Horiai Setsuko (1886-1913)

[nnozomi]

Horiai Setsuko was born in 1886 in Morioka, north Japan, the daughter of a regional bureaucrat. In her first year at Morioka Girls’ School, early in her teens, she met Ishikawa Hajime, a year ahead of her at the regional high school and the son of a local priest. They were drawn to each other immediately—he was apparently attracted by Setsuko’s cuteness and her violin playing. After her graduation in 1902, she became an elementary school teacher. She had a number of offers for marriage, but had eyes for no one but Hajime. Her parents were not thrilled about this—he wasn’t strong, he was intent on the risky venture of making his name as a poet, he had quit high school before graduation—but she insisted, telling her father she was pregnant with Hajime’s child (she wasn’t) in order to gain his permission to marry.

Their engagement dragged on for some time as Hajime, now calling himself Takuboku, wandered around Tokyo and Iwate trying to publish a book of poetry; he had become an admirer of the Myojo group led by Yosano Akiko and her husband Tekkan. Setsuko refused to change her mind; they were finally married in 1905 (Takuboku, traveling in Sendai, missed his own wedding), and after a brief period in Morioka, when he published a poetry magazine and she wrote for it, settled in nearby Shibutami Village. There, their daughter Kyoko was born and Takuboku tried to pay the rent as an elementary school teacher. He liked the work, but was fired after a year when he led a strike against the principal.

They were to be poor and struggling for the rest of their lives; Takuboku worked in Hokkaido as a wandering reporter for a year or two and then moved to Tokyo, where he got a job as proofreader for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, but all his salary went on movie tickets or prostitutes or whatever else caught his eye. He borrowed, notably from his lifelong friend Kindaichi Kyosuke, to pay the rent; people put up with him for some reason, apparently not alone the excellence of his poetry.

Setsuko worked as a teacher in Hokkaido for a while, supporting her mother-in-law without pleasure on either part and cursing her husband for sending no money to support the family. They all moved to Tokyo in 1909, where Setsuko had two more children, Shin’ichi, who died as a baby, and Fusae (who was born after her father’s death). Takuboku died of TB in 1912 and Setsuko a year later, at the age of twenty-seven, leaving her husband’s diaries to a literary friend rather than burning them as he had instructed. Her father brought up their daughters.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.tohokukanko.jp/en/attractions/detail_1551.html (English) Beautiful house in Morioka where Setsuko and Takuboku lived very briefly after their marriage
https://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2013/10/dark-wings-of-night-four-tanka-by.html (English) Poems by Setsuko in translation

Comments

[mekare]

>> (Takuboku, traveling in Sendai, missed his own wedding),

SERIOUSLY????

Man, only 27 years of a life and so many things happened... tragic really.

[nnozomi]

>> (Takuboku, traveling in Sendai, missed his own wedding),
SERIOUSLY????
I know! It will not be a surprise that a lot of people present at the time told Setsuko to get out while the getting was good... :(

[nineveh_uk]

I've got to say, after so many Fridays where the parents made their daughter marry someone awful, finally here the parents were right!

[nnozomi]

You are so right. It's hard not to go SETSUKO NO the whole time, poor woman. (Takuboku must have had _something_, though; Setsuko and Kyosuke both stuck with him for his whole life even while he put Setsuko through hell and was the Worst Friend to Kyosuke.)

[chestnut_pod]

But how do you miss your own wedding while still ending up legally married? Second wedding?

[nnozomi]

Ceremony conducted in absentia! Genuinely! I am honestly not sure about the legal parts; it may be that they just submitted some paperwork when he finally showed up and that covered it.