HIRABAYASHI TAIKO

(1905–1972)

   Novelist Hirabayashi Taiko, given name Tai, was born in Nagano Prefecture. Drawn to socialism in high school, she moved to Tokyo after graduation and lived with anarchist Yamamoto Torazo. Following the Kanto Earthquake, the two were exiled from Tokyo and moved to Manchuria, where she gave birth in Dalian to a baby girl, who died shortly thereafter from malnutrition. That experience was the basis of her proletarian novel Seiryoshitsu nite (In the Charity Hospital, 1928). Her novel Ko iu onna (This Kind of Woman, 1946) received the first Women’s Literature Prize. Royalties from her long career were used to establish the Hirabayashi Taiko Literary Prize in 1973, and a museum in her honor is located in her hometown of Suwa.

   See also FEMINISM; MARXISM; WOMEN IN LITERATURE.