Perhaps no other female Japanese writer has traversed the personal and the political so successfully in her work as Yuko Tsushima (1947-2016).
The prolific author burst onto the literary scene in 1967 with her first short story, ¡°A Birth,¡± while still a university student. Initially, Tsushima garnered media attention as the daughter of famed writer Osamu Dazai (1909-48), but she quickly forged her own independent literary identity and eventually won most of Japan¡¯s top literary accolades, including the Noma Literary Prize, the Yomiuri Prize for Literature and the Tanizaki Prize.
Early on, Tsushima broke the boundaries of the traditional Japanese I-novel genre, giving voice to a voiceless minority by authentically depicting the struggles of single mothers in society as a single mother herself. Tsushima was lauded both at home and in the West as a feminist writer for these early works.
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