Pathway to Japanese Literature

Discover Japan's stories—across time, across language.

January–December 1929Author: Miyamoto Yuriko

Original Title	一九二九年一月――二月
Author	宮本百合子
Genre	War & Social Literature
Author Type	Female Author
Summary	In a Moscow hospital bed, a Japanese woman chronicles her confinement with piercing clarity, her body weakened by a stubborn gallbladder yet her mind acutely attuned to the rhythms of Soviet life. Through feverish nights punctuated by patients’ moans and the clatter of nyanki caregivers, she observes the stark realities of 1929 Russia—the communal kitchens’ unhygienic meals, women’s fraught liberation through perilous abortions, and the weary resilience of a people shaped by revolution. Fragments of home haunt her: the phantom taste of chilled sōmen, the scent of shoji paper in sunlight, visceral longings that clash with Moscow’s icy pragmatism. Between medical procedures and strained conversations with doctors, she dissects the contradictions of a society striving to reinvent itself—its grand ideals frayed by bureaucratic inefficiencies, its citizens enduring scarcity with grim humor. As snow batters the windows, her diary becomes a lens on vulnerability and survival, where personal illness mirrors a nation’s growing pains, and every whispered hospital anecdote hints at untold revolutions of the flesh and spirit.