Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Endo Kiyoko was born in 1882 in Tokyo. After leaving high school, she worked as a teacher, a railway company clerk, and a reporter as well as becoming involved in political activism (demanding the revision of Article 5 of the Peace Police Law (forerunner of the infamous Peace Preservation Law), which forbade women to engage in political activity; she picketed the National Diet building in men’s clothes and a woman’s traditional hairstyle).

In December 1909 she met the writer Iwano Homei, nine years older than she was, who already had one wife, six children, and countless girlfriends. Five days after their first meeting he was already asking her to live with and marry him. Kiyoko herself had had a troubled love life, once attempting suicide when her “platonic lover” of five years betrayed her (she had refused to sleep with him without marriage, unwilling to become “one of his belongings”). She had no reason whatsoever to trust Iwano, but she wanted a change of scene, and agreed to live with him on the grounds that a) he would never hit her and b) they would live together as friends sharing a house. Each of them had their own room, with both names on the gate. At the time this was unusual enough to bring reporters from the Yorozu Choho [Universal Morning News], to whom Kiyoko said “I’m still hooked on my previous man. I’m not even slightly in love with Iwano,” while Iwano said “She continues to refuse my second condition [ie sex], but I have hopes.” The reporter added a sensationalist headline along the lines of “Two Oddities: Will the Spirit or the Flesh Win?”.

As recorded in her diary, Iwano continued to press his attentions on Kiyoko, using every method in the book from a kiss on the hand to a hint that she must be sexually abnormal if she wasn’t interested. Her former lover visited and Iwano complained that he couldn’t lord it over him; his ex-wife visited to ask for money, remarking snidely “you two seem well matched” (given that she was raising Iwano’s six children, it’s hard to blame her for her tone). Various other friends appeared to observe the situation. Iwano wrote Kiyoko letters addressed from his room to hers. When Kiyoko gave in is not clear, but by the following spring she was calling him her husband and they were working together on his new book. They were officially married three years later in 1913. [It is extremely tempting to think that Dorothy Sayers was influenced by this story when she wrote Strong Poison, except that the chances of her actually having heard about it are for all intents and purposes zero. Proving the universality of certain kinds of male behavior?]

In 1912 Kiyoko had begun writing for Hiratsuka Raicho’s feminist journal Seito [Bluestocking], where she left a vivid impression with her “strong personality, heavy makeup, big hair, and green cape” (Raicho). In 1913, she and Iwano both spoke at a Bluestocking-sponsored lecture series, Iwano on “Men’s Demands” (interrupted by a heckler demanding “so why did you get divorced?”) and Kiyoko on “Ideological Independence and Economic Independence”: men and women were essentially equal and discrimination against women was a problem of society, so women must become both ideologically and economically independent and should have the right to handle their own finances.

Their son Tamio was born in 1914; predictably, Iwano began to lose interest in his wife thereafter, going so far as to sleep with Kambara Fusae, the young Bluestocking staff member engaged by Kiyoko to work with Iwano on a translation. Kiyoko moved out, demanding two-thirds of Iwano’s income into the bargain, to which Iwano grudgingly agreed. In the following two years, however, she sued him twice for failing to pay child support. Iwano sued in return for divorce; Kiyoko won (advised by the judge to settle it amicably, she retorted that she didn’t mind divorcing but she insisted on cash in hand, although Iwano was too broke to pay up). During the trial, her diary of their marriage was published, dedicated by initials to her previous lover. Iwano married Fusae shortly after the divorce was complete (Fusae herself had protested that she had no intention of living off him as his mistress, only taking money for the work she actually did for his book). The newspapers went to town.

In 1917, Kiyoko began to live with an art student ten years younger than she, Endo Tatsunosuke (same family name, no relation), with whom she opened a flower shop; their relationship was ultimately short and conducted amid poverty, but very affectionate from all accounts. Their daughter Aiko was born in 1920; Kiyoko died (of gall bladder problems?) only seven months later (oddly enough, Iwano died in the same year). Tamio was adopted by Araki Ikuko, another Bluestocking staffer, but died in the 1923 earthquake; Aiko was adopted by Kiyoko’s lawyer, Kawaguchi Shozo, and eventually moved to America.

