Arduinna

Hayashi Kimuko was born in 1884 in Tokyo; her birth name was Kin. Her father Toyotake Wakunidayu was a joruri reciter, and her mother Takemoto Soko one of his disciples, and later a noted reciter in her own right. At age seven Kimuko was adopted by Uchida Hana, who ran a noted ryotei frequented by the leading politicians of the day, to be trained as her successor. She began studying traditional dance at nine in the Nishikawa-ryu school, along with the koto, the shamisen, the tea ceremony, and flower arrangement. At twelve she began to write waka poetry. By her teens she was considered one of the three great beauties of the period, along with Kujo Takeko and Yanagiwara Byakuren.

In 1901, at seventeen, she was married to the politician Hinata Terutake, who had made good as a broker in Hawaii promoting Japanese immigration; he had come to the ryotei and fallen in love with her at first sight. Although not in love with him, she appreciated his sincerity and gentlemanly manners, and the marriage eventually took place in the face of Kimuko’s adoptive mother’s protests. Kimuko and Hinata, who had been baptized in Hawaii, attended church together, and in 1905 moved into an enormous mansion known after its location as the “Tabata Palace,” where Kimuko held court as mistress of the salon (and learned to like the snakes her husband kept as pets for his amusement; the newspapers claimed she kept snakes up her kimono sleeves and bathed in perfume). They had six children between 1902 and 1913. In between, Kimuko found the time to study languages, art, and theology, as well as to write and publish well-regarded stories, essays, and poetry. In 1913 she became involved in the New Real Women’s group with Nishikawa Fumiko and others, arguing against loveless marriages and marriage with men who did not respect women.

In 1914, Hinata was arrested for alleged involvement with the Oura Incident (a vote-buying scandal involving military expenditures); he became unbalanced in prison and died in 1918 in a psychiatric hospital. Kimuko sold the mansion and focused on her existing sideline, taken up when her husband’s businesses wavered, producing and selling Aurora beauty lotion (she used her already legendary looks to put the product over) in addition to her writing and dancing. Her cosmetic work put her in contact with the pharmacist and poet Hayashi Ryuha, nine years younger than she, whom she called her first love; they married in 1919 and opened their own pharmacy, the brief gap between husbands (as well as Hayashi’s age and Kimuko’s existing children) setting off an enormous scandal. (Her oldest daughter Chie, then seventeen, remembered being told “it’s time for you to stand on your own two feet” at the time.) Kimuko found support in the activist Hiratsuka Raicho; although Raicho’s Bluestocking group had been ideological opponents of Kimuko’s New Real Women, both of them had set out on unconventional marriages with younger men, leading Raicho to sympathize.

In 1924, Kimuko launched her own “Hayashi-ryu” dance school, focusing on creative and folktale-based dance; she produced numerous dances of her own, some drawing on Western concepts and music as well, and promoted dance as a source of physical and mental health for women. She kept her dance lesson fees low and taught her students classical literature on the side; in addition, she and her husband both wrote poetry for the children’s literary magazine Akai Tori [Red Bird]. Kazue, the fourth of her six daughters, eventually inherited the school (of the other children, Chie married a pastor, Nana became a typist, studied in the States, and married a judge, Harumitsu was a sailor and an actor, Kiyomitsu was a cameraman, Saeko wrote for radio, and Momoko and Midori died in their twenties).

In 1945, just as Midori was dying of tuberculosis, Hayashi got another woman pregnant; Kimuko told him that the child would need a father and sent him off, although they never formally divorced. She received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 5th class, in 1966, and died the following year at the age of 82.

Sources
Mori 2014
https://kusanomido.com/study/history/japan/shouwa/97010/ (Japanese) Photos of Kimuko, her mother, her first husband and others.