Higuchi Ichiyo — The Woman Who Said the Roadside Was Fine

Sad Enough to Die

"My whole life will be torn and torn again, until I fall by the roadside as a beggar. That is the wish of my whole life."

It was February 1894. The woman who said this was twenty-one. The man she said it to, she had met that very day.

He ran a society that told people's fortunes, under a sign that read Tenkei Kenshin Society. She did not give her real name. She called herself Akizuki and was shown into his sitting room.

She had come about money. She wanted to try speculating, betting on the rise and fall of prices. But she did not have a single sen to spare. So she had thought of him. That is what she confessed to him, her diary says.

She wrote down everything that was said that day, in detail, in her diary. In the preface to a diary she had begun three springs earlier, she had written that it was never meant for the eyes of the world.

Her name was Higuchi Natsuko. Later she would write novels under the name Ichiyo.

But the story goes back more than ten years.

"I was so sad I could have died, but school was over for me."

This is how Natsuko later wrote about what happened when she was eleven.

It was her mother who pulled her out. Giving a girl a long education was bad for her future, her mother thought. It was better to teach her sewing and have her learn how to run a house. That was her mother's view, Natsuko wrote.

Her father disagreed. He argued with her mother: no, we should not do that, let her go a little longer. Then, her diary says, he asked his daughter:

"What do you think?"

Natsuko could not answer. She had been timid since birth and could never say clearly which she wanted.

Perhaps she really did love school.

From the age of seven, by the old way of counting, she had been crazy about illustrated storybooks. She dropped her toy balls and her shuttlecock and read for hours. By nine or so, it made her miserable to think that her whole life would end up ordinary.

"It was as if I wanted to step on the clouds and reach the sky."

That is how Natsuko described herself at that age. Money, she added, seemed almost like dust and dirt to her.

After she left school, her days were chores and sewing lessons. Still, she kept sitting at her desk every night. Her father even bought her books of waka, the short poems of old Japan.

And then her father decided to let her study again. In the summer when she was fourteen, Natsuko entered Haginoya, a poetry school run by Nakajima Utako.

But misfortune kept coming to the family. Her oldest brother, and then her father after his business had failed, died one after the other.

At seventeen, Natsuko, a woman, became head of the household. She had to support her mother and her younger sister, Kuniko, and what she earned from sewing was nowhere near enough.

It was the second spring since her father had died. On the morning of April 11, 1891, eighteen-year-old Natsuko took Kuniko to see the cherry blossoms on Ueno hill.

As they walked down Kurumazaka slope, Kuniko said suddenly:

"This is where Father always took us, morning and evening, in cherry blossom season, when he was alive."

The springs of long ago seemed to float up before their eyes. Under the mountain cherries blooming again this year, they thought of the one who had gone and would not come back. They wrote poems about it, and said to each other that they felt helpless. By then, Natsuko wrote, their sleeves were soaked with tears.

Four days later, on April 15, she visited a novelist, through an acquaintance. His name was Nakarai Tosui. He wrote novels for newspapers.

She wanted to write novels and feed her family. She had come to be his student.

According to her diary that day, Tosui was about thirty. His calm, slight smile was the kind that "even a three-year-old would take to."

Scholars spoke badly of newspaper fiction, saying it was all about villains and wicked women. Why Tosui wrote it anyway, her diary says, he explained like this:

"I am not writing for honor. I am writing so my brothers and sisters, my father and mother, have clothes to wear and food to eat."

It was the same reason Natsuko wanted to write.

"I am not worthy of being called a teacher, but I can always be someone you talk things over with. Come whenever you like, without holding back."

When he said that, she wrote, she was endlessly happy, and the first thing that came was tears.

Dinner was served. They hardly knew each other yet, she thought, and she refused several times. But as he kept offering, she finally ate it all.

The rain grew heavy and it was getting dark. When she got up to leave, Tosui said he had already called a rickshaw for her, a small carriage pulled by a man.

A week later, Natsuko visited again, bringing a story she had not finished. Her diary for that day says:

"Someone you thought you could meet once is sometimes not so good the second time. But with this man, today I felt closer to him than ever, and I thought he was a rare and precious person in this world."

Because of this man, Natsuko soon became the talk of the whole poetry school.

Sweet Bean Soup on a Snowy Day

From around the autumn of that year, Natsuko began to use the name "Ichiyo," which means "one leaf."

It came from a legend about Daruma, the founder of Zen, who is said to have floated down a great river on a single reed leaf. Daruma had no legs, and she had no ashi, the Japanese word that means both legs and money. They were the same, she joked, according to the memorial museum.

February 4, 1892. According to her diary, the sky was bad from the morning, and everyone said it would snow.

Around ten, sleet began to fall. By noon it had turned into a real snowfall. Let it snow, Natsuko decided, and she left the house. She had promised to visit Tosui.

She hired a rickshaw on the way, but the wind blew snow in at her. Holding an umbrella up in front, she finally reached Tosui's house in Hirakawacho a little after twelve.

