Hayashi Fumiko is perhaps the most popular woman writer in twentieth-century Japan, but she is still little known in the West. Only one of her novels and a half dozen short stories have been translated into English, out of a body of work that includes twenty-five books and over 250 stories and essays. Yet even this tiny sample reveals her extraordinary power.

Most of Hayashi's books were best sellers, and the Japanese public still loves her as a working class girl who made good. Hayashi (1903-1951) endured extreme poverty until she became rich at twenty-six, and drew upon her early hardship to write with compassion about the troubles ordinary women have with jobs, money, husbands, and lovers. In a simple and poetic style Hayashi wrote bittersweet stories about poor women who never give up hope.

Hayashi was born on December 31, 1903, in a rented room above a tin shop in Moji City, at the northern tip of the island of Kyushu. Her father was a peddler, and opened a secondhand thrift store in the nearby city of Shimonoseki soon after her birth.

Hayashi's mother worked as a chambermaid at a hot springs inn before was pregnant. A high-spirited woman, she cared little for social convention and already had three children by two different men. At thirty-five, she was fourteen years older than her new lover. Hayashi's parents never married.

When Hayashi was six, her father brought home a concubine. Within months her mother ran off with a handsome clerk at the thrift shop who was twenty years her junior. Taking Hayashi with them, the couple moved from city to city, peddling secondhand goods. Hayashi's stepfather was kind, but the young girl switched elementary schools thirteen times in six years, and made no friends her own age. She read a great deal, and also spent time with her mates at cheap boardinghouses. Among her companions were a coal miner who picked lice out of Hayashi's unwashed hair, a prostitute with a snake tattooed on her belly, and a street singer with a glass eye.

When Hayashi was twelve, her family moved to Onomichi, a small forty miles east of Hiroshima. An elementary-school teacher there admired Hayashi's writing and encouraged her to enter high school in 1918; Hayashi's mother then insisted that the family not move again until Hayashi graduated.

Hayashi earned her tuition by working nights at a canvas-sail factory. Her grades at high school were average, but still another teacher encouraged her literary ambitions. She discovered the poetry of Basho, Walt Whitman, and Heinrich Heine, and wrote poems of her own for local newspapers.

Okano Gunichi was Hayashi's first love, a friend from Onomichi who shared her interest in literature. When Hayashi graduated from high school in 1922 she followed him to Tokyo, and for a year they lived together while he finished his university studies. Despite the fact that Hayashi was very pretty and highly intelligent, Okano did not marry her when he graduated because his family strongly objected to a match with someone poor and illegitimate. Hayashi was devastated, but decided to stay in Tokyo, and supported herself with a variety of jobs: as a cashier at a public bathhouse, a saleswoman at a pawnshop, a nanny for an author's children, a clerk in a stockbroker's office, an assistant at a maternity hospital, a painter of toys in a basement factory. Usually she worked as a waitress in cheap cafés, but she also helped her parents sell socks and underwear at a night stall they operated when they came to Tokyo.

Once Hayashi had so little money, she stole turnips from a vegetable patch and slept in a public toilet. Another time she attempted suicide because she felt it was the only way she could avoid the financial temptation to become a prostitute. When the sleeping powder she took failed to work, she decided that she would "toil on by daring to live."

Hayashi also had hard times with men. In 1924 she supported a young actor for months until she discovered that he had a bankbook with deposits of over 2,000 yen (several years' income) and love letters from another woman. She dropped him immediately, but her next lover was worse. Nomura Yoshiya was a mediocre anarchist poet who beat Hayashi frequently. The miserable affair ended only after he kicked her to the floor, stuffed her into a burlap bag, and threw the bag under the floorboards of their kitchen.

In 1926 Hayashi finally met a supportive and level-headed man, a European-style painter named Tezuka Ryokubin. They began living together almost immediately, but did not bother to legalize their happy relationship until 1944.

Throughout these difficult years Hayashi was determined to be a writer. She kept a lengthy diary, and also wrote poems. Some of her poems were published in a left-wing journal called Literary Front. Hayashi also read translations of Baudelaire, Tolstoy, O'Neill, and the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun.

In 1927 Hayashi rewrote her diary under the title A Vagabond's Story, also translated as Vagabond's Song. She sent the manuscript to several publishers, all rejected it. A literary magazine, Women and the Arts, began to print installments of the diary in October 1928, and an editor who liked what he read published the diary as a book in 1930.

A Vagabond's Story describes Hayashi's life as she works at a variety of menial jobs. Although the book has a stream-of-consciousness feel, each thought is complete and concise.

Hayashi writes concretely about her lack of money:

A Vagabond's Story is not an exposé of poverty, however; it is a record of Hayashi's moods, her despair—"I want to scream like a crazy person"—and also her ambition:

The book has many unforgettable images: a hundred women waiting on line to apply for two jobs at a grain store, a group of construction workers who quarrel and vomit after drinking ten bottles of sake, and a knife-throwing ex-boyfriend whom Hayashi both hates and adores.

