Hasegawa Shigure (1879-1941)
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senzenwomenHasegawa Shigure was born in 1879 in Tokyo, where her father was a lawyer; her birth name was Yasuko and her intimates knew her as O-Yat’chan all her life. She was fond of novels and plays from childhood on, popular among her elementary school classmates for her recountings of the stories she had read. At age fifteen she began to study waka poetry with Sasaki Nobutsuna, until her mother Taki, who resented her oldest daughter Yasuko for the short shrift given Taki by her husband and mother-in-law, sent her out to train as a maid.
Four years later she was married to the son of nouveau-riche family friends, a wastrel who was shortly dispatched to a remote mining town in the north to teach him proper behavior. Yasuko, lonely and isolated in what might at the time as well have been a different country, consoled herself with writing and sent the results to various magazines, winning an award in 1901 for a short story. This gave her the impetus to return to Tokyo in 1904 in order to focus on her writing, eventually divorcing her husband. It was at this point that she began to use “Shigure” as a pen name.
By 1908 Shigure’s theater and kabuki works were beginning to be staged; she was the first female playwright to be recognized by name at the Kabuki-za theater. Rapidly becoming known as a popular playwright (even her mother Taki applauded her success at this point, although she may have had financial motives), she also wrote for dance productions and experimental troupes, working with the kabuki actor Onoue Kikugoro VI, who became a lifelong friend. In 1917 she fell in love with the writer Mikami Otokichi, twelve years younger than she. They lived together from then on but were never formally married.
In 1928, Mikami—whose popular novels were raking in enough cash for him to support multiple mistresses, thanks in part to Shigure’s support and networking—offered to buy her a diamond ring. She requested instead the seed money for a magazine, and subsequently founded Nyonin Geijutsu [Women’s Art] in order to cast light on more women authors: serving as a Japanese equivalent of sorts to the English Time and Tide, it offered a platform to writers including Okada Yachiyo, Hirabayashi Taiko, Sata Ineko, Hiratsuka Raicho, Ozaki Midori, Kamichika Ichiko, the two Fumikos (Enchi and Hayashi), Tamura Toshiko, Takamure Itsue, and many others. Adopting the left-wing orientation of literary circles at the time, the magazine was banned more than once. While its publication run was only five years long, it was a major event in the history of twentieth-century Japanese women’s literature.
Shigure continued to write in her later years while caring for her ill husband. In 1936 she published Kindai Bijinden [Modern Beauties], a collection of biographical sketches of women of the time which she had written over the last two decades, including essays on O-Yuki Morgan, Yanagiwara Byakuren, Matsui Sumako, Raicho, Tazawa Inabune, Takemoto Ayanosuke, Shugensha Hamako, Kujo Takeko, Otsuka Kusuoko, and Iwano Kiyoko among others. As the war took shape, she founded a women’s organization called the Kagayaku Kai [Shining Group] which worked on behalf of Japan’s wartime machine, supporting Japanese troops overseas, Chinese women students in Japan, injured veterans, and the families of soldiers killed in action. She died in 1941 at the age of sixty-three, frustrated on her deathbed that she would not live long enough to write a biography of Higuchi Ichiyo.
Sources
Nakae
Mori 2008
Ishii
Four years later she was married to the son of nouveau-riche family friends, a wastrel who was shortly dispatched to a remote mining town in the north to teach him proper behavior. Yasuko, lonely and isolated in what might at the time as well have been a different country, consoled herself with writing and sent the results to various magazines, winning an award in 1901 for a short story. This gave her the impetus to return to Tokyo in 1904 in order to focus on her writing, eventually divorcing her husband. It was at this point that she began to use “Shigure” as a pen name.
By 1908 Shigure’s theater and kabuki works were beginning to be staged; she was the first female playwright to be recognized by name at the Kabuki-za theater. Rapidly becoming known as a popular playwright (even her mother Taki applauded her success at this point, although she may have had financial motives), she also wrote for dance productions and experimental troupes, working with the kabuki actor Onoue Kikugoro VI, who became a lifelong friend. In 1917 she fell in love with the writer Mikami Otokichi, twelve years younger than she. They lived together from then on but were never formally married.
In 1928, Mikami—whose popular novels were raking in enough cash for him to support multiple mistresses, thanks in part to Shigure’s support and networking—offered to buy her a diamond ring. She requested instead the seed money for a magazine, and subsequently founded Nyonin Geijutsu [Women’s Art] in order to cast light on more women authors: serving as a Japanese equivalent of sorts to the English Time and Tide, it offered a platform to writers including Okada Yachiyo, Hirabayashi Taiko, Sata Ineko, Hiratsuka Raicho, Ozaki Midori, Kamichika Ichiko, the two Fumikos (Enchi and Hayashi), Tamura Toshiko, Takamure Itsue, and many others. Adopting the left-wing orientation of literary circles at the time, the magazine was banned more than once. While its publication run was only five years long, it was a major event in the history of twentieth-century Japanese women’s literature.
Shigure continued to write in her later years while caring for her ill husband. In 1936 she published Kindai Bijinden [Modern Beauties], a collection of biographical sketches of women of the time which she had written over the last two decades, including essays on O-Yuki Morgan, Yanagiwara Byakuren, Matsui Sumako, Raicho, Tazawa Inabune, Takemoto Ayanosuke, Shugensha Hamako, Kujo Takeko, Otsuka Kusuoko, and Iwano Kiyoko among others. As the war took shape, she founded a women’s organization called the Kagayaku Kai [Shining Group] which worked on behalf of Japan’s wartime machine, supporting Japanese troops overseas, Chinese women students in Japan, injured veterans, and the families of soldiers killed in action. She died in 1941 at the age of sixty-three, frustrated on her deathbed that she would not live long enough to write a biography of Higuchi Ichiyo.
Sources
Nakae
Mori 2008
Ishii
