Beauty in Disarray. Harumi Setouchi

      WHEN I THOUGHT of going to Hakata, it was merely out of a desire to stand upon the seashore at Imajuku, noted for its beautiful pine grove at Iki-no-Matsubara. If you look at a map, you will find that the town of Imajuku, which sits upon Hakata Bay on the western outskirts of Fukuoka, is about seven miles from the center of the city. Inside Hakata Bay is a smaller inlet bay called Imazu, and Imajuku is exactly in the middle of that inlet's coastline.

      Four or five years ago, on a trip down this coastal highway from Hakata to Karatsu, I must have driven past Imajuku, but I don't have the slightest recollection of having done so. Only after the memory of Noe Ito began to occupy my mind did I become conscious of the name of the small coastal village of Imajuku in the Itoshima district of Fukuoka prefecture.

      The name Noe Ito alone will probably not mean anything to those born in the Showa era (1926-89); and even to those born in the Taisho era (1912-26), her name will be practically unknown. But for those who have even the slightest interest in or knowledge about the Taisho era, it is inconceivable that they could not know of the two greatest events at the beginning and end of that era: the trial of Shusui Kotoku for high treason and the Sakae Osugi murder case. Even among the various massacres that took place in the confusion following the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923, no event caused more indignation and consternation among the people in those days than the murder of Sakae Osugi, his wife Noe Ito, and his six-year-old nephew Soichi Tachibana. They had been strangled and beaten to death by military-police captain Masahiko Amakasu and five of his men and then dumped into an abandoned well. Sakae Osugi's too great fame as an advocate of the anarchist and socialist movements in Japan, and the brutality of accompanying his death with the murders of his wife, not even in her thirties, and his young nephew, were the main reasons that the case evoked so much public compassion and resentment. I suspect that those who remember Noe Ito as a victim in the Amakasu Incident may go even further back and recall the famous assault-and-battery case of the zany love affair dubbed the "Shady Inn Incident," after the inn of that name in Hayama, in which Osugi was stabbed by his mistress Ichiko Kamichika. The object of the woman's jealousy at that moment was not Osugi's legal wife Yasuko Hori, but his new flame Noe Ito.

      The mere fact that a woman named Noe Ito turned up in these two bloody affairs, both of which created sensations in society within a few short years, is sufficient to make us aware that she committed herself to a dramatic destiny. Furthermore, you will be all the more impressed with the dramatic elements in her life when you realize that the same Noe Ito was one of those sensational "New Women" in the coterie of the Bluestocking Society and much talked about in the magazine Seito (Bluestocking), edited by Raicho Hiratsuka; that Noe Ito shared her fate to the end with Seito after proudly taking it over from Raicho; and that she was also entrusted with the historical role of bringing down the curtain on this magazine. Moreover, before Noe ran off with the anarchist Sakae Osugi, she was the ardently loved wife of Jun Tsuji, the man who had established dadaism in Japan, though according to one family census, she had been married once before. In a period of ten years she gave birth to seven children. The life she lived so fully and colorfully during the brief span of twenty-eight years was so remarkable and brilliant that it contained the measure of the lives of several ordinary women.

      It was during the time that I was writing about the author Toshiko Tamura, one of the leading female figures from the last years of the Meiji era (1868-1912) to the beginning of the Taisho era, that I became acquainted with Noe Ito's name. Though I had noticed it listed among the names of the Seito staff, to which Toshiko herself was connected, I was not the least bit charmed by Noe Ito's overly subjective impressions, which were composed in a stiff style; by her so-called "short stories," which were cast in a rather immature form; or by her puerile poems published in the magazine, the following one typical:

      Eastern Strand

      Solitary rock along the eastern strand,

       On its brown back

       You grebes that have also come to perch today—

       Why in that lonely way

       Do you cry out?

       . . .

       See here, grebes! How I wish

       You'd die! On that rock—

       If you die, I'll die too.

       If we must die after all, oh grebes,

       Why not hurl ourselves into the maelstrom!

      I burst into laughter after reading this poem. I was amazed that even though the magazine had come into being in the last year of Meiji, the staff had been so poorly endowed with talent that they had been forced into publishing such a juvenile attempt at literature.

      When I compared this poem with the first article of the Bluestocking Society bylaws, formulated when the group was organized, I was all the more surprised by their naivete and could not help but smile sardonically:

      We will strive for the development of female writers, allow each to exhibit the special gift of her inborn talent, and at some future date aim to produce female geniuses.

      By chance I once more came across the name of Noe Ito, which I had hardly given the slightest notice to the first time. This is how it came about. Shortly after I had finished writing about Toshiko Tamura, I began a tenaciously long novel based on the life of Kanoko Okamoto. Kanoko had joined the Seito staff a little later than Toshiko and slightly earlier than Noe. Since not only one but two excellent female writers who had attracted my interest had, during a period in their youth, secured positions on the staff of Seito, I took another look at the magazine itself.

      As a result of this examination, I was strongly caught up in the blazing enthusiasm and dazzling way of life in which Noe Ito, the youngest member of Seito, spent her youth on the magazine, defended it longer than anyone else did, absorbed from it more than anyone else had, despaired over it more deeply than anyone else, and, finally, using Seito as a springboard, resolutely sundered herself from her past to fling herself against the bosom of her lover Sakae Osugi—all at the risk of her life and for the purpose of love and revolution.

      Even when considered in the most favorable light, the literary talent of Noe, who wrote poetry like "Eastern Strand" at the age of seventeen, could hardly be called full of promise. Though she later earned her living quite well from her pen by managing to produce stories and reviews and even translations, she left behind works too poor for later generations to dub her a writer of the first rank.

      What attracted me to Noe was neither her literary talent nor her remarkable growth as a human being, but the elaborate drama of the lives she was entangled in, the extraordinary intensity of each of the individuals who appeared upon her stage, and the bewitching power of the dissonant play of complexity and disharmony performed by all those caught up in these complicated relationships. My feelings intensified as I read about Noe in Fumiko Ide's herculean labor Seito, and Kureo Iwazaki's elaborately detailed biography of Noe Ito entitled Woman of Flame.

      By standing on the beach at Imajuku, where Noe Ito was born; by listening to the cries of the grebes, which she had written about in her poem; and by watching the blue waters of Hakata Bay, in which she had swum, I thought I would attempt to get closer to the image of Noe that had so completely captivated me.

      When the jet I was on landed at Itazuke Airport, I was greeted by a reporter from the Nishi Nippon newspaper office. As soon as I got into his car, the young man, whom I was meeting for the first time, said, "I've been in touch with Mako. I expect she'll see us at the office." At that moment I didn't understand what he meant. Two or three days before my departure for Hakata, I had casually mentioned to Shizuo Kito, an old newspaper journalist who happened to drop by to see me, my reasons for going to Hakata, and he was