Ariyoshi Sawako, who died in 1984, wrote dozens of best-sellers about women, yet rarely wrote about romantic love. In a simple style, she focused on other issues in women's lives-tension between mothers and daughters-in-law, care for the elderly, environmental dangers, and racism.

Ariyoshi (1931-1984) was not interested only in modern problems, she was also a lover of the traditional Japanese arts. She wrote a no dance drama, a bunraku puppet play, several historical novels, and dozens of short stories about Japanese artists.

Many of Ariyoshi's works have been made into movies and television shows in Japan; she herself wrote several screenplays. She is still little known outside Japan, partly because to date only half of her many books have been translated into English.

Ariyoshi Sawako was born on January 20, 1931, in Wakayama City, thirty miles (50 km) southwest of Osaka. Her father was an international banker who spent five years working in New York and was well read in English, French, and German. Her mother came from a conservative family of landowners, but nevertheless worked for women's rights.

When Ariyoshi was six her father was stationed in Jakarta, Indonesia. The family lived luxuriously, with many servants, and Ariyoshi and her older brother went to an elementary school for overseas Japanese. She was often sick and spent many days at home reading the books in her father's library. There she began her lifelong enthusiasm for the literature of traditional Japan.

In 1941, only a few months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the Ariyoshis returned to Japan. It was a shock for the young girl. Crowded and dirty, modern Tokyo was nothing like the Japan she had read about in books, and Ariyoshi began seeing Japanese society more objectively than most girls her age. She particularly disliked the subordinate role of women.

As the war grew worse for Japan, Ariyoshi left Tokyo in 1943 to live with her grandmother in Wakayama. Her school days were tedious because she and her classmates spent much of their time sewing army uniforms.

In 1945 Ariyoshi's house in Tokyo was bombed, her father's bank was dissolved, and by order of the United States military, her grandmother's land was sold cheaply to its tenants. Ariyoshi stayed with her grandmother one more year, then rejoined her parents in Tokyo. For three years during the American occupation she completed high school while her parents scrounged for money and food.

The contrast between the bleak postwar years and Ariyoshi's happy childhood in Jakarta temporarily soured the young woman on things Japanese. Sensing this, her father tried to rekindle her interest in Japanese culture by taking her to kabuki plays. It worked. Ariyoshi loved the first performance she saw and remained interested in the theater for the rest of her life.

In 1949 Ariyoshi entered Tokyo Women's Christian College, the school her mother had also attended. Unlike her mother, Ariyoshi decided to join the Catholic Church. Perhaps she was disillusioned with the Shinto religion, which until 1945 had been closely tied to Japanese militarism.

At college Ariyoshi majored in English literature. When her father died in 1950, she supported herself by working part-time. She dreamed of becoming a drama critic, and regularly wrote articles for a magazine called Theater World.

In 1954, two years after her graduation, Ariyoshi became the corresponding secretary for a kabuki troupe that was unusual because it was led by a female performer. She also helped produce and direct the company's plays.

In her spare time Ariyoshi wrote short stories for literary magazines. One story, "Jiuta" ("Ballad"), is about a famous and blind ballad-chanter who disowns his daughter when she marries a nisei, a Japanese-American. What particularly saddens him is the knowledge that his daughter, who plays the stringed koto beautifully, will not be carrying on the Japanese musical tradition. The story ends when the father relents and goes to the airport to say good-bye to his daughter as she leaves for America.

Without Ariyoshi's knowledge, her friends entered "Jiuta" in a literary competition in 1956. The story was a finalist for the Akutagawa Prize, the highest award a new writer in Japan can aspire to. Some of the judges thought her story's theme was old-fashioned; the criticism may have spurred Ariyoshi to seek bolder and more original topics in the future.

Another short story, "Prayer," is about the continuing dread a family feels when a woman who survived the Nagasaki atomic bombing has a child. First, the family worries that the child will be born with deformities. Then they worry the child will be retarded and not learn to talk. They worry each time the child has a fever, wondering if it could be leukemia. The ordinary anxiety of parents and relatives is multiplied a hundred times, and out of love for the child each member of the family offers a silent, fervent, and continuing prayer for his well-being.

In 1959, when she was only twenty-eight, Ariyoshi finished her first important novel, The River Ki. The book is highly autobiographical and spans the lives of three generations of strong women. Hana, the first, is a traditional wife who works hard to help her politically powerful husband; when she is married 1899, five festive wedding boats float gently down the Ki River. By contrast, when her rebellious daughter Fumio marries an international banker in 1925, the wedding is at a Tokyo hotel, followed by a Western-style banquet. The third woman, the granddaughter Hanako, is modeled after Ariyoshi herself, who inherits her mother's modern outlook but also shares her grandmother's affection for Japan's past.

After The River Ki was published, Ariyoshi won a Rockefeller Foundation grant to spend the 1959-196o school year at Sarah Lawrence College, just north of New York City. She studied the works of Christopher Fry, a British playwright she admired, and took many trips to Harlem to research her next novel, Not Because of Color.

