Background
Yoshiko Yuasa was born on December 7, 1896 in Kyoto, Japan.
芳子 湯浅
Yoshiko Yuasa was born on December 7, 1896 in Kyoto, Japan.
Attended Waseda University (1924) and then proceeded to Moscow to make a special study of Russian literature (1927-30).
Yoshiko Yuasa was appointed chief editor of Fujin Minshu Shimbun (Women's Democratic Daily) (1948). She has translated many Russian classics, especially the works of Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov and Samuil Marshak. She is especially known for her translation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.
Yuasa died in 1990, and her grave is at Tōkei-ji, a temple in Kamakura.
Yuasa was an early supporter of the feminist movement in late Taishō and early Shōwa period Japan. Moving to Tokyo, she was also drawn to leftist political movements.
In 1924, after Chūjō Yuriko (leading female proletarian literature movement novelist) divorced her husband, the two women began to live together, and from 1927-1930, traveled together to the Soviet Union, where they studied the Russian language and Russian literature and developed a friendship with noted movie director Sergei Eisenstein. Evidence suggests that the relationship between Yuasa and Chūjō was a romantic if not sexual one. While Yuasa has also been romantically linked to writer Tamura Toshiko among others, Chūjō is said to have been the love of Yuasa's life. Yuasa was never again romantically linked to another woman after Chūjō's marriage to proletarian author and Japan Communist Party leader Miyamoto Kenji, although in an interview late in life Yuasa said that the word "lesbian" (rezubian/レズビアン) applied to her.