against the backdrop of battlefronts—all of their themes were military-issued provisions.
Because the works of women writers showed less social engagement than those of male writers, they came to be noticed from the perspective of preserving literary purity within their works.

Kawabata Yasunari’s following words carried the implication of a dark omen.

“Just as women themselves cannot exist without adornment, women writers show us women adorned through their own pens.”
“The art of women writers becomes such adornment; to dismiss it as false because it is adornment is our shortsightedness.”
“And I deeply felt that the women writers who, with such adornment, had become a kind of ‘women in paintings’ grew all the more dear for it.”
“And that is probably for the best.”
Having been made aware that the literature of women writers adorned in such fashion held certain propaganda value in journalism, and moreover of the fact that their capacity for critiquing social reality was weaker than that of male writers, the Military Information Bureau promptly utilized such women’s writings.
At a time when all women’s magazines had been mobilized for women’s war collaboration, they had no choice but to fully mobilize women writers—who possessed an appeal different even from what men had written—into reporting activities.

In June 1946, Kubokawa Ineko published *The Woman Author*, in which she exposes and recounts how even she had been drawn into war collaboration as a reporter during that time.
“I was swept up by the emotions of soldiers and the women in families who had sent them off—by those women’s emotions—”
They had gone to both China and the South, but for the military, which had continued to deceive the Japanese people with false Imperial General Headquarters announcements until August 15, 1945, “their tearful accounts were just what was needed.”

Toward Tomorrow (1945–1950)

The Second World War from 1939 to 1945 taught the world's two billion people the following:
To fight imperialism and international fascism for national independence and stability of people's livelihoods, and to eradicate war from this earth—this was the great undertaking of the people.
Because in every war, it was always the people who had to be killed, and because that slaughter had grown ever more vast in scale.
China became the People's Republic of China, and democratic forces expanded across Asia and Europe.
Women from forty-three countries that had paid the highest sacrifices in the war organized the International Democratic Women's Federation, while progressive workers worldwide rallied under the World Federation of Trade Unions.
The Women's Federation of China and Korea, Britain's Housewives' Federation, Japan's Democratic Women's Council, and others began striving to protect peace and people's livelihoods according to their regions' specific conditions.
An international youth organization was also formed.
Today over a billion people have already united for peace and the prohibition of atomic weapons.

In the first period from 1946 to around spring 1947—a time when the implementation of the Potsdam Declaration was most sincerely accepted, and Japan’s democratization agenda was being monitored by the world’s conscience across political, economic, and cultural spheres—the Shin Nihon Bungakukai (New Japan Literature Association) was organized as the core of the democratic literature movement, and the magazine *Shin Nihon Bungaku* (New Japanese Literature) began publication, enabling Japanese literature to sprout anew from the ashes with fresh growth. Simultaneously, the activities of the People’s Tanka group and democratic poets were also launched. In accordance with the essence of global people’s democracy, the Japanese democratic literature movement positioned its main force in working-class literature and, while critically inheriting the achievements of both global and Japanese Proletarian Literary Movements, commenced its course toward creating fresh literature that would express the democratic aspirations of diverse and broad strata of the people.

In January 1946, several commercial magazines that had restarted after a long hiatus all featured Nagai Kafū’s *Ukishizumi* and *The Dancing Girl*.
The phenomenon of featuring works like *Towazugatari* and subsequently competing to publish writings by Masamune Hakuchō, Uno Kōji, Shiga Naoya, and others revealed one aspect of Japan’s tragedy.
Commercial magazines felt compelled to avoid writers who had collaborated in the war effort.
In August and September of the previous year when the editorial planning occurred, the Peace Preservation Law had not yet been repealed.
Consequently, seeking works by former proletarian writers carried inherent risks.
To navigate these dual constraints while satisfying the postwar readership—those who blurred distinctions between literature and popular reading matter, or who matured during wartime unaware of such boundaries—the safest approach became focusing on Nagai Kafū, whose works like *Okamezasa* and *Udekurabe* were deemed accessible through their stylistic familiarity.

