In this blog post, we will examine how the representation of women in the Meiji era was reconstructed in the modern era, focusing on the life and works of Ichiyo Higuchi, particularly ‘Child’s Play’.

Ichiyo Higuchi: Selection for Banknotes and Social Significance

For the design of Japan’s new banknotes, issued starting November 1, 2004, portraits of Hideyo Noguchi—a renowned bacteriologist—and Ichiyo Higuchi—a Meiji-era female novelist who died of tuberculosis at the age of just 24—were selected. As the then-Minister of Finance, who was responsible for selecting the figures to be featured on the banknotes, stated, “While politicians have traditionally been the focus, this time we selected them from a broad perspective—including an emphasis on academia and the promotion of a society of equal participation by men and women,” the selection of Ichiyo is linked to the fact that women’s issues were reframed as gender issues—one in which men must also be included—and institutionalized at the national level following the enactment of the Basic Act on a Society of Equal Participation by Men and Women in 1999. The government, responsible for implementing these policies, readily recognized that featuring a woman on banknotes—as a symbol of a society where men and women participate jointly—would be advantageous from the perspective of visible governance.
To my knowledge, there was little opposition to this selection. This is understandable, given that Ichiyo—who became the head of her household at the age of 16 following her father’s business failure and subsequent death—was unable to break the cycle of poverty during her short life. For this reason, the criticism that having close relatives in political and business circles could undermine the fairness of political or economic activities did not apply to her. Furthermore, since she had remained single her entire life after her betrothed broke off their engagement due to her family’s downfall, there was no reason for her to face criticism that she was attempting to emphasize the feudal Confucian order through the image of a model wife and mother. Moreover, and most crucially, since she passed away just four years after making her literary debut at the age of twenty, she never had the opportunity to be involved in any way with Japan’s subsequent path toward expansionist imperialism; thus, criticisms labeling her as pro-state or anti-state were fundamentally untenable. In short, it was her ill-fated destiny that underpinned this uncontroversial selection.
And what this makes all the more poignant is her genius as a novelist. Of course, one cannot overlook the fact that the canonization of “famous” female writers—a process long pursued by feminist criticism—is deeply involved here. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the writing of this ill-fated genius—who carved out an era with her very being before vanishing in the blink of an eye—assaults us as an endless presence that simply refuses to allow her very existence to fade into the recesses of memory.
Higuchi Ichiyō was born during the Meiji era, when Japan began its full-scale Western-style modernization, yet the shadow of the old era defined her and the world around her so profoundly. There was a man. Although he was a farmer, he studied Chinese classics to become a samurai—the ruling class of the Edo period—and purchased the status of a samurai family with his own money, eventually realizing his lofty dream of social advancement. However, this occurred just three months before the Meiji Restoration led to the collapse of the shogunate and the subsequent restructuring of the samurai class. Having only just become a samurai, he was forced to reinvent himself as a bourgeois citizen by venturing into business—a field with which he was unfamiliar—and, burdened by debt from his business failure, he died in anguish. Although values were overturned and the economic structure was changing during this period of upheaval, he was unable to adapt skillfully to these shifts. This is the story of Ichiyo’s father.
There was a woman. She and her children were able to maintain a middle-class lifestyle until her husband’s business failed. She had a daughter who, influenced by her father and older brothers, had loved reading since childhood. However, as a woman shaped by the Confucian view of women—which had regarded a woman’s literary talent as taboo since the early modern period—she refused to allow her daughter to continue her education, even though the girl had graduated at the top of her class from the fourth level of the Advanced Elementary School curriculum at age 11. She insisted, “It is not good for a woman’s future to pursue learning for too long; I will teach her sewing and have her help with the housework instead.” Nevertheless, that bookworm of a daughter would sneak into the storeroom behind her mother’s back and read by the light seeping through the crack in the door. This is the story of Ichiyo’s mother. Ichiyo, who would later be hailed as Japan’s greatest modern female novelist, grew up under parents who personally embodied the values of a bygone era.
