Personal life Sawako Ariyoshi was born on January 20, 1931, in
Wakayama City,
Japan, and spent part of her childhood in
Indonesia. The family returned to Japan in 1941, and quickly moved from Tokyo to Wakayama to live with her grandmother to escape the bombings. After the war, the family returned to Tokyo, where she attended high school and later college at
Tokyo Women's Christian University. After she left Sarah Lawrence, she worked for a publishing company, and continued publishing short stories and journal articles. Two of her works,
Hishoku and
Puerutoriko Nikki, are based on her experiences in New York. Additionally, she received some Japanese literary awards, and even made an appearance on the popular Japanese TV show
Waratte Iitomo!. She is credited as a writer for multiple Japanese TV shows and movies, including adaptations of her books. In 1962, she married Jin Akira and had a daughter. They divorced in 1964. She died of acute heart failure on August 30, 1984. Her works dramatize significant social issues, such as the suffering of the elderly, the effects of pollution on the environment, and the effects of social and political change on Japanese domestic life and values, and focus particularly on the lives of women. Her novel
The Twilight Years depicts the life of a working woman who is caring for her elderly, dying father-in-law. Among Ariyoshi's other novels is
The River Ki, an insightful portrait of the lives of three rural women: a mother, daughter, and granddaughter. One of the characters, Hana, is based on her own grandmother. ''The Doctor's Wife'' is a historical novel dramatizing the roles of nineteenth-century Japanese women, and chronicles the life of the wife of a pioneer Japanese doctor,
Hanaoka Seishū. She was nominated for many awards, and won several, including the first Mademoiselle Reader's Award for
Tsudaremai, the sixth Fujin Kōron Readers’ Award, and the twentieth Art Selection Minister of Education Award, both for
Izumo no Okuni. ==Works==