Eiji Yoshikawa was a Japanese historical novelist. Among his best-known novels are revisions of older classics. Although most of his novels are not original works, he created a huge amount of work and a renewed interest in the past.
Background
Eiji Yoshikawa (Hidetsugu Yoshikawa) was born on August 11 1892 in Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan (now part of Yokohama) into a family of ex-samurais. He has spent his youth in Yokohama. Eiji's father was a troubled man. He was an alcoholic and he loved to drink. That and many other things caused his father's business to fail and his family to ruin.
Education
Because of his father's failed business, he had to drop out of primary school to work when he was 11 years old. When he was 18, after a near-fatal accident working at the Yokohama docks, he moved to Tokyo and became an apprentice in a gold lacquer workshop. Around this time Eiji Yoshikawa became interested in comic haiku. He joined a poetry society and started writing comic haiku under the pseudonym "Kijiro".
Career
In 1914, with The Tale of Enoshima, he won first prize in a novel-writing contest sponsored by the publisher Kodansha. He joined the newspaper Maiyu Shimbun in 1921, and in the following year he began publishing serializations, starting with Life of Shinran.
He married in 1923, the year of the Great Kantō earthquake. His experiences in the earthquake strengthened his resolve to make writing his career. In the following years he published stories in various periodicals published by Kodansha, who recognized him as their number one author. Eiji Yoshikawa used 19 pen names before settling on Eiji Yoshikawa. He first used this pen name with the serialization of Sword Trouble, Woman Trouble.
In the early 1930s, his writing became introspective, reflecting growing troubles in his personal life. But in 1935, with the serialization of Musashi, about famed swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, in the Asahi Shimbun, his writing settled firmly into the genre of historical adventure fiction.
Upon the outbreak of war with China in 1937 the Asahi Shimbun sent him into the field as a special correspondent. At this time he divorced Yasu Akazawa and married Fumiko Ikedo. During the war he continued writing novels, and became more influenced by Chinese culture. Among the works of this period are Taiko and his re-telling of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
At the end of the war Eiji Yoshikawa stopped writing for a while and settled down to enjoy a quiet retirement in Yoshino (present-day Oumeshi) on the outskirts of Tokyo, but by 1947 he had started writing again. His post-war works include New Tale of the Heike, published in the Asahi Weekly (1950), and A Private Record of the Pacific War (1958).
On September 7, 1962, he died from cancer-related complications.
Eiji Yoshikawa was at first a Shinto, but he later became an atheist, for unknown reasons. He didn't imply religion in any of his literary works.
Views
Quotations:
"Fighting isn't all there is to the Art of War. The men who think that way, and are satisfied to have food to eat and a place to sleep, are mere vagabonds. A serious student is much more concerned with training his mind and disciplining his spirit than with developing martial skills."
"Not only must a warrior be strong with his bow, but he must have a heart full of pity for all living creatures."
"Danger was the grindstone on which the swordsman whetted his spirit. Enemies were teachers in disguise."
"The greatest happiness of life was to stand at the difficult border between success and failure."
"When a woman dislikes the man who is courting her, she parries him cleverly, like a willow in the wind."
Personality
Eiji was a hard-worker from his early life. He was a responsible man full of respect for others and also was an intelligent person who was able to rewrite some of the historical hardest novels to read and understand. He didn't have many friends. Eiji was an altruistic man.
Physical Characteristics:
Eiji had black hair, bushy black eyebrows and brown eyes. He had a high forehead and very prominent cheekbones. He was around 165 cm tall.
Interests
chess, gardening, reading
Connections
Eiji Yoshikawa married twice. First, he married Yasu Akazawa in 1923. They later divorced. Then he got married with Fumiko Ikedo in 1937.