Yaho Kitabatake - Early Life

Early Life

Kitabatake Yaho was born in Aomori city, Aomori Prefecture as the sixth of ten children. After her graduation from high school, she moved to Tokyo and attended the Jissen Women's University, but was forced to drop out due to illness (tuberculosis spondylitis) after around 18 months. She returned to Aomori and found employment as a substitute teacher in 1924, but continued to struggle with her sickness. In 1926, she published her initial works in the literary magazine Kaizo. Around this time, she also met fellow writer Fukada Kyuya, with whom she started to live with as his common law wife.

With Fukada, she returned to Tokyo in 1929, living at first in Abiko, Chiba followed by Honjo in Tokyo. Although they were living together as husband and wife, Fukada never officially registered the marriage with the city office due to strong opposition from his family over Yao's weak health.

Yao continued to write, but as her writing was affected by her strong Tohoku accent and lack of higher education, she relied on Fukada to copy edit her works. Fukada had the works published under his own name, and soon was receiving fame and adulation as a brilliant new author, not to mention the royalties from the works. However, leading literary critics Kobayashi Hideo and Kawabata Yasunari eventually realized that Asunarao and Fukada's previous work Orokko no musume were not Fukada's works at all, but had been copy-edited (or to put it less charitably, plagiarized) from the writings of Kitabatake Yao; the scandal nearly ended Fukada's credibility as a writer

In March 1940, Fukada formally married Kitabatake Yao. However, in May 1941, Fukada happened to be reunited with his first love, Koba Shigeko (the daughter of Nakamura Mitsuo) in a chance meeting, and by August 1942, Shigeko gave birth to his illegitimate child. Yao soon found out about the affair, and Fukada quickly enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Army and fled to wartime China rather than return home.