Meanwhile, publications such as *Kindai Bungaku* (Modern Literature) and *Kihō* (The Wasp) strove from a different angle than *Shin Nihon Bungaku* (New Japanese Literature) to foster new literature.
*Shin Nihon Bungaku* published Ozawa Kiyoshi’s *Town Factory*.
Following this, it began publishing works by worker-writers employed in workplaces—such as Atsuta Gorō’s *Samui Mado* (Cold Window) and Hayashi Yoneko’s *Yagurumagusa* (Cornflower)—while also starting to feature Tokunaga Sunao’s *Tsuma yo Nemure* (Wife, Sleep Now) and Miyamoto Yuriko’s *Banshū Heiya* (Harima Plain).

The journalism that had originated with Nagai Kafū—navigating inflation’s turbulent waves while battling for survival—began promoting the so-called nikutai-ha (flesh school) literature of Oda Sakunosuke, Funabashi Seiichi, Tamura Taijirō, Inoue Tomoichirō, and others.
Ikeda Michiko emerged as a female writer of the nikutai-ha.
Niwa Fumio and Ishikawa Tatsuzō advocated novels of manners that sought to document postwar society’s chaotic reality through literature.
Yet it was only natural that criticism arose against this flesh literature—which professed to rebel against feudalism through bodily liberation while emphasizing humanity—for ultimately reducing human essence to mere sexual relations between genders; similarly censured were novels of manners that remained stagnant as literature of superficial observation, unable to abandon their detached stance or chart a meaningful course forward.

The literature of Dazai Osamu, overcome by nihilism, found resonance in the petty bourgeois sentiments that sympathized with the postwar decline of the privileged class and its pathos.

The labor union activities and working-class cultural movements that emerged vigorously from the winter of 1945 pierced through the increasingly fragmented currents of commercial literature to give birth to literary circles. This led to works such as *In the Cage*—a literary collection by Japan Postal Workers—poetry anthologies by National Railways poets, and new plays that successively appeared alongside the rise of independent theater troupes, including those by Horita Kiyomi, Yamada Tokiko, Suzuki Masao, Terashima Akiko, and others.

The Shin Nihon Bungakukai managed to publish two volumes of the Working-Class Literature Anthology, three volumes of the New Japan Poetry Collection, and three volumes of the New Fiction Collection.

In December 1948, the executions of war instigators beginning with Tojo were carried out, and in the wake of those sacrifices, a large number of Japanese fascist war criminals associated with fascist cultural movements such as Kodama Yoshio were acquitted and released, blending into civilian life.
This has become a grave detriment to Japan’s democratization.

In March 1949, after the conservative camp secured an absolute majority, Japan reached a state where the people had to once again demand the faithful implementation of the Potsdam Declaration in all aspects concerning fundamental human rights.

The struggle to oppose war provocation and protect peace, along with national independence—the voices of men and women opposing Japan’s transformation into military bases—alongside the demand to protect cultural and academic freedom, became statements from a broad stratum of scientists and writers.
The movements by literary figures to protect peace were increasingly being advanced in combination with the working-class peace preservation movements.
Even writers who produced flesh school literature in their works had added their names to the demands for peace and a comprehensive peace settlement.

The strata of women who entered the literary field expanded multidimensionally and extensively since 1946.
Hirabayashi Taiko’s *Blind Chinese Soldier*, *End-of-War Diary*, and *Going Alone*,
along with works such as *Such a Woman*, retained the author’s anarchistic qualities while serving as both a record of the oppression she endured during the war and a harrowing account of Chinese prisoners of war’s fates, leaving a profound impression.
It was noteworthy that through her newspaper serial *The Song from the Depths*, this writer emerged as a chronicler of the yakuza world.
The author must have possessed concrete knowledge about how Japan’s violent underworld hindered civic democratization—as seen in *Violent City*—and how those in power exploited yakuza threats to workers’ lives through strikebreaking in disputes like Yomiuri’s.
While *The Song from the Depths* attempted to critique the yakuza world’s feudal nature, the author compromised with their sentimental codes and failed to expose Japan’s yakuza as anti-democratic forces.
The future movements of this woman writer—whose robust vitality was recognized by both herself and others as an authorial trait—would be closely watched.

