She was born in Tokyo, with the name Natsuko Higuchi. Her parents had come to the capital from a farming community in a nearby province. Her father struggled to buy a lower-rank samurai position, then lost it, worked for the municipal government, but was let go, and then invested all the family's savings in a business venture which failed.
Not long before this final debacle, Higuchi, 14 years old, began studying classical poetry at one of the best of the poetic conservatories, the Haginoya. Here she received weekly poetry lessons and lectures on Japanese literature. There were also monthly poetry competitions in which all students, past and present, were invited to participate. Poetry taught at this school was that of the conservative court poets of the Heian period.[1] She always felt awkward among the other students, the great majority of whom came from the upper-class. It did not help that she was nearsighted, modest, small, and with thin hair.
Her compulsion to write became evident by 1891 when she began to keep a diary in earnest. It would become hundreds of pages long, covering the five years left in her life. With her feelings of social inferiority, her timidity, and the increasing poverty of her family, her diary was the place where she could assert herself. Often the entries are written as if they were part of a novel. Of considerable quality and interest, it has not been published in English.
She, her mother, and younger sister made ends meet by doing needlework, washing, and other jobs. In 1892, after seeing the success of a classmate, Kaho Tanabe, who wrote a novel,[2] Higuchi decided to become a novelist to support her family.
Nevertheless, her initial efforts at writing fiction were in the form of a short story, a form to which she would remain true. In 1891 she met her future advisor who would help, she assumed, this poet-turned-fiction-writer and connect her with editors: Tosui Nakarai. She fell in love with him right away, not knowing that, at 31, he had a reputation as a womanizer. Nor did she realize that he wrote popular literature which aimed to please the general public and in no way wished to be associated with serious literature. Had she studied fiction instead of poetry, Higuchi would have realized she had chosen the wrong mentor, and that she would have received far more beneficial advice from such writers as Shoyo Tsubouchi, Shimei Futabatei and Ogai Mori.
Her mentor did not return her passionate, if discreet, love for him, and instead treated her as a younger sister. This failed relationship would become a recurrent theme in Higuchi's fiction.[3]
Eventually, she got the break she was so anxious for: her first stories were published in a minor newspaper under her pen name, Ichiyo Higuchi. The stories from this first period (1892–94) suffered from the excessive influence of Heian poetry.[4] Higuchi felt compelled to demonstrate her classical literary training. The plots were thin, there was little development of character and they were loaded down by excessive sentiment,[5] especially when compared to what she was writing concurrently in her diary. But she was developing rapidly. Several of her trademark themes appear; for example, the triangular relationship among a lonely, beautiful, young woman who has lost her parents, a handsome man who has abandoned her (and remains in the background), and a lonely and desperate ragamuffin who falls in love with her. Another theme Higuchi repeated was the ambition and cruelty of the Meiji middle class.[6]
The story "Umoregi" ("In Obscurity") signaled Higuchi's arrival as a professional writer. It was published in the prestigious journal Miyako no Hana[7] in 1892, only nine months after she had started writing in earnest. Her work was noticed and she was recognized as a promising new author