• Writer Hirabayashi Taiko, 1905

 

Hirabayashi resolved at the age of 12 to become a writer and also developed an interest in socialism at a young age. After graduating from the Suwa Women’s Higher School in 1922, she moved to Tokyo and began living with the anarchist Yamamoto Toshio. They went to Korea together but returned after only one month. They were both arrested in the confusion and clampdowns following the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and released on condition of leaving Tokyo. She eventually moved to Manchuria and was to give birth in a hospital in Dalian but the child lived for only twenty - four days, dying of malnutrition. Based on this personal experience, she wrote the short story In the Charity Hospital, which established her as a writer of proletarian literature.

Hirabayashi Taiko married the novelist and critic Kobori Jinji in 1927 but divorced in 1955 after discovering that he had an illegitimate child. In 1946 she won the inaugural Women's Literature Prize with Kou iu onna.

After the war, she was to be seen as a writer of Tenko Literature (literature based on one's own political apostasy) and showed conservative, anti - communist tendencies. She was also known to be a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.

Her writings were often modeled on her own life or contemporary authors but she also produced various social commentaries and essays. During the war, after receiving help from a gambler named Ishiguro Seiichi (石黒政一), she became interested in the world of the yakuza and also wrote novels with a chivalrous spirit such as Kokusatsu (黒札)、Chitei no Uta (地底の歌) and Nagurareru Aitsu (殴られるあいつ). In 1967 she won the 7th Women's Literature Prize with Himitsu.

She was posthumously awarded the Nihon geijutsuin shou (日本芸術院賞) and the Hirabayashi Taiko Prize was created in her honor.

There is a Hirabayashi Taiko Memorial Museum in Suwa City, Fukushima prefecture.