Sometimes Hayashi puts her poems into the book. Here is a powerful couplet:

A Vagabond's Story was an instant success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies even before critics had a chance to review it. Many Japanese women led lives like Hayashi's, and they hailed her for putting their experiences and feelings into words.

"The only ideal I ever had was to get rich quick," Hayashi once wrote, and at twenty-six she had succeeded. She gave money to her proud and weary mother, then treated herself to a month-long trip to China. When she returned, she published some additional chapters of her diary to meet the public's demand for more material. About this time she also released a book of poetry, I Saw a Pale Horse.

In the summer of 1931 A Vagabond's Story was staged at a theater in Tokyo. Four years later it became a popular film, the first of three movie adaptations. Yet more than sixty years later only a few excerpts of this remarkable book have been translated into English.

The year 1931 was also when Hayashi published Town of Accordions and Fish, a memoir of her childhood in Onomichi, and Honest Poverty, a collection of short stories about the first four years of her relationship with Tezuka. During this time Hayashi and Tezuka were desperately poor, but deeply in love. As Hayashi gradually began to feel secure in her marriage, she also regained the faith she had lost in the basic goodness of people.

Honest Poverty was a success with both the critics and the public, and substantially boosted Hayashi's royalty income. Traveling again, she took the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Moscow, then continued on to Paris, where she spent four months going to operas, plays, and museums. But even the royalties from a best seller could go only so far in this expensive city. Hayashi helped make ends meet by eating lightly and by writing articles for Japanese magazines before returning to Japan by ship in June 1932.

Back home, Hayashi was inundated with offers not only to write magazine articles, but also to give talks to women's groups and literary societies. She rarely refused a request, partly because she was very hardworking, and partly because she enjoyed traveling around Japan. During each of the next ten summers, however, she and Tezuka rented a quiet cottage in Onomichi, where she could write and he could paint undisturbed. By 1933 Tezuka was making a decent living as an artist.

In 1934 Hayashi began for the first time to write stories that were not drawn from her own life. Cry Baby is about an unwanted boy who is passed from one relative to another while his mother begins a new marriage. Oyster, published in 1935, describes a pouch maker who gradually retreats into madness after his young wife, who married him only for money, deserts him. Both novellas were highly praised by critics, and this gave Hayashi the confidence to continue writing fiction.

In the fall of 1936 Hayashi visited troops in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. She enjoyed being a reporter, but never challenged the militarism of her time. Perhaps it was too dangerous. Only three years earlier the police had thrown her into jail for nine days merely for subscribing to a communist newspaper. Although she had many left-wing friends, Hayashi was basically uninterested in politics. She preferred to write personal stories about ordinary people coping with hardship.

When Japan invaded China in 1937 Hayashi's lover was drafted into the army. In December, Hayashi went to China herself as a war correspondent for Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan's leading newspapers. She was the first Japanese woman in the city of Nanjing after its conquest, but she wrote articles from the Japanese point of view and ignored the fact that the Japanese soldiers raped over twenty thousand Chinese women. Censorship was severe, and perhaps Hayashi knew better than even to try to report such horror.

During the next several years Hayashi wrote articles about Japanese troops in China, Manchuria, Vietnam, and Borneo, and often gave speeches to the soldiers. Although she never questioned the harshness of Japanese military rule in public or in print, she did try to live with local civilians so that she could see what their lives were like. Her rather luxurious stay in the highlands of Vietnam in the winter of 1942-1943 proved especially useful because the area became the setting of her final novel, Floating Cloud. In that book she wrote that the Japanese "were nothing but sheer outsiders who came to ransack someone else's property."

By the time Hayashi returned to Japan for good in May 1943 it was almost impossible to write. The search for food and necessities was too time-consuming, and censorship grew tighter as even A Vagabond's Story was banned for being too self-absorbed and insufficently patriotic.

Fortunately, Tezuka was discharged from the army, and in December 1943 he and Hayashi adopted a baby boy whom they named Tai. Four months later Hayashi and her son left Tokyo for a hot springs inn in the mountains near Nagano. They stayed at spas in the region for the rest of the war, but the care of her baby left Hayashi with little time for writing.

After the war Hayashi made up for lost time. She was free at last from censorship, and in a defeated nation there was a wealth of material to write about because everyone was poor and deserving of compassion. Hayashi published several short stories in Kawabata Yasunari's literary magazine, Humanity, in 1946, and began serializing a novel about war widows, Swirling Currents (not yet translated), the following year.

One of her best stories from the postwar years is "Borneo Diamond." Manabe, a mining engineer, sends his wife a large diamond that he has dug up himself and dreams of seeing her wear. Instead, to his disgust, his wife donates the diamond to the war effort.

In another story, "Splendid Carrion," a war veteran abandons the tiny apartment of his sister's family for life in the streets, because "the life of a vagabond promised a more comfortable world than that of a bed in the entrance hall."

It is probably no coincidence that Hayashi wrote her best work once her son was old enough to go to elementary school. Between 1948 and 1951 she completed eight novellas, a full-length novel, and her forest short stories.

