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.