In The Shade of Spring Leaves
The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo, With Nine of Her Best Stories
1981
First Published
4.19
Average Rating
355
Number of Pages
“The Danly-Ichiyo book is one of those works where the author and subject seem so perfectly matched that the style of each suffuses and inspires the other: Danly as translator and commentator picks up and transforms Ichiyo’s blend of formal and colloquial language into flowing, strong, modern terms; she, in turn, spreads her wit, her melancholy, her sudden piercing insights to Danly.” ―Jonathan Spence, New Society Higuchi Ichiyo, Japan's first woman writer of stature in modern times, was born in 1872 and died at the age of twenty-four. In her brief life she wrote poems, essays, short stories and a great, multivolume diary. This book is made up of a critical biography, interlaced with extracts from the diary, and Robert Danly's translations of nine representative stories.
Avg Rating
4.19
Number of Ratings
201
5 STARS
39%
4 STARS
46%
3 STARS
11%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
1%
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Author
Ichiyō Higuchi
Author · 9 books
See also 樋口 一葉. Pen name of poet and writer Natsu Higuchi. She studied at the Haginosha school of poetry run by Utako Nakajima and showed talent from early on. After her father’s death in 1889, she began writing novels to make a living, but she also had a sideline business, a general merchandise store, because she could not survive on income from writing alone. In less than a year from the end of 1894, she successively published such masterpieces as Otsugumori (The Last Day of the Year), Take Kurabe (Comparing Heights), Nigorie (Troubled Waters), and Jusanya (13th Night). She died at the young age of 24 from tuberculosis. Her image currently appears on the Japanese 5000-yen banknote.
