page_title: Ichiyō Higuchi
section_title: Last years
hierarchical_section_title: Ichiyō Higuchi / Last years
caption_attribution_description: English: Monument of Ichiyo Higuchi 日本語: 樋口一葉女史文学碑（山梨県甲州市慈雲寺）
context_page_description: Ichiyō Higuchi was the pen name of Japanese author Natsu Higuchi, also known as Natsuko Higuchi. Specializing in short stories, she was one of the first important writers to appear in the Meiji period and Japan's first prominent woman writer of modern times. She wrote relatively little as a result of living a brief life—she died at 24—but her stories had a large impact on Japanese literature and she is still appreciated by the Japanese public today.
  Higuchi was unique among her peers in that her writing was based on Japanese rather than Western models. Her work is highly regarded for her use of Classical Japanese language, and for that reason people are reluctant to update or translate it into contemporary Japanese, leaving it difficult for the majority of Japanese people to read.
context_section_description: In 1893, Higuchi, her mother and her sister abandoned their middle-class house and, with a grim determination to survive, moved to a poor neighborhood where they opened a stationery store that before long failed.  Their new dwelling was a five-minute walk from Tokyo's ill-famed red-light district, the Yoshiwara.  Her experience living in this neighborhood would provide material for several of her later stories, especially "Takekurabe", (literally, "Comparing heights"; "Child's Play" in the Robert Lyons Danly translation; also called "Growing Up" in the Edward Seidensticker translation.)
  The stories of her mature period (1894–1896) were not only marked by her experience living near the red-light district and greater concern over the plight of women, but also by the influence of Ihara Saikaku, a 17th-century writer, whose stories she had recently discovered.  His distinctiveness lay in great part in his acceptance of low-life characters as worthwhile literary subjects.  What Higuchi added was a special awareness of suffering and sensitivity.  To this period belong "Ōtsugomori" ("On the Last Day of the Year"), "Nigorie" ("Troubled Waters"), "Wakare-Michi" ("Separate Ways"), "Jūsan'ya" ("The Thirteenth Night") and "Takekurabe" ("Child's Play").  The last two are considered her best work.
  With these last stories her fame spread throughout the Tokyo literary establishment.  In her humble home she was visited by other writers, students of poetry, admirers, the curious, critics, and editors requesting her collaboration.
  But between constant interruptions and frequent headaches, Higuchi stopped writing.  As her father and one of her brothers had before her, she had caught tuberculosis. She died on November 23, 1896. She was 24.
  Higuchi's likeness adorns the Japanese 5000 yen banknote as of fall 2004, becoming the third woman to appear on a Japanese banknote, after Empress Jingū in 1881 and Murasaki Shikibu in 2000.  Her best-known stories have been made into movies.
caption: Monument of Ichiyō Higuchi in her hometown at the Jiunji or Jiun-ji Temple of Koshu
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