She called out, but no one answered. However many times she called, it was the same. Maybe he was out. She sat on the step at the entrance and waited. Wind and snow blew in through the gaps in the lattice door.

Unable to stand the cold, she slid a paper door open a crack and stepped into a room of about two mats. One sliding door away was Tosui's room. She put her ear close, and heard a faint snoring.

The clock struck one. She grew uneasy and cleared her throat several times.

Tosui finally woke up, ashamed to be seen in his night clothes, and hurriedly threw on a coat. He said he had been invited to the kabuki theater the night before. When he got home, he wrote the day's installment of his novel and went to bed, so he had overslept. You should have woken me, he said. You are too polite. He laughed loudly as he opened the shutters. It was almost two.

Tosui made the fire himself and boiled water. When she tried to help, he looked troubled and asked her to leave it. By his pillow, theater programs and wallets lay scattered.

He went to borrow a pot, and from over the hedge came the voice of the young wife next door.

"Mr. Nakarai, you have a guest. You must be happy. I'm so jealous."

If it hadn't snowed, he said, he had meant to treat her to a feast. With this snow, it had become a rice cake on a painting, something you can only look at. And with that, Tosui cooked sweet red bean soup with rice cakes for her with his own hands. He handed her the chopsticks, saying he was sorry, these were the ones he had used to grill the rice cakes.

The snow fell harder and harder. Stay the night, Tosui urged her, and I will stay somewhere else. Natsuko shook her head. Her mother had warned her strictly. Tosui laughed loudly and had a rickshaw called.

The way home was all white. Natsuko pulled her shawl over her hood, and only now and then let her eyes show. Many feelings pressed on her chest, and she thought she would write a story called "A Snowy Day," her diary says.

In June of that year, her diary says, her friend Ito Natsuko called her into a small room of about four mats at Haginoya. Haginoya was a place where girls from well-known families studied poetry. In a low voice, her friend asked:

"Is it that you feel a heavy duty to the world? Or is it that you would hate to lose your family's name?"

People at the school were talking about Natsuko and Tosui.

Two nights later, Natsuko gathered her courage and spoke with her teacher, Nakajima Utako. According to her diary, Utako looked at her with doubt and asked:

"That Mr. Nakarai. You have not made any promise about the future with him yet?"

There was no promise, nothing at all. When Natsuko said so, Utako went on. She had heard from others that this Nakarai was telling everyone that Natsuko was his wife.

Natsuko was stunned and shocked. And all she could feel, she wrote, was how much she hated that man, and how much it hurt.

On June 22, she went to Tosui's house to say goodbye. That day, too, is recorded in her diary in detail.

Tosui was asleep again. She hesitated to wake him and waited for a while. When he woke up, he came out, asking why she had not woken him.

For a while she could not bring herself to speak and kept her eyes down. Then she told him about the rumors, and said she would not see him for a while.

Tosui laughed, as if it were nothing.

"It's no wonder people talk. What is unreasonable is the two of us, with nothing between us."

When she started to leave, he stopped her.

"Today is the day we say goodbye. Who knows when we will next sip plain tea together. Stay a little longer."

That summer, someone she never expected came to Natsuko's house.

Shibuya Saburo. Long ago, her late father had looked on him as a good match for his daughter. After her father died, that plan had fallen apart. According to her diary, he was now a prosecutor in Niigata. He had even grown a mustache.

Natsuko was badly nearsighted and could hardly see his face. She had made herself nearsighted, she said, and laughed.

As he was leaving, Natsuko said:

"By the time you come again, Mr. Shibuya, I may be selling green soybeans in the street, or delivering newspapers. Who knows."

On September 1, her mother went to return some borrowed money to the house of a man named Yamazaki. Yamazaki kept urging her, it is said: why not take Shibuya in as Natsuko's husband, or let Natsuko marry into his family? Her mother refused and came home. The whole family laughed and said the world has all kinds of people, her diary says.

That day's entry also says this. If she leaned on this man, her mother could live in comfort and her sister could find a good match. But in return she would have to bow her head and obey him. She would not do that.

"If I have no one to lean on, I do not mind falling by the roadside."

"I do not know when this heart will change. But today, my heart is like this."

When the new year of 1893 came, on a day when snow started falling around noon, Natsuko wrote:

"It is not that I like snowy days. I grieve over them."

They had talked peacefully across a charcoal brazier. That sweet bean soup he had made with his own hands. Love, and also a kind of awakening, had begun on that snowy day, she wrote.

And in July 1893, these words appear in her diary:

"Literature is not something you do in order to eat. You take up the brush as your feelings run, as your heart leans."

"Now then. From here on, I will stop doing literature for the sake of eating. I will try the thing called business, with the sweat of the abacus beads."

The twenty-one-year-old novelist decided to open a shop that sold cheap sweets.

She had no money to start with, anywhere.