In one story, "Bones," a widow is the sole support of her family. Her husband had died in Okinawa, her brother suffers from tuberculosis, and her father's pension has been cut off. She is too frail to make a living knitting, and turns to prostitution. On her first night with a customer "she felt such remorse that it seemed to set her ears ringing," but before long she learns "to guess the worth of a wallet at a glance."

Another work by Hayashi, "Late Chrysanthemum," written in 1948, is regarded by some critics as not only her finest short story, but also as one of the best accounts of a geisha ever written. It concerns a middle-aged geisha's dashed expectations.

Kin, who is fifty-six and comfortably retired, eagerly awaits a visit form Tabe, a former lover who is twenty-five years younger than she is. Before the war Tabe was a fresh-faced student, but years of fighting in Burma have taken their roll. He arrives with a bottle of whiskey, and drinks it in greedy gulps. His business is failing, his marriage is stale, and his mistress is pregnant. He asks Kin to lend him 400,000 yen. "A cold chill crept over Kin…. 'Did you come to talk about money, then, and not to see me?'"

Kin loved Tabe once, and kept his photograph for years. Now, as Tabe falls into a drunken sleep, she burns his picture. Although Kin still has a wealthy patron, she is unlikely to fall in love again. Money will be her chief comfort in her old age.

"Downtown," also written in 1948 and sometimes translated as "Tokyo," is perhaps Hayashi's most vivid story. In only a dozen pages Hayashi conveys the bleakness of postwar Tokyo, the beginning and end of a romance, and the start of a new life.

Ryo makes a meager living trudging from house to house shouting, "Tea for sale." She has a son six years old, the length of time that her husband has been a prisoner in Siberia, if he is alive at all. On a cold, windy day a kindhearted truck driver invites her into his home so that she can warm herself by a fire. She returns the next day and the day after, and they become friends. One night they go to a movie and stay at an inn. The following day the truck driver is killed in an accident, and the friendship has ended almost as soon as it has begun. At the end of the story Ryo sells tea to four women who are sewing a pile of shirts and socks by a warm stove: perhaps Ryo will join them.

During 1949 and 1950 Hayashi wrote several novellas, but her most important work during this period is her last novel, Floating Cloud, which she published in installments between 1949 and 1951.

Floating Cloud is a novel of defeat. It is about a man and a woman who cannot adjust to the bleak realities of postwar Japan. Tomioka is a forestry engineer, Yukiko is a typist, and they meet in 1943 in the wooded highlands of Japanese-occupied Vietnam, where they live luxuriously at a French colonial villa. Everywhere there are tropical flowers, white peacocks, and mountain views. For Yukiko especially, life is paradise. She is the only young Japanese woman in the area, and is sought after. She falls in love with Tomioka, a handsome man who is married and also has a Vietnamese mistress. Tomioka desires Yukiko but does not love her nearly as much as she loves him. Nevertheless the two have plenty of time to explore the woods, the gardens, and each other.

By contrast, Japan in 1946 is a nation of shortages and fatigue. Skies are gray, blankets are thin, pillows are soiled, and breakfast is boiled barley. At home Tomioka is demoralized and weak. He cannot bring himself to tell his wife about Yukiko, or to tell Yukiko that he doesn't love her. He sells his house to start a lumber business, but it fails quickly, and eventually he lives with relatives.

Yukiko is also weak. She sees Tomioka's faults clearly enough, but cannot stop "chasing the shadow of a lost love." When Tomioka's wife dies and Tomioka takes a forestry job on the rainy island of Yakushima, Yukiko follows him there even though the damp weather worsens her tuberculosis. Lying sick in bed, Yukiko realized

Yukiko dies, and Tomioka has no wife, no lover, no home, and no purpose. He is a floating cloud, one of the millions of lost souls in postwar Japan.

Two months after finishing Floating Cloud, Hayashi suffered a heart attack and died the following day, June 28, 1951. She was forty-seven. (Her son died in a train wreck in 1959, when he was only sixteen.) Kawabata Yasunari, author of Snow Country, led her funeral service, but thousands of ordinary women with aprons and shopping bags also came by to pay their respects.

Hayashi literally wrote herself to death. At the time she died she was writing installments for three novellas simultaneously, and in March she had also be a new full-length novel, Meals.

Why did she work so hard? She once said that "to eat and to write are two reasons for living." Because of her firsthand experience with poverty, Hayashi had many more tales to share than do most women who write. She could tell the stories of ordinary women better than anyone else in Japan, perhaps it was because she knew this that she drove herself so hard.

Hayashi Fumiko loved common people, and they love her in return Onomichi, her hometown, a statue of Hayashi stands on the main street, nearby is an exact replica of her office. In Sakurajima, Kyushu, at the hot springs inn where Hayashi's mother once worked as a chambermaid, buses stop daily at a shrine dedicated to Hayashi. Two lines of her poetry are carved in stone:

Weston, Mark. "Hayashi Fumiko," Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japan's Greatest Men and Women. New York: Kodansha International, 1999, 264-270.