Yōko Hagiwara was a Japanese writer. She wrote extensively about her family.

Biography

Hagiwara was born in Tokyo on September 4, 1920. Her father was

Sakutarō Hagiwara was a Japanese writer of free verse, active in the Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. He liberated Japanese free verse from the grip of traditional rules, and he is considered the "father of modern colloquial poetry in Japan". He publis ...

. Hagiwara's younger sister became brain damaged from

meningitis Meningitis is acute or chronic inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord, collectively called the meninges. The most common symptoms are fever, intense headache, vomiting and neck stiffness and occasion ...

in 1927, and her mother left her father in 1929. Her mother's abandonment left her with trauma that influenced her later writing. Hagiwara married a civil servant in 1944, and they had a child, the cinematographer . She studied at

Kokugakuin University Kokugakuin University , abbreviated as ''Kokugakudai'' () or ''Kokudai'' (), is a Shinto-affiliated private research university in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. The university consists of undergraduate departments in humanities and social sciences and ...

from 1949 to 1952. She divorced her husband in 1953. Hagiwara's writing career began with a book of essays published in 1959. It was called , and won the Japan Essayist Club Award. Her next major work was titled ' and was published in 1966. It was a biographical novel about

Tatsuji Miyoshi was a Japanese poet, literary critic, and literary editor active during the Shōwa period of Japan. He is known for his lengthy free verse poetry, which often portray loneliness and isolation as part of contemporary life, but which are written in ...

, a poet who had courted Hagiwara's aunt, Ai Hagiwara. The novel was nominated for the Akutagawa Award and won the and the Shinchōsha Literary Prize. It was adapted into a film starring Masahiro Higashide in 2022. Many of Hagiwara's novels were about her family and their internal struggles, from her father's extended family almost throwing her out of the house after his death, her escape into a marriage, her dissatisfaction within that marriage, and the difficult relationship she had with her mother after Hagiwara found her in

Hokkaido is the list of islands of Japan by area, second-largest island of Japan and comprises the largest and northernmost prefectures of Japan, prefecture, making up its own list of regions of Japan, region. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaidō fr ...

. In the 1980s she began writing significantly less material about her complex family dynamics. and are both about dancing, an interest that she had taken up during that period. Researcher Sachiko Schierbeck notes that Hagiwara's popularity comes from her "frank depictions of the shadier sides of life" and her informal writing style. Hagiwara died on July 1, 2005, in Tokyo.

Selected works

* , 1959 * ', 1966 * , 1983 * , 1984

References

1920 births 2005 deaths 20th-century Japanese writers Writers from Tokyo {{DEFAULTSORT:Hagiwara, Yoko