From the late 1950s until her death in 1984, age 53, Ariyoshi Sawako was among the most popular and prolific of post-1945 Japanese writers. Her talent, even her genius, seemed apparent. Over a span of thirty years, she had received several important literary awards and been nominated for many others. She turned out best sellers as well. Indeed, at the time of her death, Japanese women writers were on the verge of a turnabout and for several years would take most of the major prizes for novels and short stories. Ariyoshi is almost certain to be mentioned in literary biographies as one of Japan’s most prominent postwar women authors. The question is whether critics today, Japanese and foreign, also choose to rank her among the greatest of all modern Japanese writers. In a work of popular biography, 1999, Mark Weston called her one of the thirty seven giants in all of Japanese history, not simply in literature. But in 2002, literary scholar Jay Rubin, in a more selective and sophisticated work, did not even include her among modern Japanese writers. She wrote with a fury and pace that reminds one of American author Joyce Carol Oates, a writer whose reputation also varies considerably among readers and critics. Her creative output, according to Sachiko Schierbeck’s count, was an astounding 35 novels, 60 short stories, and 10 dramas.

Ariyoshi earned much of her following from compelling and well researched stories, illustrating social problems, such as urban housing, environmental pollution, the testing of missiles, and Japan’s aging population. Two of her short stories reflect on Japan’s atomic bomb experience. In addition, she was fascinated by family sagas and wrote several best sellers in this genre. Under her father’s tutelage, she developed a deep love of Kabuki drama at an early age and as an adult became increasingly fascinated by Japanese art and culture of the late medieval and early modern eras. Her mother has been described as much influenced by the Blue Stockings, a famous literary group which published a newsletter and turned feminist in outlook and conscience, 1911-1916. Ariyoshi’s fiction is peopled with the plight and pluck of a wide variety of Japanese women who over the generations more often transcended than succumbed to victimization by fathers, brothers, or husbands. They are dutiful in their daily routines but inwardly strong, complex, and creative human beings. Many of them are as well educated as was possible for girls and women or their eras. Women’s sexuality too is explored. Ariyoshi’s stories also feature artisans and craftsmen, actors, geishas, prostitutes, and men and women of lower and middle classes. But there is more about femininity and feminism than of masculinity. She was well traveled in Europe, the United States, China, and parts of Southeast Asia, and her writing reflects her observations, such as racial segregation in New York’s Harlem. Her characters include African Americans and Japanese Americans. Currently, four of her novels, parts of others, and several short stories have been translated into English; these and additional works are available in many foreign languages, making her accessible on a global scale.

On this site, Ariyoshi has a special place as a Japanese woman of special literary talent who came of age during total war and foreign occupation. She was born in 1931 in Wakayama prefecture, not far from Osaka, during a time when Japan, an industrialized nation, had plunged into the Great Depression and also the year of the Mukden Incident, a Japanese military conspiracy which led to the rapid takeover of all of Manchuria and the creation there, as Louise Young has argued, of total empire. In these increasingly austere years for Japan, Ariyoshi led a comparatively privileged young life as the daughter of a banker father, moving with her family first to Tokyo and, at age five or six to Indonesia, then under Dutch rule as the Netherlands East Indies. After border skirmishes with China turned into full-scale war in the fall of 1937 and relations with the Western empires in Southeast Asia turned more threatening, the family briefly returned to Tokyo in 1940 and permanently in 1941. Ariyoshi had celebrated her tenth birthday by the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Malaysia, and the Philippines in December 1941. During the bleak years of World War II on the Japanese home front, Ariyoshi completed her elementary education and began junior high school. She was fourteen when the Allied Occupation troops arrived in September 1945 and would continue her education in Tokyo, entering a girls’ higher school in 1947 and a junior college operated by Japan Women’s University in 1949. She lived and studied in a Tokyo devastated by fire bombs and plagued by black markets, continued rationing, and poor housing. When Japan regained its sovereignty in April 1952, she was twenty-one years of age, a convert to Catholicism, and the beneficiary of Occupation legal and educational reforms, including voting rights. One month before she had graduated as an English major, a commemoration saddened by the death of her father the previous year.

During junior college, Ariyoshi had published her first essay—it was on Kabuki actors--in a theatrical magazine. She made her first visit to the United States in 1954, acting as secretary and helper to a group of women Kabuki dancers and musicians. She returned in 1959 on a Rockefeller Grant to study at Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, and in 1970, was a visiting scholar at the University of Hawaii. Her debut as a professional writer of fiction was in 1956 with a short story, “Jiuta” [Ballad], which won a new author’s prize and was nominated for the important Akutagawa prize. By 1959, Time, an American weekly magazine, ran a story on Japanese women, featuring crown princess Michiko, commoner bride of Akihito (Emperor in 1989) , and singling out Ariyoshi as a bright and talented young writer. The novel, River Ki, followed to much acclaim in 1959. She married in 1962, gave birth to a daughter, and exercising new legal rights under the revised Civil Code, abruptly divorced in 1964. She never remarried. Her subsequent years, though filled with work, fame, and recognition, also brought insomnia and too much reliance on pills and drink, contributing to poor health and an early death.

Most critics agree that the work which gives readers the greatest insight into Ariyoshi’s own early life and psyche, including her attitudes toward Japan’s aggression, empire, defeat, and life and reforms under foreign occupation, is her novel, the River Ki. Set in Wakayama prefecture, the area of her mother’s family, her own birth, and her earliest education, the novel was first published as a serial in 1959 and attracted favorable reviews and sales. It was translated into English in 1980 by Mildred Tahara, a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Hawaii who began studying the author and her works after doctoral training at Columbia University. Tahara had earlier translated short stories by Ariyoshi and become a close friend. The novel, a social history spanning the late 1890s to mid-1950s, is primarily about three generations of Japanese women, each very different in upbringing and temperament: Hana, who at age 18 in 1897, marries a promising village headman and future politician, selected by her grandmother; Hana’s most rebellious offspring, daughter Fumio, who marries a man of her choice, a banker; and in turn Fumio’s daughter, Hanako, a young woman in her late twenties, unmarried and independent as the novel ends. Fumio seems to have some of the characteristics of Ariyoshi’s mother; and Hanako resembles Ariyoshi herself in background, early life, and education. The male characters, their feelings, and what happens to them, are intriguing too, but though occasionally pivotal, they remain mainly in the background and are often a disappointment to the women. For the ways in which Ariyoshi does or does not sketch the Pacific War, the Occupation, and in particular land reform into the background of her family narrative, see especially Part III of River Ki, where the main focus is the aging matriarch, Hana, her partial reconciliation in wartime with Fumio, and her mutual and loving relationship in post-1945 Japan with her granddaughter.