Nevertheless, her father—who had long recognized his daughter’s literary talent—enrolled the 14-year-old Ichiyo in a private school called Hagino-ya, where upper-middle-class women of the time were taught classical subjects such as calligraphy and flower-and-bird painting, primarily using the Kana script, and were encouraged to practice writing. However, this was not intended to support his daughter’s self-realization as a modern woman. Considering that, since the early modern period, women’s writing had been bound by these classical literary norms—and that these norms served as a controlling force limiting the influence of modern women’s writing on Classical Chinese-style prose, Western literature, or newspaper articles and editorials—it can be said that her father’s intention was to have his daughter internalize traditional women’s writing and the ideal of womanhood that underpinned it.
That Ichiyo internalized the classical Chinese style as her own, in accordance with her father’s intentions, is evident from the fact that she even wrote her diary in classical Chinese. Most of the novels she left behind employed or drew upon this classical style. This represented a break from the “unification of written and spoken language” style, which had been established as the standard written language of the modern nation-state with the dawn of the 20th century (as a result, I experienced countless frustrations while translating her novels, which contain almost no punctuation). Moreover, unable to fully shake off the popular imagery associated with the Edo period—and with the value of the novel genre itself still unstable—she aspired to become a leader of a private school like Hagino-ya rather than write novels. Like her parents, she, too, had both feet firmly planted in the old era. Yet the tumultuous times would not allow her reading and writing to remain complacent, sipping the sweet essence of the past.
For her—who, upon her father’s death, became the head of the household at the age of 16 and had to support her debt-ridden family—the success of ‘The Nightingale in the Bushes’, written by Miyake Kaho, a senior member of the same literary circle, and the substantial royalties Kaho received were the decisive events that spurred the birth of “Ichiyo the novelist.” Unlike the female novelists of the time—who were typically graduates of girls’ high schools or current students—she was forced to enter the world of fiction writing out of necessity to make a living.
Buried under a mountain of debt, she devoted herself to writing novels by diligently subscribing to newspapers and frequenting libraries, and her mother and younger sister also became partners in this “business” as the head of the household. Ichiyo had unexpectedly found herself in the midst of an era where the novel was gaining prominence. Furthermore, her decision to leave traditional poetic circles like Hagino-ya and instead forge close ties with modern publishing media—which incorporated an economic system—played a decisive role in her establishing herself as a modern writer. Beginning with lessons from a popular novelist at the ‘Tokyo Asahi Shimbun’, she gained opportunities to publish her own works in ‘Capital’s Flower’, ‘Literary Circle’, and ‘Literary Club’, which allowed her to engage with the mainstream literary views of the time.
It is true that, like female novelists before her, Ichiyo depicted the lives of Meiji-era women in her works. However, her novels went far beyond the narrow worlds of high society—the typical subject matter of female novelists from privileged classes—or the conventional narrative structures that culminated in marriage; instead, she gave voice to the diverse lives and struggles of women. Ichiyo’s sphere of life dramatically expanded the limited scope of their activities.
At that time, achieving economic independence as a novelist was a daunting task for anyone, regardless of gender. Struggling to make ends meet, Ichiyo even opened a small shop near Yoshiwara, a red-light district that had rapidly declined by the Meiji era as it was pushed out by the emerging entertainment industry. Drawing on that experience, in her masterpiece ‘Child’s Play’—completed ten months before her death—she depicted boys and girls living their daily lives and their love stories in a world where the old-world vitality of Yoshiwara intersects with the darkness of the Meiji era, luxury and poverty, and humor and sorrow. Such a portrayal of the world was unthinkable in conventional depictions of women.
However, Ichiyo’s writing process eventually transcended the pursuit of worldly gain and extended far into eternity. The following is a famous passage from Ichiyo’s diary.
