Koe Bōken

Koe Bōken [芒竺・卻; December 7 1912 - March 19 1985) was an acclaimed novelist of 20th century Kanton. She is considered one of the founders of the naturalism movement in modern Kantonese literature, and an icon for female writers in the Kantonese industry.
Koe was born in Iroyama, Hamae Prefecture. She moved to Kōryō in 1930 to attend a women's university, but soon dropped out to devote herself to writing full-time. The start of her career was rocky and coloured by the misogynism of her contemporaries; after showing a sample of her work to local newspaper editor Yoshi Kanebotsu, she was encouraged to 'make herself useful and become a typist'. Undeterred, she visited Ōyu Ōnaki, a well-established poet of the time, who told her that she 'would never realise her ambition' of becoming a novelist. In 1935, Koe became a student of satirical author Monno Futake and began writing novels under his direction.
She was hired by the literary magazine Shishinnen in 1938, but was transferred by the magazine to the newspaper Shiyura Koppun, where she worked alternately as a typist, interviewer, article editor and writer. Later Koe said that this experience heavily informed her later writing style.
Koe published her first novel, First Sight (韓眼, Kanme), in 1940. It was a story about a senkō and her relationships with different men from different social strata, while also focusing on the disappearing world of the traditional arts. Koe followed this with another novel in 1946, Diving for Pearls (辟午き, Nebi Noki), which told the stories of five different women, experiencing the ups and downs that came with their own social spheres, from low-class prostitute to the (fictional) wife of the Kantonese Prime Minister. This proved to be her most successful work.
Koe attempted to write in a realistic and highly personal manner, engaging the reader with the characters in a way which was considered rather revolutionary for the time. Her use of the first person, previously considered basic and unpleasantly ambiguous in Kantonese literature, made her stand out from her contemporaries. In the forward to her third novel, Magpie, Koe commented that she 'seeks to move the reader not by the unusual, but what is normal and average, and yet what they don't see most of the time'. Although often compared to her closest rival Sakami Sanji, Koe is sometimes criticised for the 'predictability' of her work, with characters often stylised with stereotypes and meeting ends that could be considered unimaginative. Koe defended this in a 1968 interview, stating that her novels were based on 'real life, and real experiences, which aren't always so exciting'.
Koe was elected to the Kantonese National Art Academy in 1951. In her later years, she also turned towards the genre of historical fiction. Koe died of bone cancer in March 1985, at the age of 73.
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