was a Japanese novelist, short-story writer, social activist, and literary critic active during the Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. She is best known for her autobiographical fiction and involvement in proletarian and women's liberation movements.
Miyamoto began writing while she was still in school. She traveled for several years to the United States and the Soviet Union before returning to Japan, where her works were heavily censored and she was imprisoned repeatedly for her political views. She founded and operated a number of proletarian and feminist magazines during her career, many of which were also censored.
Her works include Nobuko, (The Banshū Plain), Fūchisō (The Weathervane Plant), and other works of fiction and literary criticism. Much of her work is autobiographical and centers around themes of war, class, and gender relations. She and her husband, Miyamoto Kenji, continue to be honored by the Japanese Left for their vision and commitment toward Japanese women and the working class.
Her maiden name was Yuriko.
Biography
Early life
Miyamoto Yuriko was born Chūjō Yuriko on 13 February 1899 in the Koishikawa district of Tokyo (now part of Bunkyō district) to privileged parents. Her father was a Cambridge and Tokyo Imperial University-trained architect, and her mother was a former painter, whose career had halted when she discovered that Ueno National Art School did not accept women. Miyamoto's mother had no intention of forcing her into the Good Wife, Wise Mother role encouraged by the Meiji government.
Miyamoto attended Ochanomizu Girls' Middle School. She was aware at an early age of the differences between her own circumstances and those of the sharecroppers who worked her family's land, as shown in her early work "Nōson" ("Farming Village"), which drew on many of the same influences as her later work "Mazushiki hitobito no mure" ("A Crowd of Poor People"). Miyamoto's concern for differences in social and economic status drew her towards socialism, and later towards the early Japanese feminist movement.
Miyamoto took an early interest in literature, including both Japanese writers, such as Higuchi Ichiyō, Futabatei Shimei, and Natsume Sōseki, and non-Japanese writers, including Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. While in her teens and a freshman in the English literature department of Japan Women's University, she wrote the short story "Mazushiki hitobito no mure" ("A Crowd of Poor People"), which was accepted for publication in the prestigious Chūō Kōron (Central Forum) literary magazine in September 1916. Her story won a literary prize sponsored by the Shirakaba (White Birch) literary circle and was endorsed by Tsubouchi Shōyō.
Travel to United States and first marriage
In 1918, Miyamoto left the university without graduating and traveled to the United States with her father. She went to New York, where she studied at Columbia University and met her first husband, Araki Shigeru, with whom she would return to Japan. She broke a number of social norms, including entering a love marriage, proposing herself, and refusing to take her husband's surname. The two were different in terms of age, socio-economic class, and intellectual interests, and the couple divorced in 1924, inspiring her semi-autobiographical Nobuko (1924–1926), which criticizes conventional ideas of gender and love as it relates the failure of the protagonist's marriage, her travels abroad, and her quest for independence. Considered a feminist I-novel, it was serialized in the journal Kaizo (Re-creation) from 1924 through 1926 before being published as a book in 1928.
Upon her return to Japan, Miyamoto met Russian-language scholar Yuasa Yoshiko, through a mutual writing friend Nogami Yaeko. The two bonded over their mutual interest in Russian literature, particularly Chekhov, and Miyamoto contemplated dedicating Nobuko to Yuasa, with whom she entered into an intimate relationship after the failure of her marriage in 1924. The first few years of their relationship provided inspiration for another semi-autobiographical story, "Ippon no hana" (One Flower), which Miyamoto published in 1927.
Travel to Soviet Union and second marriage
In 1927, Miyamoto and Yuasa traveled to the Soviet Union, where they lived together for three more years. In Moscow, they studied the Russian language and Russian literature and developed a friendship with noted movie director Sergei Eisenstein. Yuasa dedicated herself to Russian translation, while Miyamoto observed the advancement of women in the Communist state.