Even to myself, it is true that I pick up the brush to write these fleeting, trivial novels—mere empty words. Even if it is for the sake of food, clothing, and shelter, or to endure the rain and snow, anyone who sees it will recognize its childishness. As long as I am called a writer, I simply cannot write works that, like those of most people in this world, are read once and then thrown into the trash. Even in a world where human sentiment is shallow—where what is cherished today is discarded tomorrow—if I appeal to sincerity and portray sincerity, wouldn’t even a scrap of a novel have some value? I do not covet silk robes, nor do I desire a grand mansion. How could I sully a name meant to last a thousand years for the sake of a fleeting moment?
It is clear that for Ichiyo, the purpose of writing fiction was no longer merely a means of making a living, but rather the pursuit of eternity. Emerging like a comet against the backdrop of modern media, she discovered, through the practice of writing, the infinite value of the novel—a value that stood in stark contrast to the transience of her life as a woman. This is the full story of modern female expression achieved through writing by a 19th-century female novelist. Novels—which, hand in hand with the age of media, were used by elite writers from Imperial University to construct “sublimity”—must have seemed particularly eternal to women forced to lead humble lives.

Works and Themes: Money, Love, and Class Conflict

That said, when you think about it, it seems like a cruel joke that Higuchi Ichiyō—whose family fell apart over money, who was forced to call off her engagement, who was plagued by debt, and who died of a sort of overwork before her youth could even bloom—is featured on a banknote. This is because Ichiyo’s life itself was a tragedy: that of an individual thrust onto the track of the Meiji era’s compressed modernization—a period of fierce competition for money and social advancement following the end of the Edo period’s class-based society—who perished just as she was on the verge of achieving the commodification of the self.
In that sense, honoring the traces of glory left by this unfortunate “genius woman” who was left behind by modernization—whether by dedicating a page to her in the history of modern Japanese literature or by featuring her on the front of a 5,000-yen bill—cannot help but be seen as supporting the psychology that seeks to rationalize “those days when we were poor but not bad” through the “national” feel-good story of a “flower that bloomed in poverty.” However, just as one cannot conceal the material greed of money—the colossal idol of modernity—no matter how much one models a figure on a great person who had no connection to money, the world of fiction Ichiyo depicted was also a story of outcasts who were either pushed out of or voluntarily rejected the competitive system of capitalism—a narrative that can never be subsumed into the literary history of the modern nation.
‘New Year’s Eve’ Omine, who grew up orphaned in her uncle’s poor household and became a maid in a wealthy family to help support the household, experiences firsthand the contradictions of a polarized society: while her uncle’s family, unable to pay their debts and struggling even to afford a single rice bin, and the impoverished people around them are completely ignored, the wealthy family goes to watch a play under the New Year’s Eve sky. She is filled with rage at this reality. Eventually, driven to a dead end, she ends up stealing money from her employer. However, it is Ishinosuke, the son of the household—who had boldly promised the poor, “Someday, I’ll embezzle all the Yamamura family’s wealth and ensure you all have a joyful New Year’s”—who comes to Omine’s rescue.
However, deviant men like Ishinosuke—who are completely different from the modernized men endlessly racing toward wealth and social advancement—also appear in ‘Child’s Play’. This is true of Shin’yo, who cannot fit in with his family’s obsession with making money and hastens down the path of Buddhism, as well as Shota, who, despite being the grandson of a wealthy moneylender, is always lonely. And they are all drawn to Midori, a courtesan who is free from material attachments, cheerful, and hedonistic. The courtesan stands in direct opposition to the modern wife, who contributes to her husband’s social advancement through wealth, education, honor, or childbearing.
In ‘Turbulent Stream’, Kenshichi is the one who is fatefully drawn to this otherworldly courtesan, unable to control himself, driving his affluent family to ruin and ultimately committing suicide alongside her. The outcasts and deviants wandering in the dark shadows of modernity feel compassion for one another and are drawn to each other.
