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Introduction: Hirabayashi Taiko and the "Mothers and Books Club"
This article explores the fateful encounter between the Nagano Prefecture based women’s reading group “Hon to Haha no Kai (Mothers and Books Club)” with the literature of Nagano-born author Hirabayashi Taiko in 1980. Hirabayashi Taiko (1905-1972) is one of Nagano Prefecture’s most famous literary figures and was at various times during her life an author, activist, biographer, and critic. Perhaps Hirabayashi Taiko is best known, however, for her provocative, incisive, and unsettling proletarian literature which includes such famous stories as Self Mockery (1927), In the Charity Hospital (1927), and Blind Chinese Soldiers (1946).
The “Hon to Haha no Kai (Mothers and Books Club)” is a women’s reading group composed of approximately 40 “ordinary” housewives who have been meeting once a month to discuss and write about books at the Ueda City Public Library since 1963. Despite the fact that many members of the “Hon to Haha no Kai” felt apprehension, tension, and reluctance over the prospect of reading Hirabayashi Taiko’s works because of their heavy “ideology” and “peculiar” nature, nevertheless all of the members read, studied, and discussed them for a year. Eventually the “Hon to Haha no Kai” published the book Hirabayashi Taiko Kenkyu consisting of some of their essays concerning Hirabayashi Taiko along with some academic contributions from other guest writers in 1985.
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A Brief Biography of Hirabayashi Taiko
| Note: This biography is based mainly on information from John Lewell’s Modern Japanese Novelists: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Kondansha International, 1993) and Nakayama Kazuko’s Josei Sakka Hyouden Shirizu 8: Hirabayashi Taiko (Tokyo: Shindensha 1999). Supplementary sources include Linda Marie Flores’ Dissertation Writing the Body (University of California, Los Angeles 2005), Charles Eubanks’ “Re-writing the Myth of Motherhood” (Critical Asian Studies, Routledge, 2001), Michia Linderman’s “Kishimojin” (Encyclopedia Mythica, July 1999), and Fujisawa Toshiko’s “Otai-san no Koro” Hirabayashi Kenkyu (Nagoya: Shinshu Shirakaba, 1985). |
The Young Hirabayashi Taiko
Perhaps one of Nagano Prefecture’s most famous literary figures besides Shimazaki Toson, Hirabayashi Taiko (1905-1972) was born in Suwa City as the youngest of three daughters to a family of former local gentry which had fallen into decline. The young Hirabayashi Taiko was a precocious child who would read French and Russian literature, especially the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky which she could borrow from her brother-in-law, while helping her mother tend the family store.
Her father, Hirabayashi Saburo, was always busy trying to rebuild the family fortune and went to Korea as a migrant laborer when Hirabayashi Taiko was entering elementary school. Her mother, Hirabayashi Katsumi, would stay at home and tend to the family farm and small general store. Both parents were not particularly interested in acquiring a higher education for their three daughters so in order for Hirabayashi Taiko to continue her education beyond the compulsory level she had to meet her father’s condition in 1918 that she earn the top score of all test applicants on the Suwa Women’s Higher School’s entrance exam.
Suwa Women’s Higher School
At Suwa Women’s Higher School Hirabayashi Taiko became known among her classmates for always reading literary materials. Using her regular school textbooks as a cover, she would discreetly read novels and literary magazines even during the middle of class periods. Despite seeming to put almost no effort into her regular class studies, her grades were always outstanding and many of her classmates considered her “a genius” or “a rare talent.”
Hirabayashi Taiko also demonstrated her independence, willpower, and desire for social justice when she formed together her own small study group to discover new and different ways besides just taking regular classes to acquire knowledge. When she found the high school curriculum to be unsatisfactory, she and her study group would buy various difficult books, including even Marx’s Das Kapital, and read them outside of class on their own time. Hirabayashi Taiko and her very close friend Noyama Misa even took a daring and unauthorized trip to Tokyo during the middle of her school’s senior class excursion to the Kansai region to meet the radical socialist and chairman of the Japan Communist party Sakai Toshihiko (1870-1933).