Sata Ineko embarked on a new departure with *My Tokyo Map*.
In this series, while retrospectively depicting the now completely transformed lower districts of Tokyo altered by war damage, the author portrayed against that backdrop the journey of a working-class girl who becomes a young working woman and eventually awakens to class consciousness as a wife and mother.
When reading together works such as *My Tokyo Map*, *The Woman Author*, *Falsehood*, and *Record of Bubbles*, one can understand the efforts this writer—who twenty years ago wrote *From the Caramel Factory* and left a distinct mark on proletarian literature’s history—is imposing upon herself as a democratic woman writer, buffeted by waves of complex conscience.

Miyamoto Yuriko, who had only about three years and nine months of freedom to publish works over the past twelve years, from around November 1945 onward depicted in works such as *Harima Plain* and *Wind-Knowing Grass*—unique to this writer—the joy of liberation and protest against war, in addition to literary critiques on democratic literature including *Sing, Voices, Sing*.
As a sequel to *Nobuko*, *Two Gardens* and *Signpost*—which also served as a sketch of twenty years of social thought history beginning in 1927—
Parts One and Two were written, and Part Three was being drafted.
This novel traced both the collapse of Japan’s middle class and the protagonist’s class-based human growth as a burgeoning spirit of the next generation emerging from its old history, while also attempting to depict phenomena such as the shift toward fascism in European countries—sharply contrasted with the Soviet Union’s socialist achievements around 1927–1930.
It attempted to portray how such historical circumstances shaped a class-conscious human being through the protagonist’s mind and body.

Through *Koyomi*, Tsuboi Sakae emerged as a chronicler of working people's pure and diligent lives; her writing of *Shibuya Dōgenzaka*—bearing the character of a sequel to *Koyomi*—and its lineage producing *A Wife’s Place* came to hold a significance that could not be lightly passed over.

*A Wife’s Place* also grappled with notably challenging subject matter. While becoming acutely aware of her efforts to confront the difficulty and pain of this material with all her strength, this writer—whose previous works had been marked by clarity and cohesive structure—came to exude a bitterness unseen in her earlier writings. The overturning of common sense, discretion, and cleverness of character laid bare the harshness of human relationships in *A Wife’s Place*, a harshness rooted in petty bourgeois preconceptions and entanglements of secularity that characters within the work’s world unknowingly carried in their spirits and attitudes toward life. *A Wife’s Place* became a singular work that cannot be overlooked when examining this writer.

When *Women’s Arts* once held a contest for lyrics to what was called the All-Women Marching Song, a young woman who had been an elementary school teacher on Izu Ōshima was selected.
That was Matsuda Kaiko.
Having grown up in the mines of Akita, she—who had honed her skills as a women writer during the Proletarian Literary Movement era—now strove to bring those abilities to fruition through multifaceted democratic political activities, with works beginning to emerge such as the novel *Tail* (*Shin Nihon Bungaku* [New Japanese Literature]), numerous reportages, and essays on democratic literature.