Sources
Mori 1996, Mori 2008
Hasegawa Shigure [I’m tempted to sit down and translate this, one of Shigure’s “Modern Beauties” essays, because it’s so readable—part one describing a very sad group visit to Kiyoko’s grave long after her death, and part two in quasi-fictional form from Kiyoko’s POV shortly after moving in with Iwano, hearing something in the next room and thinking it’s the cat she gave away when she moved, until she realizes it’s her new ?partner snoring. “Losing oneself might be necessary in order to build a bigger self, she told herself.” “She missed him so [while he was away working in Osaka], even the frogs seemed to be croaking o-sa-ka o-sa-ka.”]

Mori Shige was born in 1880 in Tokyo, the daughter of a judge; her maiden name was Araki. A nicely brought up young girl who studied painting, koto and flower arrangement and graduated from Gakushuin Girls’ School (the school of choice for upper-class young ladies), she daydreamed as a child about becoming the Empress of Russia, eager to marry someone unique. Her first marriage, a family arrangement when she was in her teens, was to an up and coming young banker; however, it was rapidly dissolved when his relationship with a local geisha was discovered.

Shige met Mori Rintaro (better known as the novelist Mori Ogai) in 1902, when he was a military doctor in Kyushu; he was eighteen years older than she and, like her, had been married and divorced once already. He already had a twelve-year-old son, Otto (having studied in Germany, Ogai gave all his children German names written in Japanese characters). Although he had been stubbornly refusing his mother’s urgings to remarry, Ogai gave in when he met Shige and was struck by her beauty (“like a work of art” in his words). Shige, as a fan of his novels, was pleased with the opportunity to marry her idol.

The initial harmony of their married life was disturbed three months in when Ogai was posted back to Tokyo, where they moved in with his mother and sisters and Shige experienced the classic Japanese mother-in-law/daughter-in-law struggles. She found Ogai’s mother Mineko, who ran the household (including Ogai’s military salary) with an iron grip, so difficult to handle that she ended up taking shelter with her daughter Mari (born in 1903) in a room of her own parents’ house. Ogai put this into the short story Hanjitsu[Half a Day] in 1909; upon reading it, Shige was so infuriated that she started writing and publishing her own stories (in some accounts, encouraged to do so by Ogai), submitting them to Seito [Bluestocking] among other magazines. She depicted her husband in fiction as a loving partner and gentle father, while omitting her mother-in-law entirely.

Their son Fritz was born in 1907 and died the following year; Anne was born in 1909 and Louis in 1911. As her children told it, Shige was apparently a resistant mother, getting on badly with her stepson Otto and very critical of the children’s looks, including telling Louis that he had better sow his wild oats in the West where women didn’t know what really handsome men looked like (she also bought him prophylactics when she felt he was old enough to visit the red-light districts).

Ogai died in 1922; Shige survived him by over a decade, living to see her grandchildren, and like other writers’ wives suffering from the criticism of his family (including his younger sister Koganei Kimiko, also a writer) and friends. Afraid after Mari was divorced twice running that Anne would never be able to marry, Shige sent her to France to study painting, along with Louis, who was struggling in school (in the event Anne married the painter Kobori Shiro). All four of Ogai’s surviving children made themselves known; Otto became a pathologist, Mari a novelist known for tanbi better known to cdrama fans by its Chinese pronunciation of danmei novels, and Anne and Louis essayists. Shige died in 1936 at the age of fifty-five.

Sources
Nakae
https://forbesjapan.com/articles/detail/50669 (Japanese) Includes photographs of Shige in her youth.

Sasaki Nobuko was born in 1878 in Tokyo, where her father ran a hospital and her mother, Sasaki Toyoju, was the head of the Japan Women’s Christian Temperance Union (founded jointly with Yajima Kajiko), working actively for monogamy and against prostitution and alcoholism; Toyoju was also aunt to Soma Kokko. Nobuko spent her youth studying at mission schools; her mother hoped to have her study in the United States and become a journalist.