On to Tokyo
After graduating from the Suwa Women’s Higher School in 1922, Hirabayashi Taiko immediately set out for Tokyo and while in one sense this was the start-line of her new life it was also simultaneously the starting point of many of her troubles. In Tokyo, Hirabayashi Taiko associated with an unsavory and unreliable group of male anarchists and other assorted leftists while working in various low wage jobs. After a long line of failed romantic relationships with various male leftists, she began associating with the anarchist Yamamoto Toshio and together with him was arrested by the police “as a precaution” after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. When they were eventually released they first wandered across Japan and then later arrived in Manchuria where Hirabayashi Taiko gave birth to but lost her only child due to malnutrition while Yamamoto was thrown into prison again for publicly criticizing the Emperor. These bitter experiences would later become the basis of her prize-winning short stories Self-Mockery (1927) and In the Charity Hospital (1928).
Two Fateful Encounters
In 1924 Hirabayashi Taiko returned to Tokyo alone and had two very fateful encounters. The first was with Hayashi Fumiko who became a lifelong friend who taught Hirabayashi Taiko how to get her works published into magazines and books. For a short time they even lived together but as John Lewell notes in Modern Japanese Novelists:
Whereas Fumiko “found stability in a lasting relationship and soon became self-supporting as a writer, Taiko had a greater difficulty. If the life of an artist has three basic needs – to earn a living, to form a relationship, and to pursue a chosen art – Taiko became ensnared in the conflict so often created by these largely separate activities (110).
Perhaps this contrast between these two authors can be seen most clearly in comparing Hayashi Fumiko’s Vagabond’s Song with Hirabayashi Taiko’s Self Mockery. While both are semi-autobiographical works written in 1927, the protagonist of Hayashi Fumiko’s novel seems to be soothed and cushioned from the random events of life by her steady relationship with her mother, whereas the protagonist in Hirabayashi’s novel seems to be torn in different directions by her relationship with her parasitic boyfriend Koyama, her former boyfriend Yada who she still relies on for money, and the desire to pursue her art.
The second fateful encounter Hirabayashi Taiko had in Tokyo was with the left-wing activist Kobori Jinji who would eventually become her husband. But misfortune still followed Hirabayashi Taiko and after getting married she was later betrayed by Kobori who had an affair with another woman who later gave birth to his child. These bitter experiences with male left-wing activists most likely influenced her portrayals of them in novels like A Laborer’s Wife (1929). According to Linda Marie Flores in Writing the Body: Maternal Subjectivity in the Works of Hirabayashi Taiko, Enchi Fumiko, and Oba Minako, Hirabayashi Taiko “unsympathetically portrays men in socialist organizations who are equally complicit in the exploitation of women within the movement (42).”
The War and After
However, while Hirabayashi Taiko was not finding much success with love or relationships, her writing was beginning to receive acclaim and recognition. In 1927 she won the Osaka Shinbun’s New Writer’s Award Contest for Self Mockery and many of her later stories also were to receive significant literary awards. As Tanaka Yukiko notes in To Live and To Write, proletarian literature privileges political ideology over personal sentiments, but Hirabayashi Taiko was unwilling to accept this “dogma” at face value and instead followed her own desire to explore “the complexity of human relationships as well as the relationship between the individual and society (71)” But just as it seemed as if her writing was going to take-off the government began its harsh crackdown on leftist groups in the 1930s. In 1937 Hirabayashi Taiko was arrested again and while spending eight months in a prison she contracted tuberculosis. While she was one of the leftist proletarian writers who did not publicly renounce her political beliefs (tenko), she was apparently confined to bed for almost eight years and unable to publish any of her works until after the war.
With the end of the war Hirabayashi Taiko immediately addressed the issue of Japanese war responsibility with her short but incisive story Blind Chinese Soldiers (1946). Using the image of a linked multi-car train carrying blind Chinese soldiers who were apparently the test subjects of some unknown chemical weapons experiments as a metaphor for the chain of command in the wartime Japanese state, she subtly but firmly placed the culpability for wartime atrocities not only on the Emperor and the Japanese military but also on Japanese civilians. The physical coupling of the train cars together into one line representing a chain of command includes not only the Japanese leadership in the lead car and the blind Chinese soldiers in the rear car but also the civilians who follow orders in the middle cars. In this arrangement the civilians are the vital link between the first and last train cars that facilitate the orders issued from the leaders in first train car reaching the last train car carrying the Chinese. Thus, this arrangement seems to suggest that Japanese civilians bear a degree of culpability for war atrocities.
