Fumiko Hayashi

was a Japanese writer of novels, short stories and poetry, who has repeatedly been included in the feminist literature canon. Among her best-known works are Diary of a Vagabond, Late Chrysanthemum and Floating Clouds. Biography Hayashi was born in Moji-ku, Kitakyūshū, Japan, and raised in abject poverty. In 1910, her mother Kiku Hayashi divorced her merchant husband Mayaro Miyata (who was not Fumiko's biological father) and married Kisaburo Sawai. The family then worked as itinerant merchants in Kyūshū. After graduating from high school in 1922, Hayashi moved to Tokyo and lived with several men, supporting herself with a variety of jobs, before settling into marriage with painting student Rokubin Tezuka in 1926. During this time, she also helped launch the poetry magazine Futari. Her autobiographical novel Diary of a Vagabond (Hōrōki), published in 1930, became a bestseller and gained her high popularity. Many of her subsequent works also showed an autobiographical background, like The Accordion and the Fish Town or Seihin no sho. In the following years, Hayashi travelled to China and Europe. Starting in 1938, Hayashi, who had joined the Pen butai ("Pen corps"), war correspondents who were in favour of Japan's militarist regime, wrote reports about the Sino-Japanese War. In 1941, she joined a group of women writers, including Ineko Sata, who went to Manchuria in occupied China. In 1942–43, again as part of a larger group of women writers, she travelled to Southeast Asia, where she spent eight months in the Andaman Islands, Singapore, Java and Borneo. In later years, Hayashi faced criticism for collaborating with state-sponsored wartime propaganda, but, unlike Sata, never apologised or rationalised her behaviour.