In 1895, when Nobuko was eighteen, the Sasakis held a party for writers who had reported on the First Sino-Japanese War, among them the 25-year-old journalist Kunikida Doppo. Immediately struck by Nobuko’s straightforward intelligence and beauty, he began to court her with English poetry of his own as well as recitations of Wordworth. Nobuko was charmed enough to agree to his proposal of marriage, but her mother was fiercely opposed, and eventually gave in only on the condition that they married quietly and lived outside Tokyo. However, the marriage did not go well: Doppo, trying to make a living from his writing, was desperately poor, barely able to put rice on the table. He was also short-tempered and high-handed. Nobuko fled back to her parents less than six months later, where she shortly gave birth to a daughter called Urako, who was added to the family register in the guise of her younger sister.

Both her parents died not long after. In 1901, relatives sent her to America to marry a politician’s son called Mori Hiroshi; they did not expect, however, that on the long boat trip she would fall in love with the chief purser, Takei Kanzaburo, and he (although married), with her. Instead of staying in the US, she got straight back on the boat to return to Japan with Takei.
This “scandalous” behavior was leaked to the newspapers by a fellow passenger, the educationalist Hatoyama Haruko, which left Nobuko exposed to fierce criticism and slander as a “loose woman” “unbefitting to her class” and so on. The writer Arishima Takeo (a close friend of Nobuko’s unsuccessful fiancé Mori) picked up her story and made a novel out of it, Aru Onna [A Certain Woman] (in which the Nobuko figure dies in the end). Nobuko’s little sister Yoshie, furious, demanded to meet with Arishima and defend her sister’s honor, but Arishima committed suicide along with his lover Hatano Akiko before she could make this happen.

Once the furor had died down, Nobuko and Takei (until his death in 1921) ran an inn in the southern city of Sasebo, raising their daughter Ruriko. One of their guests, Okabe Kansuke, eventually married Sasaki Yoshie and took her to his hometown of Maoka in Tochigi. In 1925, when Yoshie became ill after childbirth, Nobuko took Ruriko and moved to Maoka to help look after her. There, as well as looking after her sister’s family, she ran a Sunday school which made her very popular among the local children, continuing it throughout World War II even when Christianity was not well regarded. She died in 1949 at the age of seventy-one.

Sources
Nakae
https://kusanomido.com/study/history/japan/shouwa/101171/ (Japanese) Biographical article with photographs of some of the relevant people

Natsume Kyoko was born in 1877 in Tokyo, where her father was a senior bureaucrat; her maiden name was Nakane. At nineteen, she became engaged through a matchmaker to Natsume Kinnosuke, ten years older than she, at the time a high school English teacher in Shikoku. Their reactions on seeing each other’s photos, and agreeing to go ahead with the marriage, are recorded: she liked his firm features and thought he looked refined and gentle, while he noticed that her teeth were yellowed and snaggly but approved of the way she made no attempt to conceal this. (Also, he was a graduate of the University of Tokyo, and her father had already declared his refusal to marry off his daughter to any man who hadn’t attended one of the Imperial Universities.)

They were married in 1897, when Kinnosuke was appointed to teach in Kumamoto. Their married life was far from peaceful; Kyoko disliked getting up early and doing housework, sending her husband off to work without breakfast, and he complained about this (while paying more attention to his scholarship than to his wife): “your behavior is extremely uneconomic!” to which she would retort “Instead of dragging myself out of bed to struggle through the housework rubbing my eyes, I think it’s a lot more economic to get enough sleep and do the job in a good mood!”

Kinnosuke spent four years in England as an exchange student, returning in 1903 in a somewhat disturbed state of mind which went as far as violence. More than once Kyoko packed up her children (they had two sons and five daughters in total) and returned to her birth family, but she refused to give him a divorce: “he’s violent because he’s sick, not because of me.” She treated him with medication of all kinds and tried to get him to see a psychiatrist, considering him mentally ill, but he resisted.

