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Otsuka Kusuoko (1875-1910)
Dec. 20th, 2024 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiOtsuka Kusuoko (sometimes also known by the more typical reading of Naoko) was born in 1875 in Tokyo, the daughter of a judge. After graduating from the High School of Tokyo Women’s Normal University (later Ochanomizu University) with the highest grades, she was married at nineteen to the art history scholar Oya Yasuji, who took her family name as an adopted-husband. They were to have four daughters and a son.
Kusuoko was able to go on studying after her marriage, taking lessons in poetry, painting, piano, voice, and English while also auditing classes at Meiji Girls’ School, where her classmate Soma Kokko praised her beauty and grace; Hasegawa Shigure, who studied poetry alongside her, included a verbal sketch of her in Modern-day Beauties.
Around 1895 she began writing stories, derivative at first of Higuchi Ichiyo and others; later works drew on the novelist Natsume Soseki, a friend of her husband’s and, by some accounts, a would-be lover. (While this is not clear, we do know that Kusuoko told him he might have been a little kinder in his depiction of the wife from I Am A Cat.) Kusuoko’s work was published along with Tazawa Inabune in the “women authors” issue of Bungei Club [Literary Club] magazine.
Some critics have argued that she led too happy and narrowly confined a life to write other than awkward and constrained stories—“you need to suffer more to write better,” Soma Kokko would tell her, only to be received with a gentle “I really don’t know much about life.” She also risked calling up unwelcome gossip, as people would believe that whatever happened to her heroines had happened to her in real life, compelling her to add a disclaimer of “I do not write romans á clef” at the top of each story.
Along with short stories she was a published poet, including a poem from 1905 which addressed the Russo-Japanese war from a wife’s perspective. She also made translations (probably via English versions) of Gorky and Maeterlinck.
In 1910 she died unexpectedly of influenza, surrounded by her husband, her children, and several blank notebooks.
Sources
Mori 1996
https://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/datas/6297/ (Japanese) Existing photographs of Kusuoko
Kusuoko was able to go on studying after her marriage, taking lessons in poetry, painting, piano, voice, and English while also auditing classes at Meiji Girls’ School, where her classmate Soma Kokko praised her beauty and grace; Hasegawa Shigure, who studied poetry alongside her, included a verbal sketch of her in Modern-day Beauties.
Around 1895 she began writing stories, derivative at first of Higuchi Ichiyo and others; later works drew on the novelist Natsume Soseki, a friend of her husband’s and, by some accounts, a would-be lover. (While this is not clear, we do know that Kusuoko told him he might have been a little kinder in his depiction of the wife from I Am A Cat.) Kusuoko’s work was published along with Tazawa Inabune in the “women authors” issue of Bungei Club [Literary Club] magazine.
Some critics have argued that she led too happy and narrowly confined a life to write other than awkward and constrained stories—“you need to suffer more to write better,” Soma Kokko would tell her, only to be received with a gentle “I really don’t know much about life.” She also risked calling up unwelcome gossip, as people would believe that whatever happened to her heroines had happened to her in real life, compelling her to add a disclaimer of “I do not write romans á clef” at the top of each story.
Along with short stories she was a published poet, including a poem from 1905 which addressed the Russo-Japanese war from a wife’s perspective. She also made translations (probably via English versions) of Gorky and Maeterlinck.
In 1910 she died unexpectedly of influenza, surrounded by her husband, her children, and several blank notebooks.
Sources
Mori 1996
https://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/datas/6297/ (Japanese) Existing photographs of Kusuoko
