SOURCE: "Higuchi Ichiyō: A Literature of Her Own," in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 1985, pp. 53-66.

In the following excerpt, Mitsutani examines Higuchi's place as a woman writer in Meiji period (1868-1912) literature and examines the evolution of her literary style.

At the close of his small book on one of the masterpieces of Heian literature, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, Arthur Waley mentions Higuchi Ichiyō, drawing an analogy between her position in the literature of the Meiji era, and that of women writers such as Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu in the literature of Heian, approximately a thousand years before Ichiyō lived:

While the energy of male writers was largely absorbed in acquiring a foreign culture, and their output was still too completely derivative to be of much significance, there arose a woman [Higuchi Ichiyō (1872-1896)] whose work, hitching straight on to the popular novelettes...