Taiko Hirabayashi is the pen name of the award-winning Japanese author, Hirabayashi Tai. At the tender age of 12 Hirabayashi had already decided to become a writer. She also developed an early interest in socialism. She graduated from the Suwa Women's Highschool in 1922 and moved to Tokyo, where she would live with an anarchist Toshio Yamamoto. Together they moved to Korea but returned after only a month. Hirabayashi gave birth to a child in Manchuria in a hospital in Dalian but the child would only live for twenty-four days before dying of malnourishment. She would use this experience to write a semi-autobiographical short story Charity Hospital that would start off her career as a proletarian literature writer. In the year 1927 Hirabayashi would marry the novelist and literary critic Jinji Kobori, the marriage lasted 23 years before it ended by divorce in 1955. After the second world war Hirabayashi took to writing Tenko Literature (literature based on one's own political identity.) based on her conservative and anti-communist leanings. She was posthumously awarded the Nihon geijutsuin shou (日本芸術院賞) and the Hirabayashi Taiko Prize was created in her honour. There is a Hirabayashi Taiko Memorial Museum in Suwa City, Fukushima prefecture.