Shigure Hasegawa

was a Japanese playwright and editor of a literary journal. Hasegawa was the only woman to be featured in three volumes of the Meiji bungaku zenshū ("Collected works of Meiji literature"), a collection published by Chikuma Shobō, and she had the title joryū bundan no ōgosho ("great writer of the woman’s literary community’"); Barbara Hartley, author of "The space of childhood memories: Hasegawa Shigure and Old Nihonbashi," cited these facts when describing Hasegawa as "a major literary figure" of the era prior to World War II.

Hartley wrote that "Shigure’s work has been largely overlooked in English-language scholarship" and that this may have been due to a perception that she supported militaristic elements that existed in Japan before World War II. second husband, Her parents were merchants; her mother came from a hatamoto family, while her father practiced law and was one of the first to do so in a modern manner in Japan. Hasegawa's father died in 1918. In 1919 she and Mikami began living together as part of a common law marriage. The journal was named Nyonin geijutsu ("Women and the Arts").

Works

Plays: Chōji midare ("Wavering traces", 1911) - Translated into English in 1996 The Dog (1923)

Other works: Old Tale Nihonbashi Hasegawa Shigure wrote a fictionalized biography of Tazawa Inabune as part of Shuntaiki - Meiji Taishō josei shō ("A springtime account - Portraits of women of Meiji and Taishō"), a seven-part series that was serialized in Tokyo Asahi. Melek Ortabasi, author of "Tazawa Inabune (1874-1896)", wrote that compared to the Yomiuri Shimbun series about Inabune, this was "more sympathetic".

Collections: Hasegawa, Shigure. Hasegawa Shigure zenshū. In five volumes. Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1993.