Eguchi Ayako (1888-1946)

[nnozomi]

Eguchi Ayako was born in Oita in 1888. Her family, a traditional sake brewery, fell into disarray after her father’s attempt at expanding his business failed, with both parents and several siblings dying in short order. Ayako still managed to graduate from high school with top grades; she married a local lawyer at eighteen and lived in comfort, studying traditional music and dance with servants to do the housework. Her husband was unfaithful, however, and in 1915, when he was posted to faraway Tsushima, she divorced him and—with help from Hiratsuka Raicho of Bluestocking magazine—moved to Tokyo on her own.

Through Ikuta Hanayo, another Bluestocking, Ayako met the poet Kitahara Hakushu, who had just divorced his first wife Toshiko. Three years older than she, Hakushu was also a brewer’s child from the south whose family had lost their standing; he and Ayako also shared interests in poetry and in Buddhist practice. He was already a very successful poet who had spent time in prison for adultery with his first wife, although when free to marry their marriage only lasted a year. Ayako moved in with him at a temple outside Tokyo; not surprisingly, they had very little to live on. We scrape together a little money, and yet, she wrote in a poem, your umbrella pitches against the rain and wind. Eventually, after their marriage in 1918, Hakushu’s poems began to sell, and he planned a large Western home for them; at the earth-placating ceremony, however, while he was in the middle of a quarrel with his brother and a friend, Ayako is said to have slipped away with his publisher. She and Hakushu were divorced in 1920 (he married his third wife Kikuko within the year).

Ayako returned to Oita, stayed with Yanagiwara Byakuren for a while, and then went on a pilgrimage in Shikoku. In 1921 she moved to a temple in Kyoto to practice Zen and in 1923 married a priest there, but the marriage lasted only two months; she contemplated becoming a geisha, and for the moment returned again to her hometown, where in 1928 she published a collection of prose poems.

In 1930 she married Nakamura Kaisen, another Kyoto priest, who kept the marriage secret because of his ambitions for promotion within the order; Ayako spent several years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. She published a book of poetry in 1934. In 1938 she divorced Kaisen and took the tonsure as a Buddhist nun, living in part on contributions from old friends including Ikuta Hanayo and Hasegawa Shigure.

Ayako died at her childhood home in Oita in 1946, at the age of fifty-eight.

Sources
Mori 2008

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

I knew precisely what you meant, but "Her family, a traditional sake brewery, fell into disarray after her father’s attempt at expanding his business failed, with both parents and several siblings dying in short order," definitely made me imagine a business plan so dramatically dreadful that it directly killed all of them.

[nnozomi]

lol, I see your point. Sometimes it really does seem like that!