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Harada Kinu (1845-1872)
Nov. 17th, 2023 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiHarada Kinu was born in 1845 in Edo, the daughter of Harada Daisuke, a temporary employee of the samurai (an unstable position treated with samurai rank when employed, which they lost immediately upon unemployment; the more things change). Or maybe she was the daughter of the fisherman Harada Sajiro, depending on which source one believes. In any case, having lost her parents to illness by sixteen, she was adopted by an uncle and eventually became the concubine of the daimyo Okubo Tadayoshi (or Tadanori), to whom she bore a son who became his official heir. [We think. None of the dates quite line up, never mind the names; the disadvantage of giving all male family members the same first character is clear in that the materials do not agree on how to read Tadanori/Tadayoshi or Tadayori/Tadanori/Tadatoshi, or indeed which of them was Kinu’s common-law husband and which her son.]
The disorder of the Meiji Restoration disrupted the Okubo household as well as many others, and Kinu was expelled in 1868, whereupon she became a geisha in the Asakusa district. [She may have spent some time as a Buddhist nun in the interim, mourning Okubo’s 1864 death. Or maybe not.] She became the mistress of the moneylender Kobayashi Kimpei, who supported her comfortably. Introduced by a friend, she fell in love with the Kabuki actor Arashi Rikaku (later Ichikawa Gonjuro), whose good looks and gentle conversation delighted her. She became both his financial patron and his lover.
Kobayashi resented this, not surprisingly, and tried everything up to and including physical abuse to keep her at home; meanwhile, warned by a senior actor not to consort with married women, Arashi refused to see her. At her wit’s end, Kinu sent a maid out to buy rat poison made from arsenic. She mixed tiny amounts of it into Kobayashi’s food, believing that a sudden death would be suspicious, but gradual ill health less so; eventually, in January, 1871, he died in agony. Perhaps she was lucky to avoid a Mithridates/Urquhart result? He was at first thought to have died of food poisoning, leaving Kinu free to attend on Arashi. Six months later, however, the matter came to light.
Kinu gave birth to a son, Rikimatsu, in November. In February of the following year, she was beheaded. The night before her execution, she wrote a poem, playing on her lover Arashi’s name, that became famous: “Yoarashi ni samete ato nashi hana no yume,” or roughly “Waking to a storm in the night which blows away dreams of flowers without a trace.” She became posthumously well known as “Yoarashi O-Kinu,” one of the dokufu or “poison women” murderesses whose stories were a staple of the social media of the time.
Little about her life is definitely known, and most information has been influenced by these sensational reports, presented both as fiction and as non-fiction. Anything above might or might not be factually true.
Sources
Nakae
https://www.myjapanesehanga.com/home/artists/utagawa-hiroshige-iii-1842-1894/the-true-story-of-harada-okina.html (Utagawa woodblock print about the incident)
The disorder of the Meiji Restoration disrupted the Okubo household as well as many others, and Kinu was expelled in 1868, whereupon she became a geisha in the Asakusa district. [She may have spent some time as a Buddhist nun in the interim, mourning Okubo’s 1864 death. Or maybe not.] She became the mistress of the moneylender Kobayashi Kimpei, who supported her comfortably. Introduced by a friend, she fell in love with the Kabuki actor Arashi Rikaku (later Ichikawa Gonjuro), whose good looks and gentle conversation delighted her. She became both his financial patron and his lover.
Kobayashi resented this, not surprisingly, and tried everything up to and including physical abuse to keep her at home; meanwhile, warned by a senior actor not to consort with married women, Arashi refused to see her. At her wit’s end, Kinu sent a maid out to buy rat poison made from arsenic. She mixed tiny amounts of it into Kobayashi’s food, believing that a sudden death would be suspicious, but gradual ill health less so; eventually, in January, 1871, he died in agony. Perhaps she was lucky to avoid a Mithridates/Urquhart result? He was at first thought to have died of food poisoning, leaving Kinu free to attend on Arashi. Six months later, however, the matter came to light.
Kinu gave birth to a son, Rikimatsu, in November. In February of the following year, she was beheaded. The night before her execution, she wrote a poem, playing on her lover Arashi’s name, that became famous: “Yoarashi ni samete ato nashi hana no yume,” or roughly “Waking to a storm in the night which blows away dreams of flowers without a trace.” She became posthumously well known as “Yoarashi O-Kinu,” one of the dokufu or “poison women” murderesses whose stories were a staple of the social media of the time.
Little about her life is definitely known, and most information has been influenced by these sensational reports, presented both as fiction and as non-fiction. Anything above might or might not be factually true.
Sources
Nakae
https://www.myjapanesehanga.com/home/artists/utagawa-hiroshige-iii-1842-1894/the-true-story-of-harada-okina.html (Utagawa woodblock print about the incident)