Hirabayashi Taiko also added her voice to the “motherhood as institution (bosei shugi)” debates in 1946 by writing the short story Kishimojin. By re-imagining the “Goddess of Children (Kishimo)” legend into that of an ambivalent mother, Hirabayashi Taiko seemed to go against the three different positions of the “motherhood as institution” debaters Yosano Akiko, Yamakawa Kikue, and Hiratsuka Raicho by attacking the role of motherhood itself and exposing the role of motherhood as an idealized image and impossible to attain myth. The story itself is based on the real life experience of Hirabayashi Taiko adopting the daughter of her husband’s younger brother. The story itself is somewhat disturbing as the way the young woman protagonist touches and strokes her adopted daughter in certain scenes is almost suggestive of child abuse. Then in the climax of the story the young woman protagonist appears to reject the role of motherhood completely by simply letting her adopted child lie crying and screaming on the floor while she is lost in her own thoughts.
That Which Post-War Women Have Lost
During the early 1960s Hirabayashi Taiko was active as post-war novelist, social and literary critic, biographer, and activist for improved Japan-Korea relations. The post-war period also saw her become increasingly more and more skeptical of left-wing causes and movements and in a turnabout of political values by the early 1960s she actually began to criticize and then oppose certain Japanese leftist groups. In the 1963 collection of her critical essays Sakka no Tojiito (1963) she criticized the Japanese Communist Party for being too dependent on the Communist Parties in the Soviet Union and China for ideological direction and urged them to “find their own voice.”
In the same essay collection Hirabayashi Taiko also criticized post-war men and women in the essay ThatWhichPost-WarWomenHaveLost (1963) for fundamentally misunderstanding the right to freedom. Post-war women, she asserted, had mistaken the right to freedom as simply the right to imitate the worst aspects of men including having illicit affairs, getting easily divorces, and embezzling company money. Men, on the other hand, have become “imitation women” in post war society because educators in their relentless pursuit of a “democratic” education have enforced equal lifestyles for men and women rather than reflecting on what “democracy” really means. She foresaw a dreary future where men have completely given up on their masculine natures and simply seek to imitate feminine manners.
“Goddess of Mercy”
Many have commentated on Hirabayashi Taiko’s warm, generous, and pleasant smile. Even though she had suffered from various illnesses throughout her life including tuberculosis, pneumonia, and cancer she always kept her warm smile. According to some of her old classmates at the Suwa Women’s Higher School, her smile was “heaven sent” or like that of the “Goddess of Mercy.” Yukiko Tanaka who translated Hirabayashi Taiko’s Self Mockery suggests in her book of women writers To Live and To Write that Hirabayashi Taiko’s smile represents her spirit, vitality, and independence which sets her apart from other women writers of her era and past eras. Hirabayashi Taiko died from pneumonia in 1972.
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The "Mothers and Books Club"
| Note: This article draws information from Fujisawa Toshiko’s two essays “Otai-san no Koro” and “Atogaki: Watashitachi no Hirabayashi Taiko no Kenkyu” from the book Hirabayashi Taiko Kenkyu (Nagoya: Shinshu Shirakaba, 1985). |
40 "Ordinary" Housewives in 1963
The “Hon to Haha no Kai” (Mothers and Books Club) is a women’s reading group that was established in Ueda City in eastern Nagano Prefecture on December 1963. Composed of about forty “ordinary” housewives, the “Hon to Haha no Kai” emphasizes not only the reading and discussion of books but also the practice of writing about them as a means for its members to evaluate themselves and their own lifestyles. At the time of the formation of the group the youngest members were in their fifties while the older members were already in their seventies. Approximately once a month the “Hon to Haha no Kai” would meet at the Ueda City Public Library and hold their “study sessions.” The results of their discussions and other inter-group news was published in a Composition Group Bulletin and distributed to the members.