However, in a world where the desire for social advancement and success runs rampant, the simple and genuine love between a man and a woman is inevitably thwarted. In ‘Thirteen Nights’, Rokunosuke loses his will to live and falls into a deep abyss when Oseki, the woman he loved, marries a man of high social standing, ultimately reducing him to the fate of a rickshaw puller. Meanwhile, Oseki, of low social standing and unable to contribute to her husband’s rise to prominence, is treated with contempt by him; in her misery, she resolves to live as a walking corpse for the sake of her child. When they chance upon each other again in the rickshaw, their social statuses have become too different to ever rekindle their lost love.
In ‘Crossroads’, Kichi, an umbrella shop clerk and lonely orphan yearning for eternal motherhood, is disappointed by his neighbor Okyo—who is willing to become a concubine just to escape her lowly status—and their paths diverge. Yet the path leading in the opposite direction of the success Kichi must pursue is so gloomy and lonely that even the shadow of death looms over it. When the real world feels like hell—or little different from the abyss—a fierce internal struggle begins between the weight of life and the weight of death.
Amid their alienation from life and their longing for escape, the protagonists in Ichiyo’s works suddenly come to loathe life. Yoshiro, the protagonist of “Because of Me,” who as a low-ranking bureaucrat had sought to share true love with his beautiful wife, became a “Red Demon” who would stop at nothing to chase money after his wife left him—unable to settle for a husband of modest means with no ambition for advancement—precisely because the truth of life had already become hollow. Furthermore, his frustration leads to the depression of his daughter Machiko, who is abandoned by Kyosuke—the son-in-law who entered Yoshiro’s household and went on to become a successful politician. This is because Machiko, who was hedonistic, moody, and decidedly frivolous, lacked the practical sense, education, or ability to bear children necessary to support Kyosuke’s success.
In this way, Ichiyo depicted in her novel the anguished breath of a fractured self, as Edo-era daily life sank beneath the waves of capitalism and the classical world was shipwrecked. It is clear that this work reflects Ichiyo’s self-awareness and worldview, shaped by her own experiences: her sudden plunge from the middle class into poverty, her breakup with a career-driven fiancé, her struggles to borrow money from various sources, and her experience with grueling physical labor.
Around this time, Ichiyo wrote in her diary, “People in this world, driven by greed, are pitiful and pathetic. When I think, ‘Is this what drove them so mad?,’ gold and silver feel almost like dust,” thereby rejecting the value of money. By crossing the boundary between wealth and poverty, she realized the illusion of such distinctions and depicted them in her novels. Furthermore, Ichiyo came to realize the illusion of distinguishing people by artificial social status. She declared, “Nothing in heaven and earth belongs to me; all things grow in their proper places according to the way of nature—who, then, creates fleeting classes to distinguish between high and low? The truth lies with the courtesan,” thereby proclaiming that distinctions such as social status, or the roles of maiden, wife, and courtesan, are merely superficial shells that do not define one’s essence.
Unexpectedly placed on the margins, Ichiyo was liberated from the shackles of money and social status and found true freedom. And when Ichiyo sought to pursue the essential and valuable things that lie beyond through her writing, she discovered that within the hearts of those who are unbearably rejected by the real world—the outcasts ruthlessly cast aside by society—there lies an eternal truth capable of transcending the limitations and futility of life.

Reading “Measuring Height”: Modernity and Sexuality in the Red-Light District

Now let’s take a closer look at Ichiyo’s masterpiece, ‘Child’s Play’. It is often said that Japanese literature is characterized by a refined aesthetic sensibility and delicate emotional expression, while lacking social consciousness or ideological depth. However, this is an illusion created by the “Japanese literature” system, which, since the modern era, has excluded the classical Chinese poetry tradition and exclusively established the kana-based literary tradition. That said, kana-based writing did not replace classical Chinese to become a literary style that met the demands of the new modern era; rather, with the subsequent establishment of the “language-script unity” style, it eventually disappeared from the mainstream of Japanese orthography.
