Hayashi Fumiko (redirected from Fumiko Hayashi (author))

Hayashi Fumiko (hä`yä`shē f`mē`kō),1903–51, Japanese novelist and short-story writer. The daughter of an itinerant peddlar, Hayashi was raised in abject poverty. After finishing school, she moved to Tokyo to write, barely managing to support herself with a variety of menial jobs. Her first novel, Horoki [journal of wandering] (1928) records her early years of struggle. Subsequent works continued to address with compassion the despair of the poor and downtrodden and the suffering caused by war. Although Hayashi was briefly influenced by proletarian literature, her exploration of themes of social justice is grounded in optimism and a belief in the human will to survive.

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Hayashi Fumiko 

Born Dec. 31, 1903, in Yamaguchi, on the island of Honshu; died June 28, 1951. Japanese writer.

Hayashi spent many years in wandering through Japan. She won literary fame with the autobiographical novel Wandering (1930). This work, which is written in diary form, re-creates her childhood and adult life, especially her interest in creative writing. Antiwar motifs are evident in Hayashi’s post–1945 work, such as the short stories “The Storm” (1946) and “The Beautiful Spine” (1947).

In 1948, Hayashi received a prize for outstanding woman writers of Japan in recognition of her short story “Late Chrysanthemum,” about the life of an old merchant woman. Her most significant work, Floating Cloud (1951), concerns the wanderings of a woman who finds no stable place for herself in postwar Japan.

WORKS

Hayashi Fumiko zenshu, vols. 1–23. Tokyo, 1951–53.
In Russian translation:
Shest’ rasskazov. Moscow, 1960. Foreword by I. Erenburg.

K. REKHO