Tazawa Inabune

Who They Were

Tazawa Inabune (田澤稲舟) was a Japanese novelist and writer of the Meiji period, the era that ran from 1868 to 1912 and during which Japan industrialised, reorganised its government, and rebuilt its literary culture around a new national language. She was born in 1874 in Tsuruoka, a castle town on the coast of the old province of Dewa, in the north of the main island. She died on 28 February 1896, at the age of twenty-two.

Her working life as a writer lasted only a few years, but it fell in the middle of a decade of intense literary experimentation, when young Japanese authors were inventing a modern prose style almost from scratch. She was married to Yamada Bimyō, one of the most visible literary reformers of the day, and her writing is bound up with the movement he led.

Life and Career

Inabune was born in 1874, in the seventh year of the Meiji era. Her birth name was Tazawa Kin (田澤錦). Tsuruoka, her birthplace, was a former domain town in the north, far from the literary salons of Tokyo, and she moved into the capital's literary world as a young woman.

She became a novelist and writer at a moment when Japanese fiction was being remade. The 1880s and 1890s saw writers abandon the dense, allusive prose of the Edo period in favour of a style closer to ordinary speech, and new magazines and literary circles competed to define what a modern Japanese novel should sound like. Inabune wrote within this ferment.

She married Yamada Bimyō, a novelist, poet, and critic who was one of the leading advocates of the new style. Bimyō is the figure through whom her work is documented: he is recorded as the person who referenced her, and his account of her writing and her short life shaped how she was remembered afterwards. She died on 28 February 1896, in the twenty-ninth year of Meiji, at twenty-two.

Why They Matter

Inabune belongs to the first generation of Japanese women to write fiction as a profession rather than as a private accomplishment. Before the Meiji period, women's writing in Japan was largely confined to diaries, poetry, and courtly genres; the idea of a woman publishing novels for a general readership was new, and it was contested. Inabune was part of the small group of women who tested that idea in print.

Her marriage to Yamada Bimyō places her at the centre of the debate over literary language. Bimyō argued for a prose based on spoken Japanese and for a simplified approach to the written script; the writers around him, including his wife, were effectively the test cases for whether the new style could carry serious fiction. Her death at twenty-two cut short a career that had only begun, and it made her one of the period's emblematic brief talents — a writer known as much for the years she did not get as for the pages she published.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 田澤稲舟. It is read たざわ いなぶね in kana, and rendered in romaji as Tazawa Inabune. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese.

田 — read ta here. This kanji means "rice field" or "paddy". It is one of the most common elements in Japanese surnames, and it appears in the name of the town where she was born, Tsuruoka, in the form 田.

澤 — read zawa here. It means "marsh", "swamp", or "pool". The combination 田澤, literally "rice field marsh", is a single surname read Tazawa. Note that this is the older, fuller form of the character; in modern Japanese writing it is often replaced by the simplified 沢, giving 田沢, but the name as recorded for her uses 澤.

稲 — read ina here. It means "rice plant", specifically the growing plant in the field, as opposed to 米 (kome), husked rice grain, or 田, the field itself. It is a strongly agricultural and auspicious character, associated with harvest and abundance.

舟 — read bune here. It means "boat" or "ship". Read on its own it is usually fune; after another element it voices to bune, which is why the full given name is Inabune rather than Inafune.

The given name 稲舟, Inabune, therefore means something like "rice-plant boat" — a small boat used in the flooded paddies, or, read more poetically, a boat carrying rice. It is a rural, seasonal image rather than a courtly one, and it fits a writer who came from a northern castle town rather than from the old aristocracy of Kyoto.

Her birth name, 田澤錦, is read with the same surname and the given name Kin. The character 錦 means "brocade", a woven silk fabric with a coloured pattern. Inabune, the name she wrote under, was thus a pen name chosen for her literary career, distinct from the name she was born with.

Legacy

Inabune's reputation rests on a handful of works and on the company she kept. She is remembered as a Meiji-period woman novelist, as the wife of Yamada Bimyō, and as one of the young writers whose careers were ended by early death in the 1890s. Her dates — 1874 to 1896 — place her entirely inside the Meiji era, and she never saw the twentieth century.

For readers of Japanese, her name is a useful case study in how Meiji writers handled their own names. The surname 田澤 preserves an older character form, the given name 稲舟 uses a voiced reading that only appears in compounds, and the professional name differs from the birth name. All three features are common in the period and all three are still visible in Japanese names today.