The "Mothers and Books Club" at Work
The “Hon to Haha no Kai” had already read and wrote about the works of many other authors before beginning to read the works of Hirabayashi Taiko. At that time many members of the reading group expressed reluctance to read Hirabayashi Taiko’s work for various reasons ranging from the dislike of “ideology” to simple fear and apprehension. Nevertheless the “Hon to Haha no Kai” began its yearlong research on her works in June 1980. The “Hon to Haha no Kai” also went one step further than the typical American women’s reading groups in that they divided themselves into smaller communal study groups consisting of five to six housewives. Each of these smaller study groups was based on a different theme about the author. These themes included “What did home mean to Hirabayashi Taiko,” “The evolution of Hirabayashi Taiko’s literature,” “Hirabayashi Taiko’s discourse on men,” “Hirabayashi Taiko’s discourse on Higuchi Ichiyo,” “Hirabayashi Taiko’s main works from 1923 – 1937,” “Japanese literary history from 1923 – 1937,” and “Japanese history from 1923 – 1937.”
Personal Transformations
In order to understand Hirabayashi Taiko as “an author who was a product of her own times” each of the smaller communal study groups made a tremendous effort to research the political, social, and economic trends in pre-war and post-war Japan. Topics they researched included the Rice Riots (Kome Sodo) of 1918, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and the White Birch (Shirakaba) Movement. Each month during their meeting at the Ueda City Public Library, the small communal groups would make their own oral presentations based on their assigned themes. Adding to this cumbersome workload is the fact that the “Hon to Haha no Kai” not only emphasizes reading but also writing to foster their ability to express themselves so each of the smaller study groups was responsible for writing up a report and presenting it to the larger group overall during their monthly meetings. These written reports later form the core of the Composition Group Bulletin which is circulated monthly among the group members. Additionally, in the formal presentation of their reports to the other group members during the monthly meetings, each group member had the opportunity to practice their public speaking skills.
In the long process of researching background materials on Hirabayashi Taiko and then reading her literature, many group members commented that they were “deeply moved” by her works and forced to reconsider their “pre-conceptions” about her proletarian literature. They also discovered the unlooked for sorrows, joys, and maternal essence of womanhood by reading her works. This new attitude of the “Hon to Haha no Kai” members towards the works of Hirabayashi Taiko represents quite a turnaround from their initial aversion to politics and reluctance to read her “ideological” works. The “Hon to Haha no Kai” which was formed in 1963 apparently waited for over seventeen years before they decided to begin reading Hirabayashi Taiko’s works. This seems quite unusual considering that the “Hon to Haha no Kai” is based in Nagano Prefecture and Hirabayashi Taiko is one of Nagano Prefecture’s most famous native-born authors. In 1972 Hirabayashi Taiko was posthumously awarded the 28th Imperial Prize by the Japan Arts Academy after passing away from pneumonia. Yet even after she received this award the “Hon to Haha no Kai” continued to ignore her works and waited another eight years before starting their research on her. However, the fact that the women group members were able to overcome their aversion for the “ideological” nature of Hirabayashi Taiko’s works and be forced to reconsider their own prejudices against her proletarian literature seems to show the subtlety, strength, and complexity of Hirabayashi's novels. While they may indeed be “ideological” and demanded a lot of background reading on history, politics, and economics, this difficulty and complexity is likely what gave the group members a chance to reflect on themselves and to transform.
One member of the “Hon to Haha no Kai,” Fujisawa Toshiko, became so motivated by the “Hon to Haha no Kai” taking up the Hirabayashi Taiko Kenkyu that she tried to contact all of Hirabayashi Taiko’s former classmates at the Suwa Women’s Higher School to get more firsthand and personal information about her. After sending out 49 letters, Fujisawa eventually received 35 replies of which 30 were written replies and 5 were phone conversations. From these replies Fujisawa was able to distill many new and different perspectives about Hirabayashi Taiko, and became inspired to use this information to write her own essay “Otai-san no Koro” which was included in Hirabayashi Taiko Kenkyu. Fujisawa also authored the “Atogaki” for Hirabayashi Taiko Kenkyu where she gave a brief history of the “Hon to Haha no Kai” and their decision to take up the literature of Hirabayashi Taiko.
Publishing
Eventually the "Hon to Haha no Kai" published the book Hirabayashi Taiko Kenkyu (1985) which consists of some of their personal essays concerning Hirabayashi Taiko along with contributions from academic guest writers. From 1964 to 1983 the “Hon to Haha no Kai” has published a total of at least twenty-three collections of their own works including three books. Most of these works are based on small group reports first published in their Composition Group Bulletin. The fact that the women group members are willing to publish their “non-academic” essays in the same book and side by side with the “academic” contributions seems to indicate that they do not privilege a “professional” academic analysis over their own “amateur” analysis. Rather, it appears from the content of their essays that they consider themselves to be approaching Hirabayashi Taiko from a different angle.
