Kusuko Otsuka - Kusuko Otsuka

Japanese: 大塚楠緒子 - おおつか・くすおこ

Year of death: November 9, 1910 (Meiji 43)
Year of birth: August 9, 1875 (8th year of the Meiji era)
A novelist, tanka poet, and poet of the Meiji period. She was the only daughter of legal heavyweights Masao Otsuka and Shin. Her real name was Hisao, and she was also known as Kusuo or Kusuoko. She graduated from the Women's Higher Normal School (Ochanomizu University High School). She studied waka poetry under Chikuhakuen Sasaki Hirotsuna. Known for her intelligence and beauty, she adopted the aesthetician Koya Yasuji as her son-in-law. After the death of Higuchi Ichiyo, she became the most popular woman in the literary world in the 1890s and 1900s, and wrote about the relationships between men and women of the intellectual upper and middle classes, the face of the era, but she was unable to break through the stereotype of a wife from a wealthy family. Her love affair with Natsume Soseki is well-known, and traces of this can be clearly seen in their works, such as in Kosaka Susumu's "Soseki's Love and Literature." She is praised alongside Akiko for her poem "Ohyakudo Mairi" (One Hundred Pilgrimages), which describes the sorrow of a woman during the Russo-Japanese War.

(Yabu Yoshiko)

Source: Asahi Japanese Historical Biography: Asahi Shimbun Publications Inc. About Asahi Japanese Historical Biography

Japanese:

没年：明治43.11.9(1910)
生年：明治8.8.9(1875)
明治時代の小説家,歌人,詩人。司法界の重鎮大塚正男と伸のひとり娘。本名久寿雄。別称楠緒,楠緒子。女子高等師範学校附属高女(お茶の水女子大附属高校)卒。竹柏園佐々木弘綱に師事,和歌を学ぶ。才色兼備で知られ,美学者小屋保治を婿養子に迎えた。樋口一葉亡きあとの明治30～40年代の文壇で,女性としては一番の売れっ子となり,時代の顔である知的上・中流階級の男女の間を書いたが,良家の夫人の類型性を突き破れなかった。夏目漱石との愛が云々され,ふたりの作品にその跡を顕著に読みとる小坂晋の『漱石の愛と文学』などもある。日露戦争下の女の悲しみをうたった詩「お百度詣』で晶子と並称されている。<参考文献>塩田良平『新訂明治女流作家論』

(藪禎子)

出典　朝日日本歴史人物事典：（株）朝日新聞出版朝日日本歴史人物事典について　情報

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