Hayashi Fumiko: Life and Major Works

Born in 1903, said to be in Shimonoseki (accounts differ, and some say Moji). Her parents were itinerant peddlers, and she grew up moving from place to place across Kyushu, working her way through Onomichi Municipal Girls' High School. After moving to Tokyo she changed jobs repeatedly — as a maid, a factory hand, a café waitress — while continuing to write poems and children's stories. She serialized the diary-form account of those hard years, "Hōrōki" ("Diary of a Vagabond"), in the magazine "Nyonin Geijutsu" beginning in 1928; on its publication in book form in 1930 it became an unprecedented bestseller and made her an overnight literary star. With the royalties she traveled to Paris, and after returning published autobiographical works of note such as "The Accordion and the Fish Town" and "A Chronicle of Honest Poverty." During the war she went to the front as a war correspondent in China and the South Pacific. After the war she produced one mature work after another — "Late Chrysanthemum" (winner of the Women Writers' Award), "Floating Clouds" — that steadily observed the loneliness and vitality of ordinary women. But in 1951, while serializing "Rice," she died suddenly of heart failure at 47. Her prolific output in her final years, as if racing to write, was called "a literary act of valor," and Kawabata Yasunari read the eulogy at her funeral.