岡本かの子
Okamoto Kanoko
1889–1939
A late-blooming novelist, poet, and Buddhist scholar whose fiction arrived in a torrent during the final years of a turbulent life. Beginning as a tanka poet in the orbit of the Myojo circle, she turned to prose only in her forties, producing works of startling sensuality and metaphysical depth. Stories such as Rogisho, Kingyo Ryoran, and the unfinished Shojo Ruten trace the appetites of women -- for food, beauty, art, eros -- against a backdrop of Buddhist longing for liberation. Her style is lush, perfumed, and unmistakable. Mother of the artist Okamoto Taro, she lived in a famously unconventional household, and her sudden death cut short a career still gathering force.
