Here's What You Thought

Okamoto Kanoko was born in 1889 in a well-to-do farming family on the outskirts of Tokyo; her maiden name was Ohnuki. Interested in literature from an early age, including the influence of her older brother’s friend Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, she attended the Atomi Girls’ School and contributed waka poetry to its journal. From 1906 on, she began to contribute her work to the Myojo poetry magazine run by Yosano Tekkan (Akiko’s husband) as well, and eventually to its successor Subaru.

In 1910, at twenty-one, she married Okamoto Ippei, three years her senior and another of her brother’s friends, and apparently handsome enough to satisfy Kanoko’s preference for nice things to look at, from clothing to men (he is also said to have done a Leander, swimming the as yet unbridged Tama River to plead his suit to Kanoko’s family). Their son Taro, later to become an avant-garde artist, was born the following year. Ippei became a successful cartoonist; Kanoko published more poetry and became one of Hiratsuka Raicho’s Bluestockings.

From 1913 on, however, she suffered something like a nervous breakdown, amid the deaths of her brother and mother and the births and deaths of her daughter Toyoko and another child; a fan of hers, Horikiri Shigeo, moved in with the family and (presumably) became Kanoko’s lover, with the approval of Ippei, who had his own history of playing away. Horikiri died in 1916. About this time, Kanoko began to devote herself to the study of Buddhism, while continuing to find success as a poet.

In 1929 the family took a three-year trip to Europe. Kanoko plunged into novel-writing upon her return (having published what she called “My Last Book of Poetry” in 1929), until her sudden death in 1939 at the age of fifty.

Sources
Nakae
Mori 1996
https://www.fujingaho.jp/culture/archives/g34529000/fujingaho115-culture-201031/ (Japanese) Photos and reproductions of contemporary articles