In April 1946, Amino Kiku’s *Possessed* was published.
This work was a moving piece that illuminated the distinctly Japanese anguish of this writer—whose oeuvre had been built up over more than twenty years through works from her first collection *Autumn* to *Photon*, *Wives*, *On the Train*, *Young Days*, and others—by tracing it back through her accumulated writings.
This modest, earnest woman writer declared in *Possessed* that the harsh walls of women’s circumstances—unfortunate mothers, disadvantaged wives, and daughters unable to live as they wished—that had long been her consistent subject matter had been shattered with Japan’s democratization, and that “the time has come when women shall no longer be objects of pity.”
Few works had expressed the joy of liberation from old Japan as candidly and transparently as this one.
What inner indignation might Amino Kiku’s honest joy—so candidly expressed in this work—harbor toward the profound deceit and substitution that have characterized Japan’s democratization as it has shifted and persisted to this day?

When Japanese literary figures—who aged prematurely—approached sixty and found comfort in the common sense of a world lost to contemporary reality, sustained by ornate prose as in Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s *The Makioka Sisters*, it was noteworthy that Nogami Yaeko was grappling with *Labyrinth*.
During the Bluestocking Society era, though they had published a biography of Sonya Kovalevskaya, Nogami Yaeko remained outside the sphere of the group’s activities.
During the Proletarian Literary Movement, Nogami Yaeko—who wrote *Young Son* and *Machiko* while recognizing the historical role of the working class yet maintaining a critical stance toward the contemporary movement without advancing beyond it—embarked on *Labyrinth* after 1946 following works such as *Fox* and *The Deity*.
This novel, initially written as *Black Procession* but interrupted due to political pressure, had by then progressed to Part Three.
Interposed by the February 26 Incident, it attempted to trace both the state of upper-class life engulfed in fascism and war, and within that context, the historical path of a younger generation spontaneously seeking its own development.

In contrast to Nogami Yaeko’s rational creative methodology, Koyama Itoko—who produced works based on researched themes with a far simpler vitality in living—recently addressed in *Suspended Sentence* the psychology of modern entangled relationships through a prosecutor-turned-defense attorney climbing the ranks via economic misconduct cases and his family.
It is noteworthy that Koyama Itoko, while drawing from the provocative methods of middlebrow and social novels, avoids grotesque exaggeration and instead structures her postwar-themed novel through commonsense decency.
However, this commonsense decency needs to evolve into sharper, more objective observation.

Ōta Yōko’s *The Town of Corpses*, which suffered atomic bomb damage in Hiroshima, stands as a work of reportage that etches war’s cruelty into collective memory.
Shibaki Shigako, Ohara Tomie, and several others—each drawing on their considerable experience as women writers—strive to grow toward tomorrow; yet the path of women’s lives and literature remains anything but easy to tread even today.
Though the critical gaze toward women writing novels may have softened, the economic fluctuations within the middle social stratum to which many established women writers belong, alongside accompanying shifts in social consciousness, remain marked.
Even if these linger as mere elements of everyday atmosphere, these writers must be growing aware that their unchanged literary concepts and creative methods lack a certain vital force when it comes to reconstructing the present and linking it to tomorrow’s vitality.

This was particularly evident in Nakasato Tsuneko’s *Before the White Fireplace*.
Through her unique living circumstances, Nakasato Tsuneko had frequently taken as her subject matter the lives of foreign women who became wives and mothers in Japan’s upper-class households.
The experiences these foreign women endured in Japan during the war had plunged many into aversion toward the Japanese people.
Humanity guided those interracial couples who had lived believing in its universality toward a sorrowful awakening of ethnic consciousness.
Nakasato’s subject matter—through its exploration of such Japanese tragedies—constituted an issue of human significance with global dimensions.
It was material that harbored the potential to once again reveal paths of lofty human liberation to those oppressed by the forces of ethnic bloodlines.
Yet Nakasato’s literature remained confined to depicting these women’s refined upbringing, common sense, and somewhat conventional intellectual judgments, failing to fully exploit the challenging possibilities she incidentally encountered as a writer.
Regrettably, this author lacked creative methods commensurate with her subject matter.