The Fate of the "Mothers and Books Club"
The “Hon to Haha no Kai” does not appear to be affiliated to any major university or local educational institute. Nor do they appear to be lead or guided by any university professors or other professional academics. Nevertheless, the group does have its monthly meetings in the Ueda City Public Library and appears to have on occasion invited some university professors to give one-time presentations on Hirabayashi Taiko to their members. Up until 1992 the “Hon to Haha no Kai” had received the help, advice, and guidance from the Head Librarian of the Ueda City Public Library. However, after the Head Librarian was transferred to another public facility in Ueda City in 1992, the “Hon to Haha no Kai’s” work has not appeared to have advanced as well as they had hoped. The last mention of the “Hon to Haha no Kai” appears on a volunteer-run library website dated November 27, 2003. On the accompanying schedule it notes that the “Hon to Haha no Kai” will meet on the 24th of that month. Since that time the fate of the “Hon to Haha no Kai” is unclear and worthy of further investigation.
Books Published by the "Mothers and Books Club"
Hirabayashi Taiko Kenkyu Nagoya: Shinshu Shirakaba. 1985.
Sorezore no Kisetsu no Naka de
Oite Ikiru Hibi
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Relevant Links
ThatWhichPost-WarWomenHaveLost (1963)
Hirabayashi Taiko Memorial House (Japanese)
Ueda Public Library Volunteer-run Website (Japanese)
Ueda City Public Library Information Website (Japanese)
Relevant Books and Articles (Japanese)
Hirabayashi Taiko Kenkyu Nagoya: Shinshu Shirakaba. 1985.
“Hirabayashi Taiko no Zouli” Bungei. March 1972. Pg. 172-175.
“Hirabayashi Taiko no Sokumen” Bungei. March 1972. Pg. 175-179.
Hirabayashi, Taiko. Sengo no Josei ga Ushinatta Mono. Sakka no Tojiito. Tokyo: Houga Shoten 1968.
Hirabayashi, Taiko. Hirabayashi Taiko Zenshu V.1-12 Tokyo: Ushio Shuppansha, 1976-1979.
Itagaki, Naoko. Hirabayashi Taiko: Sakka Shirizu Tokyo Raifusha, 1956.
Murano, Tamiko. Sabaku ni Saku: Hirabayashi Taiko to Watashi Tokyo 1991.
Nakayama, Kazuko. Josei Sakka Hyouden Shirizu 8: Hirabayashi Taiko Tokyo: Shindensha, 1999.
Watanabe, Sumiko. Gendai Josei Bungaku Jiten Tokyo: Tokyodo Shuppan, 1990.
Relevant Books and Articles (English)
Agosin, Marjorie, ed. A Map of Hope: Women’s Writings on Human Rights, An International Anthology. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1999.
Cooper, Elizabeth Lawrence. Hirabayashi Taiko’s Diary of the End of the War. MA Thesis-Ithaca: Cornell University, 1986.
Ericson, Joan. Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.
Eubanks, Charles. “Re-writing the Myth of Motherhood.” Critical Asian Studies. Routledge, 2001.
Flores, Linda Marie. Writing the Body: Maternal Subjectivity in the Works of Hirabayashi Taiko, Enchi Fumiko, and Oba Minako. Dissertation-University of California, Los Angeles 2005.
Goosen, Theodore, ed. The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Lewell, John. Modern Japanese Novelists. New York: Kodansha America 1993.
Lippit, Noriko Mizuta, ed. Stories by Contemporary Japanese Women Writers. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 1982.
Morris, Ivan, ed. Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1962.
Shinoda, Minoru, ed. Women’s Postwar Movements in Japan. Honolulu: Institute of Advanced Projects, East-West Center, 1968.
Sievers, Sharon. Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press:1983.
Tokuza, Akiko. “Women in a Modernizing Japan.” The Rise of the Feminist Movement in Japan. Tokyo: Keio University Press, 1999.
“Tokyo Firebombing Remembered.” The Japan Times. 11 March 2005.
Tanaka Yukiko. To Live and To Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers 1913-
1938.
Seattle: The Seal Press 1987.
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