Around the 1890s, a literary style that inherited the kana-based tradition did become popular, riding the wave of nationalist fervor, and Ichiyo’s works are part of that trend; however, the Meiji-era landscape depicted in them far surpassed the world previously portrayed in Chinese-character-based writing. Even when depicting the love between a man and a woman set against the backdrop of a red-light district, Ichiyo’s ‘Child’s Play’, for example, portrayed the red-light district from a different perspective than the Edo-period Kana-mun novels, which depicted romantic relationships within the district as belonging to an extremely private world—one temporarily detached from the constraints of Confucian morality or the framework of the class system.
Although the red-light districts of the Edo period—represented by Yoshiwara—were spaces officially recognized and managed by the Tokugawa shogunate, they were also unique, non-ordinary, and fictional autonomous spaces cut off from the outside world and reality. They were a kind of cultural salon integrated with the performing arts, and high-class courtesans, in particular, were a cultured class equipped with skills such as composing classical Chinese poetry, who entertained high-ranking figures, including daimyos. Those who lived in Yoshiwara were each characters in a drama. Writers and painters depicted the red-light district and its courtesans, and the publishing industry, which published these works, and Yoshiwara flourished through a mutually beneficial relationship. The red-light district also provided countless themes for Kabuki; it is no exaggeration to say that Edo culture could not have existed without Yoshiwara.
However, Yoshiwara’s sense of completeness—which stood in contrast to the real world—rapidly disintegrated during the Meiji era as it collided with harsh reality. Initially, the Meiji government had no intention of regulating prostitution, so Yoshiwara continued to thrive as it had since the Edo period. However, following the Maria Rus incident in 1872, when the West criticized Japan’s brothels as immoral spaces where a system of slavery—known as “public prostitution”—was practiced, the government hastily issued the Ordinance on the Abolition of Public Prostitution. However, this measure was merely a regulation against human trafficking; it did not prohibit prostitution itself.
The movement to abolish brothels, which gained momentum in the late 1880s as part of the modern women’s liberation movement, was a direct challenge to the government’s lukewarm stance. At the root of this movement lay a modern sexual morality that condemned prostitution as something that destroyed the ideal of monogamous, affection-based relationships between men and women. Based on this new sexual morality, the movement to abolish brothels not only denounced the buying and selling of sex as a violation of prostitutes’ human rights but also, by stigmatizing prostitution, strictly isolated prostitutes—both physically and conceptually—from mainstream society and from women in general.
Yoshiwara, which had built an independent world distinct from mainstream society, became a target of exclusion and oppression under the Meiji era’s family-state ideology—which sought to establish national order—and gradually began to sink into the shadows of the state. At the same time, the significance of Yoshiwara as a cultural salon for the performing arts also faded. This is clearly evident in the flourishing of the “haryū-kai” (entertainment circles), spaces for professional performers who specialized in the arts, which replaced the Yoshiwara courtesans. Politicians and literary figures shifted their attention to the geisha districts of Shinkawa and Fukagawa, and Yoshiwara gradually transformed into a space dedicated solely to prostitution.
“Child’s Play” is a story of first love between a boy and a girl set against the backdrop of the last remaining Yoshiwara, which still retained the vitality of the Edo period. The story begins with the August festival in Yoshiwara and ends with the November festival. The novel’s protagonist, Midori (14), is the younger sister of Yoshiwara’s most prestigious courtesan. She has moved up from the provinces with her family and lives in a lodging adjacent to Yoshiwara. Her parents assist with the work of the red-light district, and Midori is raised like a princess, without any hardships, to become a courtesan in the future who is every bit as accomplished as her older sister.
