Mozume Kazuko (1888-1979)
May. 22nd, 2026 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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senzenwomenMozume Kazuko was born in 1888 in Tokyo, where her father was a professor of linguistics (he also edited dictionaries, getting the position thanks to Shimoda Utako). Kazuko graduated from the Atomi School for Girls and, along with her sister Yoshiko, studied writing with Futabatei Shimei, who left them in Natsume Soseki’s hands upon leaving Japan. Her work (an autobiographical short story) was first published in 1910 in the literary magazine Hototogisu. The following year, when Hiratsuka Raicho started her women’s journal Bluestocking, she asked her old classmate Yoshiko to take part; Yoshiko, about to marry a diplomat, suggested her baby sister Kazuko instead.
The well-to-do Mozumes provided office space for the journal, and Kazuko worked on the editing staff and published several pieces of her own in it. In 1913, however, an issue of Bluestocking was banned by the Ministry of Education as injurious to the precepts of good wives and wise mothers, and Kazuko’s father, horrified by having policemen search his house and frighten Kazuko’s five-year-old half-brother, made her leave the women’s movement (on the pretext of her stepmother’s death the previous year). She continued to publish occasional works under a penname, but considered herself a “dropout” from the magazine ever after.
Kazuko married Fujinami Goichi, an eminent radiologist, and became a member of a group promoting education for the deaf. She also edited the journal of her husband’s hobby organization, which brought together people interested in cleaning moss off graves and recording the contents of gravestones, publishing a lengthy record of their results (they also shared the equally recondite hobby of gathering with like-minded people monthly to eat unusual fruits). Her husband died in 1942; after the war she and her sister Yoshiko, who wrote detective novels, lived together and gave calligraphy lessons. She died in 1979 at the age of ninety-one.
The well-to-do Mozumes provided office space for the journal, and Kazuko worked on the editing staff and published several pieces of her own in it. In 1913, however, an issue of Bluestocking was banned by the Ministry of Education as injurious to the precepts of good wives and wise mothers, and Kazuko’s father, horrified by having policemen search his house and frighten Kazuko’s five-year-old half-brother, made her leave the women’s movement (on the pretext of her stepmother’s death the previous year). She continued to publish occasional works under a penname, but considered herself a “dropout” from the magazine ever after.
Kazuko married Fujinami Goichi, an eminent radiologist, and became a member of a group promoting education for the deaf. She also edited the journal of her husband’s hobby organization, which brought together people interested in cleaning moss off graves and recording the contents of gravestones, publishing a lengthy record of their results (they also shared the equally recondite hobby of gathering with like-minded people monthly to eat unusual fruits). Her husband died in 1942; after the war she and her sister Yoshiko, who wrote detective novels, lived together and gave calligraphy lessons. She died in 1979 at the age of ninety-one.
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Date: 2026-05-22 12:57 pm (UTC)This sounds so fun. I want to be a member of a weird fruits club!