A Wanderer's Diary

A Wanderer's Diary is the breakthrough work of the Japanese novelist and poet Hayashi Fumiko, and a representative of Japan's "diary-form" I-novel. It was first serialized from 1928 in Women's Art, edited by Hasegawa Shigure, and published as a stand-alone volume in 1930 by Kaizōsha in its New Writers Series; within a year or two it sold six hundred thousand copies, becoming a sensation in Japan and praised as "the foremost masterpiece of Japanese women's literature in the Shōwa era." Written in the first person as a diary, the book faithfully records the ten years of drifting and struggle endured by "I" from girlhood onward: after her parents' divorce she moved from place to place across Kyushu, and as an adult worked as a maid, a street vendor, a factory hand, a tavern waitress, and a newspaper odd-job worker, while in love she was repeatedly abandoned and tormented by lovers. Amid hunger, poverty, and homelessness, "I" never gave up the dream of literature, running about to make a living while persisting in writing and publishing poems, until a turn came in both life and work. Free verse runs throughout the book, setting off the diary passages and laying bare the protagonist's self-respect, shame, anger, and longing amid poverty. The language is plain and artless, the feeling sincere and unadorned; it is at once a personal record of a lower-class woman seeking independence amid the urbanization of the Taishō and Shōwa eras, and a vivid testimony to the condition of women and the shifting social scene in modern Japan.