Not Because of Color tells the story of Emiko Jackson, a young Japanese woman who marries a black American soldier during the occupation of Japan in the late 1940s. Their daughter, Mary, is mercilessly teased by her Japanese classmates because she is half black. To give Mary a brighter future, Emiko moves to the United States, but she and her husband can afford only a one-room apartment in Harlem. They have three more children, and Emiko works hard to support them as a waitress and later as a servant for the Japanese wife of a Jewish professor. She also makes friends with a Japanese woman married to an Italian-American, and another married to a Puerto Rican.

Emiko comes to the conclusion that it is "not because of color" that prejudice exists, because

Even among whites, the Jews, Italians, and Irish are often looked down upon and regarded with disdain. They, in turn, discriminate against the blacks ... the blacks look down upon the Puerto Ricans ... the intelligent make fun of the ignorant.... No matter who he is, a human being establishes another as his inferior. ... Unless he does this, he doesn't feel secure.

In 1961 Ariyoshi met Jin Akira, director of the Art Friend Association, an organization that brought foreign performers to Japan. A cosmopolitan man, he enjoyed the fact that Ariyoshi was outspoken about so many artistic and political issues. He may also have been charmed by the fact that she was a good golfer and a knowledgeable fan of the Yomiuri Giants baseball team.

They married in March 1962, and had one daughter, Tamao, in 1963. By then Ariyoshi was making money from her writing. Later she bought a house and hired a live-in housekeeper. She also had her widowed mother move in. This allowed Ariyoshi to work long hours and even travel abroad with the knowledge that her daughter was well cared for.

Ariyoshi's marriage lasted just two years. She and Akira divorced in 1964, when Tamao was just six months old. Akira and his parents may not have understood that Ariyoshi's commitment to her writing was full-time, and that when she was not at her typewriter she felt she needed to be out interviewing, traveling, or doing research in a library. Under different circumstances Ariyoshi might have changed her lifestyle and given more time to her marriage. But at this time the Art Friend Association was in financial difficulty, and this made her own income important and a shortening of her work hours impractical.

In 1965 Ariyoshi wrote Time of Distrust, a female-revenge novel that caused a sensation in Japan and quickly became a movie. The work may also reflect Ariyoshi's state of mind after her divorce. In the book, an unfaithful husband has an affair with a bar waitress, and soon both his wife and his mistress become pregnant. When the two women meet by accident, they plot their vengeance. The waitress files a claim for a large share of the husband's pension. But the wife, who makes a good salary teaching, declares that her child is not her husband's, but instead the result of artificial insemination. The book ends with the hapless husband not knowing for certain if he is the father of either child.

The following year Ariyoshi published The Doctor's Wife, one of her two finest works. It is a historical novel based on the diary and records of Hanaoka Seishu (1760-1835), the first doctor in the world to perform surgery with a general anesthetic. Using an extract from datura and other poisonous flowers to keep his patient unconscious and numb, Hanoka successfully removed a breast cancer in 1805--thirty-seven years before Dr. Crawford Long began using ether in the United States.

The real story of this novel, however, is the subtle but constant tension between Hanaoka's wife, Kae, and her mother-in-law, Otsugi. The two women even compete to be the first one to test Hanaoka's anesthetic. In the end, both women take the dangerous drug, and Kae goes blind before the anesthetic is perfected. Hanaoka's sister observes,

Don't you think men are incredible? It seems that an intelligent person like my brother would have noticed the friction between you and Mother. But throughout he shrewdly pretended that he didn't see anything ... tension between females is to the advantage of every male.... The only luck I've had in my entire lifetime is that I didn't get married and didn't have to be somebody's daughter-in-law.

The Doctor's Wife became both a movie and a play in 1967. Ariyoshi wrote the script of the play herself. She also began writing Kabuki Dancer the same year. The book is a fictional biography of Izumo no Okuni .the graceful dancer and flamboyant actress who created kabuki theater on the streets of Kyoto around the year 1600. Only in 1629 did kabuki, by law, become an art for men only.

Most of the women in Ariyoshi's novels are strong and appealing, but in Sunset Hill Apartment Complex No. 3, written in 19 70, the housewives are petty and neurotic. They spend hours gossiping, but compete fiercely when it comes to their children's grades. The ambitious mothers constantly pressure their sons and daughters to study harder, until finally their children are exhausted.

Ariyoshi not only portrays the banality of middle-class life, a common theme in literature, but also condemns the brutally competitive system of college admission, which creates the "examination hell" endured by millions of Japanese teenagers.

During the winter of 1970-1971 Ariyoshi accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Hawaii, where she led a graduate seminar on kabuki theater. She took her daughter with her and enrolled her in a nearby Catholic school. She also visited many nursing homes in Hawaii, researching the problems of senility for her next book, The Twilight Years.

In the summer of I971 Ariyoshi sent her daughter back to Japan, then spent a month each in New York and London to see dozens of plays and visit more nursing homes. When Ariyoshi returned to Tokyo in August, she began to write her most widely read book, The Twilight Years, published in 1972. The novel tells the story of Shigezo, an eighty-four-year-old man so senile he can no longer recognize his son, his daughter, or even a picture of his dead wife. But he does recognize his daughter-in-law, Akiko, and because his daughter Kyoko lives far away, it is Akiko's duty to take care of him at home.

