A Profile of Miura Ayako (1922-1999)
Miura Ayako’s first novel, Hyôten (Freezing point) received the prestigious Ten-Million-Yen-Award from the Asahi Newspaper company in 1964. Miura, a “mere housewife” and amateur writer, had won the coveted prize over seasoned, professional competitors. The novel’s pivotal theme is human depravity, or more specifically “original sin.” With this dramatic entry into the literary world, she began a prolific writing career that spanned the next four decades and over eighty books.
To understand Miura Ayako’s worldview, it is helpful to know that she started out as a schoolteacher during the final years of World War II. The ultimate defeat of Japan brought a great deal of confusion to its people, including overwhelming moral confusion. In Hokkaido, in a town called Asahikawa, the young Ayako stood at the head of her elementary classroom, instructing her students to blot out long passages-- sometimes whole pages-- of textbooks from which she had grown used to teaching. Ayako had entered the profession by the age of seventeen, and she had been teaching for seven years when the war ended. Till that very day she had never once doubted that absolute obedience to martial law was right, that the nation took precedence over the individual, and that the aim of education was to build a nation for the emperor.
Aghast at the realization that she had been entrusted with the education of her students when she herself had not been able to distinguish right from wrong, Ayako rapidly lost confidence in herself as a teacher, and left the profession. Soon afterwards she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a disease that often spelled death at the time. Ayako felt an odd satisfaction at the news, accepting it as due punishment for her sins. She was confined to bed for the next thirteen years, seven of them in a body cast after contracting spinal tuberculosis.
These were crucial years in her development into the writer she was to become. The scholar Mizutani Akio writes: “The things that [the post-war writer] Shiina Rinzô learned through the unimaginable suffering he endured as a laborer toiling for twenty hours of each day, Miura Ayako learned in her long years of fighting illness, confined in a plaster body cast that prevented freedom of even the slightest movement.” (Mizutani 1977:23)
Japan’s defeat in the war, and those long years of incapacitating illness were to become the wellspring of Miura literature. Finding no meaning in existence, Ayako embraced Nihilism, until she found what she had been seeking in the Christian faith [read more on this topic]. At age 37, she recovered her health enough to marry Miura Mitsuyo, and became an “ordinary” housewife until the success of Hyôten, five years later, changed her life once more.
Miura Ayako’s novels revolve around complex human relationships and what the characters discover regarding their true inner natures. She sees human conscience and human righteousness to be frail, deceitful, and not-to-be-trusted, as she learned from her own experiences during and after the war. Her writing style is straightforward and her vocabulary is rather basic, but her plots have surprising twists and her characters are often complex.
Often lacking the physical strength to hold a pen in her hand, Miura “wrote” the majority of her works by dictating them to her husband Mitsuyo, who faithfully transcribed her words. She continued to produce novels, essays, and poetry while fighting recurring cancer and Parkinson’s Disease up until her death in 1999, at the age of 77.
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