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Natsume Kyoko (1877-1963)
Mar. 21st, 2025 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiNatsume Kyoko was born in 1877 in Tokyo, where her father was a senior bureaucrat; her maiden name was Nakane. At nineteen, she became engaged through a matchmaker to Natsume Kinnosuke, ten years older than she, at the time a high school English teacher in Shikoku. Their reactions on seeing each other’s photos, and agreeing to go ahead with the marriage, are recorded: she liked his firm features and thought he looked refined and gentle, while he noticed that her teeth were yellowed and snaggly but approved of the way she made no attempt to conceal this. (Also, he was a graduate of the University of Tokyo, and her father had already declared his refusal to marry off his daughter to any man who hadn’t attended one of the Imperial Universities.)
They were married in 1897, when Kinnosuke was appointed to teach in Kumamoto. Their married life was far from peaceful; Kyoko disliked getting up early and doing housework, sending her husband off to work without breakfast, and he complained about this (while paying more attention to his scholarship than to his wife): “your behavior is extremely uneconomic!” to which she would retort “Instead of dragging myself out of bed to struggle through the housework rubbing my eyes, I think it’s a lot more economic to get enough sleep and do the job in a good mood!”
Kinnosuke spent four years in England as an exchange student, returning in 1903 in a somewhat disturbed state of mind which went as far as violence. More than once Kyoko packed up her children (they had two sons and five daughters in total) and returned to her birth family, but she refused to give him a divorce: “he’s violent because he’s sick, not because of me.” She treated him with medication of all kinds and tried to get him to see a psychiatrist, considering him mentally ill, but he resisted.
It was at this time that Kinnosuke’s career as a writer began to take off—he is now, of course, much better known as the Meiji-era novelist Natsume Soseki. He acquired numerous disciples who came to visit weekly, at gatherings where Kyoko took a motherly role. Soseki struggled with stomach issues and repeated hospitalizations, dying at age 50 in 1916. For all they appeared seriously ill-matched, Kyoko remembered him largely with fondness, and the use of her birth name Kiyo for the maid in Soseki’s Botchan has been called a hint at a love letter to her on his part.
Kyoko survived her husband by almost half a century. In 1927, her daughter Fudeko’s husband Matsuoka Yuzuru (a novelist and one of Soseki’s disciples) recorded her memories of life with Soseki, which were published serially, drawing considerable disapprobation of her putative provocation of Soseki’s mental state and failure to act as the legendary author’s perfect consort (although her children and grandchildren took her side). She died in 1963 at the age of eighty-five.
Sources
Nakae
https://www.ch-ginga.jp/detail/sousekinotsuma/ (Japanese) Site citing one of the numerous TV dramas made about Kyoko and Soseki
They were married in 1897, when Kinnosuke was appointed to teach in Kumamoto. Their married life was far from peaceful; Kyoko disliked getting up early and doing housework, sending her husband off to work without breakfast, and he complained about this (while paying more attention to his scholarship than to his wife): “your behavior is extremely uneconomic!” to which she would retort “Instead of dragging myself out of bed to struggle through the housework rubbing my eyes, I think it’s a lot more economic to get enough sleep and do the job in a good mood!”
Kinnosuke spent four years in England as an exchange student, returning in 1903 in a somewhat disturbed state of mind which went as far as violence. More than once Kyoko packed up her children (they had two sons and five daughters in total) and returned to her birth family, but she refused to give him a divorce: “he’s violent because he’s sick, not because of me.” She treated him with medication of all kinds and tried to get him to see a psychiatrist, considering him mentally ill, but he resisted.
It was at this time that Kinnosuke’s career as a writer began to take off—he is now, of course, much better known as the Meiji-era novelist Natsume Soseki. He acquired numerous disciples who came to visit weekly, at gatherings where Kyoko took a motherly role. Soseki struggled with stomach issues and repeated hospitalizations, dying at age 50 in 1916. For all they appeared seriously ill-matched, Kyoko remembered him largely with fondness, and the use of her birth name Kiyo for the maid in Soseki’s Botchan has been called a hint at a love letter to her on his part.
Kyoko survived her husband by almost half a century. In 1927, her daughter Fudeko’s husband Matsuoka Yuzuru (a novelist and one of Soseki’s disciples) recorded her memories of life with Soseki, which were published serially, drawing considerable disapprobation of her putative provocation of Soseki’s mental state and failure to act as the legendary author’s perfect consort (although her children and grandchildren took her side). She died in 1963 at the age of eighty-five.
Sources
Nakae
https://www.ch-ginga.jp/detail/sousekinotsuma/ (Japanese) Site citing one of the numerous TV dramas made about Kyoko and Soseki