Akiko is a typist for a law firm, but soon she can go to work only three days a week because taking care of Shigezo is so exhausting. She gets up two or three times a night to help him urinate, and finally swaddles him in diapers, changing them several times a day. She bathes him every evening after dinner, and is embarrassed each time. Because he is constantly hungry, she also gives him snacks at odd hours.

Akiko cannot put Shigezo into a nursing home because sometimes he wanders off into the streets of Tokyo, and the nursing homes are too understaffed to take "runaways." Gradually Akiko discovers that many of her friends also take care of senile relatives. There are millions of old people throughout Japan, but surprisingly few facilities to take care of them.

"Men are so helpless," Akiko complains at one point. For over a year Akiko works at her law office, cleans house, cooks dinner, and takes constant care of Shigezo. Her husband and teenage son mean well, but do little to help.

For a long time Akiko wishes Shigezo were dead. But as Shigezo becomes more infantile, he also becomes more likable. The crotchety old man develops a beautiful angelic smile, like some wise priest in a meditative trance. His vocabulary shrinks to a single word, moshi-moshi (hello), and he spends entire days happily watching a caged songbird. In the end Akiko feels that Shigezo has somehow transcended the human condition. When he finally dies, she is the only one who mourns.

The Twilight Years sold two million copies in hard cover before it became a paperback. In a nation that reveres its old, the book had obviously touched a nerve.

Ariyoshi tried to donate all the royalties from her book to a number of nursing homes, but the Japanese government insisted on its share of taxes. After a furor in the press, the government finally allowed her to deduct a quarter of her royalties as a charitable contribution. It also began to loosen its tax laws on donations, and eventually built a few more nursing homes.

After writing The Twilight Years, Ariyoshi helped translate Father Daniel Berrigan's anti-Vietnam War play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, from English into Japanese. Then she directed the play, which was performed in Tokyo.

In 1974, Japan's second largest newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, invited Ariyoshi to write a serial novel on any subject she chose.

She decided instead to write a nonfiction book on the cumulative effects of agricultural chemicals and food additives. Compound Pollution explained difficult scientific issues simply, and many commentators said it had a greater impact than anything else previously written about the environment in Japan.

Ariyoshi reveals, for example, that because pickled vegetables are sold by the pound, modern wholesalers add water to make them weigh more. Water reduces their shelf life, so they also add preservatives, which decrease the flavor. The wholesalers then insert artificial flavoring agents to restore the lost taste, which, of course, would not be necessary if they had not added water in the first place.

Ariyoshi knew that Compound Pollution was not literature. But she felt that "someone has to do this kind of work. And because I knew I could do a good job, I felt obligated to do it."

In the spring of 1977 Ariyoshi was hospitalized for exhaustion from over-work. She was researching her last important novel, Her Highness Princess Kazunomiya, and told friends that she had been pouring all of her creative energy into the book.

Written in 1978, Her Highness Princess Kazunomiya is about the lowborn girl who married the next-to-last shogun in 1862 and her adjustment to Japan's modernization. The novel is full of detailed descriptions of the makeup, hairstyles, and dresses of the court ladies, as well as their music, manners, and style of talking.

An entire chapter of Her Highness Princess Kazunomiya is devoted to how the nobility performed the tea ceremony. Ariyoshi was a devoted practitioner of the tea ceremony, and had her own collection of tea utensils.

Her Highness Princess Kazunomiya was adapted as a series for television in 1980. Two years later Ariyoshi wrote a mystery, The Bell at Curtaintime Rings Merrily. Although Ariyoshi was a great admirer of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout, she wrote only one mystery. Her astounding output of books slowed down considerably after she finished Her Highness Princess Kazunomiya. She started a book about prostitution, for example, but serialized only a few chapters in a newspaper before discontinuing the project.

Still tired, Ariyoshi despaired that she was losing her creativity. Perhaps this depression was compounded either by menopause or by the fact that her only daughter was away at college. By 1984 Ariyoshi had difficulty going to sleep. She took sleeping pills and started drinking heavily, and it is likely that a combination of pills and alcohol caused her to die in her sleep on August 30, 1984. She was fifty-three.

Ariyoshi Sawako widened the scope of Japanese literature by writing about problems that were common to millions of families yet new to Japanese fiction. With restless compassion, she wrote about a radiation victim having a child, an interracial couple, exhausted students with competitive mothers, a young wife living with her mother-in-law, a woman caring for a senile father-in-law, and many other harried people. Considering that Ariyoshi also wrote historical novels that capture in careful detail the exquisite beauty of Japan's past, the range of her work is astonishing.

In an era when many writers, especially Japanese, have looked inward and examined every aspect of their psyches, millions of readers find it refreshing that Ariyoshi almost never wrote about herself. She was too busy describing the suffering of others.

Weston, Mark. Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japan's Greatest Men and Women (See general references for full citation).