Yoshikawa
Hidetsugu (吉川英次) or known as Yoshikawa Eiji was
born August 11th, 1982 in Kanagawa prefecture which is
now is part of Yokohama. Because the situation of his family, he had to drop
out from school and looking for job when he was eleven years old. After he was
18, after a near fatal accident working at Yokohama dock, he move to Tokyo and
become an apprentice in a gold lacquer workshop. He spends his spare time which
is not much, with reading and writing haiku and story. He joined a poetry
society and started writing comic haiku under the pseudonym “Kijiro.”
In 1914, with The Tale of Enoshima,
he won first prize in novel-writing contest sponsored by publisher Kodansha. He
joined Maiyu Shimbun (Maiyu Newspaper) in 1921, in the following year he began
publishing serialization, starting with “Shinran” (親鸞).
He married Yasu Akazawa in 1923, the year of the Great
Kantō earthquake. In this situation he decide to be a professional writer. In
the same year he published stories in various periodicals published by
Kodansha, who recognized him as their number one author. He used 19 pen names
before settling on Eiji Yoshikawa. He first used this pen name with the
serialization of Sword Trouble, Woman
Trouble. His name became a household word after Secret Record of Naruto was serialized in the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun (Osaka Daily
Newspaper), from then on his writing became much more popular.
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
(宮本武蔵), 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 he 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.