It was at this time that Kinnosuke’s career as a writer began to take off—he is now, of course, much better known as the Meiji-era novelist Natsume Soseki. He acquired numerous disciples who came to visit weekly, at gatherings where Kyoko took a motherly role. Soseki struggled with stomach issues and repeated hospitalizations, dying at age 50 in 1916. For all they appeared seriously ill-matched, Kyoko remembered him largely with fondness, and the use of her birth name Kiyo for the maid in Soseki’s Botchan has been called a hint at a love letter to her on his part.

Kyoko survived her husband by almost half a century. In 1927, her daughter Fudeko’s husband Matsuoka Yuzuru (a novelist and one of Soseki’s disciples) recorded her memories of life with Soseki, which were published serially, drawing considerable disapprobation of her putative provocation of Soseki’s mental state and failure to act as the legendary author’s perfect consort (although her children and grandchildren took her side). She died in 1963 at the age of eighty-five.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.ch-ginga.jp/detail/sousekinotsuma/ (Japanese) Site citing one of the numerous TV dramas made about Kyoko and Soseki

Senuma Kayo was born in 1875 in Gunma, where her father ran a seed nursery; her birth name was Yamada Ikuko. She was raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church; upon her mother Yoka’s death in 1883, burial in the family plot was prohibited on account of her Christianity. Ikuko went to a church-affiliated girls’ school in Tokyo, graduating in 1892 and attempting a career as a writer while teaching at her alma mater.

Given books in Russian by Archbishop Nicholas, whom she had admired since childhood, Ikuko studied the language with Ivan Senuma Kakusaburo, the head of the Orthodox St. Nikolai Cathedral seminary (he had run away from home at sixteen to go into the church and attended seminary in Kiev), and married him in 1897; they were to have six children. After her marriage he introduced her to the writer Ozaki Koyo, who took her on as a disciple (his first female one) and gave her the pen name Kayo, which shares a character with his own pen name.

She became a well-known Russian translator, as the first Japanese woman to translate directly from the Russian. Her translations included works by Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, and others, as well as a joint attempt at Anna Karenina with her husband (who was among Tolstoy’s correspondents, although their religious beliefs clashed). Her style is said to have valued elegance in Japanese writing over absolute faithfulness to the source text.

In 1909, frustrated by being shut up in the house, Kayo set off on a trip to Russia and sent back a series of newspaper articles about her visit to Vladivostok. In 1911 she traveled there again, accompanied only by her baby daughter Fumiko if that’s how you read it; I never saw the name 文代子 in my life. Fuyoko? Ayoko?, traveling as far as St. Petersburg on the Siberian Railway. (There was gossip at the time that Fumiko was the daughter of a Russian exchange student ten years Kayo’s junior.) In St. Petersburg she worked as a shop clerk and a Japanese instructor.

Upon her return to Japan in 1912, she became a member of Hiratsuka Raicho’s feminist magazine Seito [Bluestocking], which published her translations of Chekhov (whom she enjoyed for his humor among other reasons) before they were released in book form. She died in 1915 from complications of a seventh pregnancy.

Tazawa Inabune was born in 1874 in Yamagata, where her father was a doctor and her mother a local businesswoman. Her birth name was Kin. She was scholarly and clever from early on, as well as very pretty. At seventeen, persuading her parents not to marry her off immediately to an adopted-husband who would carry on her father’s occupation, she moved to Tokyo to study literature and registered at the Kyoritsu Girls’ Vocational School.

In the spring of that year, 1891, she met the writer Yamada Bimyo (Taketaro), with whom she had already been corresponding. Already well known for his innovative (at the time) use of oral rather than literary language in novels, Yamada also ran a women’s literary magazine, which had brought them together when Kin submitted a poem. He and Kin quickly became involved, although she was by no means his only girlfriend. Horrified at the news they heard of their daughter’s behavior, Kin’s parents summoned her back to Yamagata, where she began writing seriously, publishing in local literary magazines. It was at this point that she began to use the pen name Inabune (sometimes read as Inafune).