Writers who emerged as women living from a people's standpoint—standing firmly on democratic ground rooted in life's realities—had to observe how the gap between established lifestyles and literature was being bridged through unadorned means.
While grappling with multifaceted daily hardships as a housewife and mother of a young child, Hayafune Chiyo had begun successively publishing substantial works such as *Tōge*, *Nijūwaku*, *Ito no Nagare*, *Kisetsu no Koe*, and *Kōboku*.
Hayafune Chiyo had grown rapidly from the lyrical style of *Tōge*, expanding her research scope while beginning to write clearly from a working-class perspective about Japan's textile industry and the labor of women employed within it.
Her brushwork remained unpolished, sometimes lacking characterization that deeply probed the inner dimensions of human figures.
However, if she continued growing as a class-conscious writer rooted in real life, this writer's capabilities would eventually yield significant achievements.

In the military inflation era around 1939, a time referred to as one of publishing inflation with works such as Toyota Masako’s *Composition Classroom* and Ogawa Masako’s *Spring on a Small Island*, a girl named Nozawa Fumiko attracted attention with her short story collection *Brick Factory Girls*.

*Brick Factory Girls* depicted Japan’s lower-class life—rough, poignant, and directionless—with unvarnished brushwork that left a distinct impact.
Afterward, the proletarian young woman who was protected by nothing navigated through all the chaos she had to bear within capitalist society, becoming Koike Fumiko and publishing the short story collection *Notes of a Female Communist Party Member* at the end of 1948.
*“Woman’s Punishment”* and *“The Story of a Liver”*
*Notes of a Female Communist Party Member*, *Gravestone*.
In those works, the deep-seated feudal elements within her living environment and herself—intertwined with fervor for rebellion and liberation—erupted violently in their raw form.
There were dark, heavy, writhing forms, but within them blazed her people’s strong vitality that declared, “Humanity must never self-destruct.”
“Even lies like claiming not to want water when parched—I could never bring myself to write such things.”
Even when *Brick Factory Girls* was written, Koike Fumiko’s motivation had been rooted there.
“Because I am a woman—to avoid repeating the suffering of having no time to spare, no money for food—”
“We must fight all life’s falsehoods through whatever hardships we face, and claim victory.”

And now living in Tōhoku as a wife and mother of a child, she worked hard to write many more better works.

The path Koike Fumiko walked from *Brick Factory Girls* through the war years to today compels deep reflection on many matters.
She maintained an unflinching will to live—rolling mud-caked (*Woman’s Punishment*), weeping at times—yet never shrinking back.
While entangled in human bonds thick with feudal elements, she gradually began grasping their essence as historical phenomena within Japanese society.
The trajectory of Hirabayashi Taiko—who emerged a generation prior from anarchism’s chaos in the late 1920s—stretched from *In the Charity Ward* to today.
Hayashi Fumiko’s path led from her origins as a lumpenproletariat girl in *Vagabond’s Song* to *Late Chrysanthemums*.
One facet of history’s violent tides had thrust women writers like Hirabayashi Taiko and Hayashi Fumiko into such roles.
Another facet, surging to society’s depths, set Koike Fumiko on her growth path while illuminating new literary roads from printing factory benches for Hayashi Yoneko through *Yagurumasou* and *Mebae*.

Ishii Fujiko’s *Rain Boots*, Kobayashi Hisae’s *Breasts*, Yamashiro Tomoe’s *Butterbur Buds* and *The Storm*, Takemoto Kazuko’s *The Bereaved*, *Ode to Parting*, and *A Daughter’s Love*, Miyahara Sakae’s *The Current*, and Yuzuhara Masako’s *The Immortal Octopus* and *Chōsen Yaki*.
In keeping with the breadth and diversity of their social foundations, these women began to demonstrate their capacity to speak out through people’s literature.
However, the severity of people’s lives and literature culminated in the excellent work *Chōsen Yaki* and struck down Yuzuhara Masako with tuberculosis.

