According to polls taken during the Occupation period, Hayashi Fumiko was Japan's most popular author among young adults and the older generation. She wrote many stories and serialized novels in leading newspapers during a brief, intense period of creativity, 1945 to 51, ended by her sudden death before reaching her fifties. She was known for stories of ordinary Japanese people, especially women, and was not at all shy about addressing women's identity and sexuality. Though praised by critics, she was consigned to the category of woman writer, not quite good enough to enter the ranks of highly esteemed pure literature dominated by males. Very much aware of Occupation censorship rules, Hayashi seems to have avoided subjects or themes which might have antagonized Americans. She was, for example, censored at least once for making unacceptable references to GIs during a published conversation in 1946 with another well-known author, Sakaguchi Ango, who achieved his greatest fame as a "decadent" writer in postwar Japan and also died in the early 1950s. She probed social and sexual relationships between Japanese men and women, but not, at least not openly, the problem of sexual fraternization with the Occupiers. Only after formal censorship had ended did she make references to American soldiers, using the term "tall foreigners" in her last novel, Floating Clouds, 1951. This final work, in part set Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia, brings to mind the question of Hayashi's earlier career and wartime complicity. For her, as for other writers, male and female, to protest the militarist state openly would have meant interrogation and possible imprisonment.

Hayashi, born to extreme poverty, had first gained considerable fame and income when still quite young from a diary called Horoki/Wandering, sometimes also translated as A Vagabond's Story and featuring many stories of lower class working women. This was first serialized in 1928 in a magazine of small circulation but reached a much broader audience when reissued as a book in 1930. With the proceeds, she traveled to Europe, including France and the Soviet Union. Though her origins were poor and humble and her friends and lovers included proletariat and leftist writers and intellectuals, she never formally joined a leftist group. She also wrote poetry as well as fiction. Her popularity was such that she was asked by the Japanese government in late 1937 to join a special Pen brigade, that is a unit of specially selected famous writers, to report for a leading newspaper on the war front in China. At that time, a series of border clashes between Japan and China in the mid-1930s had escalated into total war-a war which Japan called the "China Incident" and China called the "War of Resistance." She was one of only two women in the brigade (the other was Yoshiya Nobuko, also extremely popular during the war). A basic question at this point is how much Hayashi actually saw or was told but could not report of the atrocities committed by Japanese troops in the brutal takeover of the city of Nanjing in December 1937. If not these atrocities, then how representative were her other reports of Japanese troops elsewhere in the Asia/Pacific War. When a complete set of her work was first published posthumously in postwar Japan, this war correspondence was omitted.

Hayashi later made other trips to the China war front, and after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor lived for several months in Japan's newly acquired territory of Vietnam, 1942-1943, formerly part of French Indo-China. This experience as an overseas civilian forms the genesis of Floating Clouds, a novel of unrequited love overseas and subsequently also in Occupied Japan. We can only speculate: what did Hayashi observe on her various trips to Japan's colonies and to the warfront in Manchuria, China, and Vietnam; what might she have written had she enjoyed freedom of expression; and what observations did she in fact publish upon her return to Japan in 1943 and after.

Very early in the Occupation, 1946, Hayashi issued still another and expanded edition of her prewar best seller, Vagabond, and was perhaps able to secure a threshold of livelihood in her devastated homeland, but she also turned out an immense amount of new fiction. Fortunately, Vagabond has recently been translated as have her prewar poems. At last count, however, only five of her postwar stories appear in English language anthologies, and Floating Clouds has not yet to receive a distinguished English rendition. Nevertheless, such stories as "Bones," "Late Chrysanthemum," and "Another Part of Tokyo" (also translated as "Downtown" and "Shitamachi"), which date from 1948 and 1949, and appear on this site, reflect the harsh realities of early postwar Japanese life for widows, veterans, aging geisha, and women turned prostitutes by necessity and not by agency. In addition, parts of two of her stories have been combined in making the Japanese film, Late Crysanthemums (English language subtitles). Hayashi 's stories are a reminder that the military bar and brothel culture in Occupied Japan, although degrading and unsavory, did not displace relations between Japanese men and women. Obviously, for full understanding of this remarkable writer, much more research is needed on Hayashi's wartime and early postwar life and career.