In 1894 the papers reported that Yamada had been living off an Asakusa geisha, Ishii Tome. “I tried it out to use as fodder for my novels,” he excused himself, which even in that era did not go over very well. Inabune was heartbroken, but did not break off her ongoing correspondence with him. It was through his intervention that in July 1895 her writing was first published in major literary magazines (although the harsh criticism of men appearing in several of her short stories has been suggested to derive directly from her reaction to Yamada’s behavior).

At the end of 1895, Inabune and Yamada married. Thanks to Yamada’s continuing misbehavior (apart from his womanizing, he made her write to her family asking them for money) and the overbearing presences of his mother and grandmother in the same house, the marriage lasted barely three months. The newspapers did not spare Inabune their curiosity. Already ill with tuberculosis, she fled back to her family; Yamada wasted no time after their divorce in moving in a geisha as his new wife. At home in Yamagata, Inabune devoted herself to writing, producing several more and less autobiographical stories, until her death in May 1896. In keeping with the original inaccurate reports that she had committed suicide, Yamada’s reputation in the literary world was left in ruins. The journal Waseda Literature wrote of Inabune that she would have been likely to become a notable author if given another ten or twenty years of life.

Sources
Mori 1996

Higuchi Ichiyo was born in 1872 in Tokyo, where her father Noriyoshi, a minor bureaucrat in the new Meiji government, had eloped from his hometown in Yamanashi with her mother Taki when the latter got pregnant. Her birth name was Natsu. In spite of their poverty, Natsu’s father noticed her intelligence and her frustration at her lack of schooling and sent her to the Haginoya poetry school run by Nakajima Utako, where she got to know Tanabe (later Miyake) Kaho. Unable to afford new clothes to wear to poetry recitals, she entertained her better-off fellow students with satirical poems punning on the patchwork state of her own kimonos, earning top marks.

By 1889, Natsu’s father and oldest brother were both dead, and her second brother estranged from the family; at not quite eighteen she was responsible for supporting her mother and younger sister Kuni. They took in sewing and laundry for a while, but were unable to make much headway, becoming infamous then and later on for their tendency to borrow money from anyone and everyone (just as often spending it on an eel dinner or a night at the music hall, or giving it away to someone even needier, instead of putting it toward existing debts). It was at this point that Natsu’s old classmate Kaho published the novel Warbler in the Grove for what seemed to her like handsome royalties. Writing had to be an easier way to make money, she realized, and set out to become a novelist.

She apprenticed herself to Nakarai Tosui, an author of popular newspaper serials, and immediately fell in love with him, recording in her diary how she would blush and struggle to speak in his presence. Tosui, fourteen years older and a well-known womanizer although a kind man overall, did not return her feelings (both legally heads of their households, they could not easily have married in any case) but did help her get her start as a writer, with short stories published in various magazines under the name of Higuchi Ichiyo.

Still short of money, in 1893 she and her mother and sister opened a short-lived stationery and penny candy shop near the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters. Her experiences in this neighborhood led to the stories now considered her best works, such as “Takekurabe [Growing Up]” and “Nigorie [Troubled Waters],” drawing on what she saw there as well as her own background. The maturity of her work was recognized by the literary journals, leading to the so-called “miracle fourteen months” in which she became a highly popular author with recognition from the literary lights of the day, such as Mori Ogai and Koda Rohan. Visitors record her appearance at the time: small, delicate, dark-skinned, wispy-haired, dowdily dressed, in general not what they had expected from the brilliant new young lady author.

Already ill with tuberculosis, however, Ichiyo died in 1896 at the age of twenty-four, leaving a voluminous diary as well as a double handful of short stories and novellas. Ironically given her money struggles in life, her portrait now appears on the Japanese five-thousand-yen note.

Sources
Nakae
Mori 2014
https://www.bunkyokurasi.com/rekisitobunka/ichiyou1.html (Japanese) Various photos of Ichiyo and family
https://www.tofugu.com/japan/higuchi-ichiyo/ (English) Account of Ichiyo’s life with some excerpts from her diary and discussion of her stories

Miyake Kaho was born in 1868 in Tokyo, originally named Tanabe Tatsu; her father was a teacher and language scholar who became a diplomat in the new Meiji administration. They were well-to-do and lived in Western style. Tatsu attended the newly established Atomi School for Girls, under its founder, Atomi Kakei, whom she admired.

