was a Japanese novelist, short-story writer, social activist, and literary critic active during the Taishō and early Shōwa eras of Japan. She is best known for her autobiographical fiction and involvement in proletarian and women's liberation movements.

Early life

Miyamoto Yuriko was born Chūjō Yuriko on 13 February 1899 in the Koishikawa district of Tokyo (now part of Bunkyō district) to privileged parents. Her father was a Cambridge and Tokyo Imperial University-trained architect, and her mother was a former painter, whose career had halted when she discovered that Ueno National Art School did not accept women. Miyamoto's mother had no intention of forcing her into the Good Wife, Wise Mother role encouraged by the Meiji government. She went to New York, where she studied at Columbia University and met her first husband, Araki Shigeru, with whom she would return to Japan. The two were different in terms of age, socio-economic class, and intellectual interests, The first few years of their relationship provided inspiration for another semi-autobiographical story, "Ippon no hana" (One Flower), which Miyamoto published in 1927. This disagreement was exacerbated by Yoshiko's violent outbursts and accusations of Miyamoto's dishonesty, which are evidenced by both women's correspondences. However, with government enforcement of the Peace Preservation Laws and the increasingly severe suppression of leftist political movements, Miyamoto's works were heavily censored and her magazine was forbidden to publish.

In 1932, both Miyamoto Yuriko and Miyamoto Kenji were arrested alongside other Communist writers.

Within a year of the end of the war, she published two companion novels, (The Banshū Plain) and Fūchisō (The Weathervane Plant), both descriptive of her experiences in the months immediately following the surrender of Japan. The former novel received the Mainichi Cultural Prize for 1947. She considered women's liberation a part of the path to better social order, pushing against both traditional proletarian literature and mainstream Japanese thought.

Selected works

Novels

  • Nobuko (Nobuko, 1928)
  • (The Banshu Plain, 1947)
  • Fūchisō (The Weathervane Plant, 1947)
  • (The Two Gardens, 1948)
  • Dōhyō (Landmark, 1950)

Short stories

  • "Nōson" ("A Farming Village", 1915)
  • "" ("A Flock of Poor People", 1916)
  • "" ("One Flower", 1927)
  • "" ("The Spring of 1932", 1932)
  • "Kokukoku" ("Movement by Movement", 1933)
  • "Chibusa" ("The Breasts", 1935)

Nonfiction

  • ("Raise Your Voice in Song! - Origins of the New Japanese Literature society", 1946)
  • (Women and Literature, 1948)
  • (The Letters of Twelve Years, 1952)

Portrayals of Miyamoto

Film

  • Yuriko, Dasvidaniya (2011), theatrical film set in 1924. Directed by Sachi Hamano, it stars Hitomi Toi as Miyamoto Yuriko. The film is based on two of Yuriko's autobiographical novels, Nobuko and , and 1990 non-fiction novel by Hitomi Sawabe. The story depicts the relationship between Miyamoto Yuriko and Yuasa Yoshiko.