More Life

Nogami Yaeko was born in 1885 in Usuki, Oita, way down south in Kyushu, to a merchant family handling sake, soy sauce, and miso (their soy sauce company is still in business today). Her maiden name was Kotegawa. After studying literature and poetry with private tutors, at fifteen she went to live with an uncle in Tokyo and attend the Meiji Girls’ School. Shortly after graduation, aged twenty-one, she married Nogami Toyoichiro, then a student of English literature and a landsman from Usuki; they had met when she engaged him as an English tutor. The following year, Toyoichiro introduced her to the author Natsume Soseki, who looked over her short stories and gave her her first publication credit in the magazine Hototogisu. Although—as a young married woman from the provinces with only a high school education—she was not permitted to take part in the “Thursday Meeting” literary gatherings held at Soseki’s home, her husband passed on to her the content of the discussions there in detail. (Among the participants there was the novelist Naka Kansuke, with whom Yaeko fell briefly and turbulently in love, although he does not seem to have reciprocated; they were to meet again as friends many years later.)

More inclined to male than female friends, in early marriage Yaeko did enjoy the company of Ito Noe, when they were both writing and raising young children. Later on she was to become close to Chujo (Miyamoto) Yuriko, as a mentor and also an admirer of Yuriko’s intellectual brilliance. Yaeko disapproved strongly, however, of Noe’s disruptive relationship with Osugi Sakae, and envied Yuriko’s domestically free and easy life with Yuasa Yoshiko, although it was she who was instrumental in introducing the two).

Her writing in her twenties was largely poems and short stories, sometimes left-leaning, which she published in mainstream literary journals as well as Hiratsuka Raicho’s Seito (although she was never closely affiliated with Raicho’s Bluestockings; it was Raicho’s one-time lover Morita Sohei whose professional clash with Toyoichiro set Hosei University on end for almost ten years in the 1930s). In the 1920s she began to write historical novels as well; she also cooperated with her husband on a Japanese translation of Pride and Prejudice, which inspired her to write the contemporary novel Machiko (also said to have been influenced by Yuriko’s novel Nobuko. She also translated Heidi, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and books by Selma Lagerlöf and Sonya Kovalevskaya. A trip through Europe with her husband just as World War II was beginning produced a travelogue considered a valuable record of the time.

From her late thirties on, as her three sons (all of whom survived the war and, like her husband, became eminent professors) grew older, Yaeko spent part of her time at a villa in the Karuizawa resort area, choosing to live apart from her husband (who died in 1950) and write in peace. After the war, she and Yuriko rekindled their friendship to help organize the New Japanese Literary Association (after Yuriko’s death in 1951, Yaeko sent her widower, Miyamoto Kenji, flowers on the yearly death anniversary; in return he sent flowers to her on the anniversaries of Toyoichiro’s death or rather his second wife did, typical of Miyamoto Kenji, a world-class shit). In 1953 she interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt upon the latter’s visit to Tokyo. She continued to produce poetry and fiction of all kinds throughout her life; in addition, her many years of diaries are full of sharp-eyed and opinionated observations on the people she knew, including most of the famous literary figures of the day, as well as major historical events from the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake to the accession of Chairman Gorbachev. At sixty-eight, she had a love affair with the philosopher Tanabe Hajime, also resident in Karuizawa; they exchanged some three hundred letters. Serving as the honorary principal of the Hosei University Girls’ High School, she instructed the students “Be a person first, then a woman.” She died in 1985 at the age of ninety-nine.

Sources
Mori 2008