When she was thirteen, however, her father’s libertine extravagance brought the family down in the world; they moved to a much smaller house and she left school to study alone at home. There she learned the Chinese and Japanese classics, traditional musical instruments, painting, and waka poetry. For the latter, she was sent to Nakajima Utako’s Haginoya school of poetry, where she studied alongside Higuchi Ichiyo.

In order to have Tatsu learn English, her mother also sent her to the Sakurai Girls’ School, where she studied with Yajima Kajiko (and was summarily pulled out by her offended mother when asked to bring Christmas presents to school), and later to the Meiji Girls’ School under Iwamoto Yoshiharu. She left the Meiji school likewise after a short time, upon the untimely death of her older brother Jiroichi, and in 1886 enrolled in the Tokyo Normal School for Women (later Ochanomizu University), where she spent three years, mastering English and gleefully attending school dances.

Tatsu had always been fond of writing, especially poetry. In 1887, sick in bed at home, she was given a copy of a novel by Tsubouchi Shoyo and found its natural rendition of student life very striking. “…I could do that,” she thought, and started writing her own. She was also motivated by the desire to earn money for a memorial service for her brother (although this may be a later justification on her part). The novel she wrote, Yabu no uguisu [Warbler in the Grove], was published (with some help from Tsubouchi and various family friends) to a positive reception, under the pen name of Kaho. The story of various young women facing marriage and schooling and the ensemble cast surrounding them, it brings in the same questions of Westernization and education for women that had marked Kaho’s life so far.

In 1892, Kaho married the journalist Miyake Setsurei. While her writing pace slowed after marrying and bearing five children (most of whom became or married eminent personages later on), she continued to produce numerous short stories and essays, mostly in the same vein of character sketches and examinations of the era as her debut work. She died in 1932.

Sources
Copland

Koizumi Setsuko was born in 1868 in Matsue on the southern Japan Seacoast. From childhood she was fond of stories, teasing the adults around her to tell her fairy tales and folktales. Adopted soon after birth by relatives, she left school at age eleven to work in her birth father’s spinning factory when her adoptive family fell on hard times. In 1886 she married, in part to help out her adoptive family’s economic situation, but her husband immediately took off for Osaka and refused to return; Setsuko divorced him and returned to her birth family.

In 1890 she became the housekeeper for Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-Irish journalist and writer then teaching English at a high school in Matsue. He admired her stubborn capacity for hard work, and they were married in 1891. Hearn’s burgeoning career was to take them to Kumamoto, Kobe, and finally Tokyo; in 1896 he took Japanese citizenship and became Koizumi Yakumo, adopting Setsuko’s family name. They had four children, sons Kazuo, Iwao, and Kiyoshi and daughter Suzuko; the only existingletters from Yakumo to Setsuko are a pleasantly pastoral record of a summer vacation with the boys.

Neither was fluent in the other’s language; they developed their own “Hearn-speak” form of Japanese in which to communicate. Yakumo was fascinated with Japanese folktales and ghost stories, eventually publishing the well-known English-language collection Kwaidan. To provide him with material, Setsuko would trawl the local second-hand bookstores, coming home with assorted collections which she would read to him. He insisted that rather than simply reading aloud, she retell the stories in her own words, with her own inflections and opinions, and found her a gifted storyteller; it has been suggested that Kwaidan should list her as co-author as well.

