still egg

Miyajima Urako was born in 1890 in Tokyo; her maiden name was Yagi. Her father had studied to be a pharmacist, spoke German and worked for Siemens, but was unreliable and spendthrift; after he died young, Urako’s mother, a society lady, devoted herself to poetry and music. Urako and her younger sister Sawako both attended the progressive Seijo Girls’ School, and Sawako went on to study and later teach at the Athenée Francaise and translate Daudet. Urako herself became a reporter for the left-leaning Yorozu Morning News. In 1914 she and Sawako also joined the Saffron feminist journal run by Otake Kokichi (after her break with the Bluestockings) and Kamichika Ichiko.

The Seijo headmaster hosted a philosophy study group at his home, which Urako attended after graduation; it was there, reading Bertrand Russell in the Everyman edition, that she met Miyajima Sukeo, when she was twenty-four and he four years older. Miyajima’s family was not well-to-do or interested in culture (apart from an artist brother); he was apprenticed in a sugar warehouse at the age of twelve, and went on to work at a kimono shop, as a trainee dentist, a money-lender’s collector, a coal mine clerk, a boiler stoker, and a traveling fishmonger. When he and Urako met he was running a used book stall. Urako, who had the more stable salary, paid for their dates, which Sukeo resented; when they married, she was already pregnant, which lost her her job. Instead she found employment as an amanuensis for a well-known translator of Goethe.

Sukeo was under police watch for his associations with the anarchist Osugi Sakae, whom he admired and looked up to; their proletarian Heimin News was frequently banned. Urako acted as an assistant editor, as she had for its predecessor Modern Thought, and stood on the street corner with a sandwich board to sell the paper when she was seven months pregnant. Osugi bought them all noodles once the paper sold out (they had cleverly avoided banning with articles by the well-respected Ozaki Yukio, husband of Yei, and others). Urako wrote for the paper as well, including a sharp critique of the Bluestockings’ debate on birth control and abortion, in which she pointed out that while Hiratsuka Raicho, Ito Noe (already among Osugi Sakae’s girlfriends), Harada Satsuki, and Yamada Waka all had varying opinions on the issue, none of them had really considered either the root causes or their solutions. Her other essays included the topics of pacifism from a mother’s perspective, the uses or otherwise of a girls’ school education, her own experience as a struggling but fulfilled housewife, and what to put in a cheap, nutritious box lunch that the children would actually enjoy eating.

In 1916 Sukeo published The Miner, sometimes called Japan’s first proletarian novel; it was in the same year that Kamichika Ichiko stabbed Osugi Sakae for his two(three)-timing ways. Sukeo and Urako took Ichiko’s side and broke off relations with Osugi. Their own household was, for all their leftist beliefs, run on conservative lines; Sukeo drank with his friends, Urako served them, washed the dishes and raised the children. In 1920, after visiting friends at a temple on Mt. Hiei near Kyoto, Sukeo took the whole household—including three children under four—there to live. As a writer he could work anywhere; Urako had to accustom herself to life on the mountain, and they lived on what local greens she could find to pick. She gave up and took the children back to Tokyo after a few months, while Sukeo went back and forth. He began to drink more and write less after the earthquake of 1923, when Osugi Sakae and Ito Noe were murdered along with many others, which led him to doubt his own practice as an anarchist.

In 1930, he told Urako he was leaving her (and their children) to become a Buddhist monk. Urako said “Well, if that’s what you feel you must do, you go do it.” Left with six children to support, she went back to work as a journalist. The essay she wrote later about Sukeo (scattered with the English and French terms of an educated left-winger of the time) suggests that she was under absolutely no illusions about his qualities, still loved him anyway, and was not prepared to tie her life to his any longer; it finishes “He left me with six children, three boys and three girls; anyone can imagine that holding them all together by myself is no easy thing. But he trusted me to be capable of it.”

She died of tuberculosis, possibly caused by overwork, at the age of forty-six in 1937, having changed her name back to Yagi Urako. Sukeo, never a very successful monk, survived her by fifteen years, coming in and out of his temple to drink or visit his family. (One episode remains in which Urako found a job for Sukeo’s old friend Kusano Shimpei (of frog poems fame), which he promptly lost by being entirely unreliable, leaving Urako to take the blame. Sukeo showed up to beat Kusano with a cane until he apologized.)

Sources
Mori 2008
Akiyama Kiyoshi 1972 (Japanese)