"Ichiyo Higuchi (1872 - 1896)" - 2 -

Turning fourteen years old, Ichiyo entered a composing
school and became an assistant to a composing master.
However, during several years she was stricken with bad
lucks, losing her eldest brother due to disease at fifteen
years old, and her benevolent father at seventeen years
old.

Ichiyo, together with her mother and her sister stayed at
her second elder brother for a while, but they left from hi
dwelling soon after because the relationship between her mother and the
brother was not favorable.

This incident left Ichiyo to be the primary bread winner at only seventeen years old and she made a living by sewing and araihari in company with her mother and sister. Even though they worked hard, their life remained frugal because of low pay, and they managed to live their daily lives by borrowing money and depositing at a pawnshop.

Under such hardship, Ichiyo met a journalist and novelist named Tohsui Nakahara through her acquaintance, and she started to learn to write a novel under his guidance. In her dairy, she confessed that she was very impressed with Tohsui Nakahara, and gradually became to admire him not only as a master but also as a man.

Eventually her short novels and manuscripts appeared in a newspaper and magazines, but due to her insufficient remuneration, at 21 she opened a variety store including sweets as a side business. Unfortunately, this business did not succeed, and the store was closed in less than ten months.

On the other hand, Ichiyo made a firm resolution to devote all her energies to write a novel at that time. Later, her experiences in those days produced a famous novel titled Takekurabe.

She rewrote her manuscript over and over under Tohsui's advice that in order to increase the sales of novels one must write to gain popular public acceptance, discarding her relatively lofty composition style, and she forced herself to put extra effort to write a manuscript everyday.

Gradually, she had doubts about writing for a commercial purpose and experienced mortification for being a woman in those times. Since she was well acquainted with the upper and the lower classes in her composing classes, it came natural to her to express her view of the times in her composition. She began to write off one story after another that picked up on the life of women in those days.

Known as the Miraculous fourteen months, from twenty-two years old to twenty-three, she published highly acclaimed novels after another, such as the "Ohtugomori", "Takekurabe", "Nigorie", "Jyusannya", etc., and was admired by Ohgai Mori who was the leading scholar of Japanese literature of the times and finally became respected as a promising new writer in the literary world.

End

(*) Araihari: To stretch and dry the pieces of kimono on boards after they have been washed and starched.