Yakumo died in 1904, leaving a thirty-six-year-old Setsuko with four children under ten. She survived him by almost thirty years, raising their children and keeping herself amused with Noh singing and the tea ceremony until her death in 1932.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.hearn-museum-matsue.jp/exhibition-setsu.html (English/Japanese) Biography of Setsuko and photos of their possessions
https://www.hearn-museum-matsue.jp/archives/family/index.html (English/Japanese) Family photos

Wakamatsu Shizuko was born in 1864 in Aizu, originally named Matsukawa Kashi, to a samurai family on the wrong side of the Meiji Restoration fighting. Like Niijima Yae and Oyama Sutematsu, she experienced the horrific siege of Aizu-Wakamatsu as a child. She was six when her mother died, leaving her alone in a DP camp (her father was fighting in Hokkaido, with Enomoto Tatsu’s husband Takeaki) until she was adopted by Okawa Jinbei, a Yokohama silk merchant (who wanted a child as company for his wife O-Roku, formerly an Aizu prostitute whose freedom Okawa had purchased).

The Okawas, and later Kashi’s birth father upon his return, sent her to Miss Kidder’s School for Girls, later Ferris Seminary, a boarding school run by missionaries. There Kashi was baptized in 1877 and became the school’s first graduate in 1882, giving a speech in English at the ceremony. One of her teachers described her as possessed of “[a] nervous temperament, yet having a masterly self-control that lent a quiet dignity to all her movements. She possessed quick mental activity and vivid emotions, without…offensive forwardness.”

She immediately became a teacher at her alma mater, running English literature and drama clubs alongside her classes and acting as an interpreter when needed. In 1886 she became engaged to Serata Tasuku, a naval officer who possessed all the virtues as far as she and the school were concerned (Christian, cosmopolitan, fluent in English, and very handsome). However, Kashi herself broke off the engagement for reasons that are not clear but may have had to do with her already poor health or with her sense that Serata was out of her star, or with a different man met in a different context.

Likewise in 1886, Kashi began to write essays and short stories for the magazine Jogaku Zasshi (Women’s Education). From this point on, she began to use “Wakamatsu Shizu” or “Shizuko” as a pen name. “Wakamatsu” came from her hometown; “Shizu,” written unusually with the character for “peasant” or “lowly,” may have come from a sense of herself as God’s servant.

Jogaku Zasshi was published by the Christian educator Iwamoto Yoshiharu, whose work Shizuko admired; she transformed his (Japanese) biography of Kimura Toko, the recently deceased founder of the Meiji Girls’ School, into a lengthy English poem. Shizuko and Iwamoto married in 1889. She wrote an English poem called “The Bridal Veil” to mark the occasion, which he published in the magazine thereafter. “…Look close on my heart, see the worst of its shining./It’s not yours to-day for the yesterday’s winning./The past is not mine. I am too proud to borrow./You must grow to new heights if I love you tomorrow./We’re married! O, pray that our love do not fail!/I have wings flattened down, and hid under my veil,/They are subtle as light, you can undo them,/And swift in their flight, you can never pursue them./And spite of all clasping, and spite of all bands,/I can slip like a shadow, a dream, from your hands./…”

She left her teaching job not long after, feeling unable to do it justice due to her failing health. As a translator, she produced Japanese versions of Longfellow, Tennyson, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy” (which became a bestseller in translation) and Sara Crewe, Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others of the time, focusing particularly on children’s literature; some of the lesser-known works, such as those of Adelaide Anne Procter, she rewrote to provide a Japanese setting more familiar to her readers. Her translations were extremely punctilious even when freer in nature, going through multiple drafts. She remarked that “[s]truggling to come up with the most appropriate word in translation is an agonizing process. But once you have found it the joyful satisfaction you feel is like to that of a woman who, rummaging through her dresser drawers, at last comes upon the very kimono collar whose design suits her perfectly.” Her translations were both very popular and critically acclaimed, even by the stringent standards of the male translators of the time.

Shizuko also wrote numerous short stories of her own, focusing on the status of women and their experiences of family life and marriage. In both her translations and her original work, she was a pioneer of genbun itchi, the practice of using a written style which approximated speech rather than an abstracted literary dialect. Somewhere in there, even as her health continued to decline, she also found the time to bear children in 1890, 1891, and 1893 (Kiyoko, Masahito, and Tamiko). From 1894 on she published a series of English essays on social and religious issues in The Japan Evangelist. In 1895, pregnant with a fourth child, she died.

Sources
Ishii, Nakae
Rebecca L. Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000)