The literature of women writers newly embarking on their craft was, with Hayafune Chiyo being something of an exception, still at a stage where the majority had only just begun undertaking small-scale works.
In terms of both subject matter and creative methods, it was characteristic that they began their narratives from a position grounded in their own lives while encompassing the breadth of people’s lived experiences.

The fact that novels have come to express the will and emotions held in this life by human beings—by women as women of the people—must be appraised as an achievement of the people that transcends all contradictions and deceptions within Japanese society over these past four or five years.

*Song by the Sea* by Matsuda Miki.
In 1949, Toda Fusako presented *In the Waves*, Koyanagi Futami *What Are Husband and Wife?*, and Masaki Kiyoko wrote *The Window of the Naval Hospital* in *Shikoku Literature*.
Hirotsu Momoko’s *Window*, Sekimura Tsuruko’s *Parting*.
Yuki Shigeko, setting out with environmental burdens (*The Book’s Story*, *The Superintendent General’s Laughter*),
What kind of development will works such as *The Troublesome Woman* and others forge ahead with amidst turmoil?

The literary works of Kōda Aya—in which the mold of Kōda Rohan, that erudite yet feudalistic common-sense virtuoso of a literary figure, was firmly cast upon the soft body and spirit of a woman—are truly singular.
There is something that compels deep reflection on the patriarchal system that extended even into literature.

Sekimura Tsuruko, Yuki Shigeko, and others had begun to publish the fruits of their long-continued literary studies today.
For so long, women’s social imagination as human beings had been continuously suppressed.
The works of women who had continued to protect their literary domains while being suppressed nevertheless gave the impression of having aimed for completion as such while remaining far removed from the pulse of modern history.
Yuki Shigeko’s humanism was being compelled to swiftly and robustly leave the nest of lifestyle habits from which she had continuously toiled over her own humanity.
Her sensibility, evaluated as “common sense,” could not avoid being soiled in reality; what awaited was the realization that this was not a stain.
How would Sekimura Tsuruko’s sincerity gnaw through its cocoon?
The reason why today’s literary history exists as a double exposure and why our growth stands at dual possibilities lies here.

The motifs in works by Yuki Shigeko, Sekimura Tsuruko, and numerous other women writers could have been said to parallel those drawn out through women's literature within capitalist society's freedoms—from when George Sand first advocated for women's humanity in European literature until World War I.
Yet in our context, it was only today in 1950 that these individuals' human voices finally became audible.
Even when motifs originated from the latter pages of world history, the potential for life and literature to develop them progressed forward.
The women writers who began writing from clearly democratic positions were naturally liberated from the sorrowful postures of 1930s Japanese women authors who had cloaked their literature in feminine pretenses—and this liberation extended even to Yuki Shigeko's works.
Whether considering Hirotsu Momoko or Sekimura Tsuruko, both stood firmly upon women's natural expression of humanity.

This seemingly modest progress marked a significant step in history. For the fact that women writers had ceased engaging in Japan's unique doll-like posturing of feminine sentiment confirmed, even for those very writers, that the path forward lay solely on humanity's path—the path of two billion people. Such a view of the road ahead glimmered even within the statements of minor women writers seen in *We Too Can Sing*.

No matter what the majority of what is called literature appearing in today's journalism may be like, literature is changing along with history.

The relationship between humanity and history had manifested with ever greater sharpness in each writer's way of life and their literature. As women writers enhanced their autonomy as human beings—and as their work ascended from "women's literature" to "human literature"—it was only natural to expect that humanity's motivated development, chosen and directed by reason, would blossom within their literature as well.

When discussing writers, it was becoming increasingly necessary to not only examine their literary works but also view all their social statements and actions in a unified manner as interrelated elements.
And on a day when several more transformations had been undergone, the special nature of women’s literature—which had continued to speak of the fraught relationship between “Women and Literature in Japanese Society”—would dissolve into the victorious song of human history.

[April 1951]