She, too, is swept up in the hedonistic atmosphere of Yoshiwara and grows up bright and cheerful, drawing her vitality from that environment. Since the ideal courtesan of the Edo period was expected to have a cheerful disposition—unburdened by petty concerns, broad-minded, and free from greed—Midori is the very embodiment of the character befitting a Yoshiwara courtesan. Midori herself says, “I didn’t find men particularly scary or intimidating, nor did I view being a courtesan as a particularly lowly profession. So, the fact that I wept bitterly as I saw my older sister off when I left my hometown all those years ago feels like a dream now. Today, as I’m in my prime and able to honor my parents, I take such immense pride in Yoshiwara that others might even envy me.”
As an elementary school student, she was not only lively but also spent money freely, making her very popular among the “Main Street Gang” kids—such as Shotaro, the son of a pawnbroker, and Sangoro, the son of a rickshaw driver. However, the “Alley Gang”—led by Chokichi, the son of a civil engineer, who were at odds with them—didn’t want to be outdone by the “Main Street Gang.” So, they enlisted the help of Shin’yo, whose father was the head priest of a temple, and caused a ruckus at the “Main Street Gang’s” event during the August festival. When Midori tried to stop them, Chokichi said, “You good-for-nothing brat who’s just following in your sister’s footsteps. “This should be a fitting opponent for you,” he says, throwing a mud-stained straw sandal at her. After this incident, Midori begins to resent Shin’yo, for whom she had secretly harbored romantic feelings, but finds solace in her older sister’s standing.
From then on, Midori stops attending school and stays at home; after styling her hair like a courtesan for the November festival, she stops socializing with the other children and suddenly becomes withdrawn. Coincidentally, the story ends with Shin-nyo leaving the neighborhood to study for the monkhood. Regarding the catalyst for Midori’s transformation, there are conflicting theories—one suggests it was her first menstruation, while another claims it was her first time receiving a client at the brothel. Regardless of which view one takes, the fact remains that Midori became aware of her own sexual body and agonized over her inability to accept the changes within herself.
I want to spend my days and nights all by myself in a dark room, without talking to anyone or having anyone stare at my face. How happy I would be if I could just play with dolls and play house all the time. Ah, no, no. I don’t want to grow up. Why does time have to pass like this? If only I could go back—even just seven months, ten months, no, a year ago.
The confusion and sadness Midori feels cannot be equated with the universal anguish that every human being experiences in the process of growing up. Midori, a child of Yoshiwara who loves its lively and glamorous atmosphere, eventually becomes aware of her own sexual body and is reborn as a “full-fledged” member of Yoshiwara—yet in this era, when the very meaning of such a transformation has become unimaginable within the fantastical space of the Edo period, the harsh fate that lies before her —being forced to live on the margins of society within the system of state-regulated brothels—is not something only we, who know of Yoshiwara’s subsequent decline, can vaguely foresee.
Midori’s friend Shōtarō, too, feels sorry for her changed appearance, saying, “It’s a pity that even she’s becoming a courtesan,” and overlays Midori’s fate onto a popular song of the time as he sings it. Midori’s anguish cannot be imagined apart from the fate of Yoshiwara, which bears the full brunt of social contradictions from the shadows within the modern state’s system of exclusion.
In the final scene, the daffodils secretly left at the threshold of Midori’s home likely symbolize Shin’yo’s compassion for Midori, who seeks to escape the greedy, worldly pursuit of fame and fortune. However, it is also a symbol that embodies the inescapable human compassion that all readers—who are skeptical of and rebel against the internalization of modern discipline, the accumulation of wealth, and the egoism of the modern, couple-centered family that serves as the basic unit underpinning the state system—feel toward Midori’s fate.
By employing the literary style of the Edo period and focusing on the birth of a courtesan whose faint memories of first love are violently severed, Ichiyo successfully crossed the “rope” connecting the Edo and Meiji eras.
It has been a long time since Ichiyo’s works were included in the canon of modern Japanese literature. However, restoring and savoring the progressive nature of the moment when the canon is born—as it subverts the existing order—is surely the joy of those who read the canon and the duty of those who study it.