ExtraPenguin

Mori Shige was born in 1880 in Tokyo, the daughter of a judge; her maiden name was Araki. A nicely brought up young girl who studied painting, koto and flower arrangement and graduated from Gakushuin Girls’ School (the school of choice for upper-class young ladies), she daydreamed as a child about becoming the Empress of Russia, eager to marry someone unique. Her first marriage, a family arrangement when she was in her teens, was to an up and coming young banker; however, it was rapidly dissolved when his relationship with a local geisha was discovered.

Shige met Mori Rintaro (better known as the novelist Mori Ogai) in 1902, when he was a military doctor in Kyushu; he was eighteen years older than she and, like her, had been married and divorced once already. He already had a twelve-year-old son, Otto (having studied in Germany, Ogai gave all his children German names written in Japanese characters). Although he had been stubbornly refusing his mother’s urgings to remarry, Ogai gave in when he met Shige and was struck by her beauty (“like a work of art” in his words). Shige, as a fan of his novels, was pleased with the opportunity to marry her idol.

The initial harmony of their married life was disturbed three months in when Ogai was posted back to Tokyo, where they moved in with his mother and sisters and Shige experienced the classic Japanese mother-in-law/daughter-in-law struggles. She found Ogai’s mother Mineko, who ran the household (including Ogai’s military salary) with an iron grip, so difficult to handle that she ended up taking shelter with her daughter Mari (born in 1903) in a room of her own parents’ house. Ogai put this into the short story Hanjitsu[Half a Day] in 1909; upon reading it, Shige was so infuriated that she started writing and publishing her own stories (in some accounts, encouraged to do so by Ogai), submitting them to Seito [Bluestocking] among other magazines. She depicted her husband in fiction as a loving partner and gentle father, while omitting her mother-in-law entirely.

Their son Fritz was born in 1907 and died the following year; Anne was born in 1909 and Louis in 1911. As her children told it, Shige was apparently a resistant mother, getting on badly with her stepson Otto and very critical of the children’s looks, including telling Louis that he had better sow his wild oats in the West where women didn’t know what really handsome men looked like (she also bought him prophylactics when she felt he was old enough to visit the red-light districts).

Ogai died in 1922; Shige survived him by over a decade, living to see her grandchildren, and like other writers’ wives suffering from the criticism of his family (including his younger sister Koganei Kimiko, also a writer) and friends. Afraid after Mari was divorced twice running that Anne would never be able to marry, Shige sent her to France to study painting, along with Louis, who was struggling in school (in the event Anne married the painter Kobori Shiro). All four of Ogai’s surviving children made themselves known; Otto became a pathologist, Mari a novelist known for tanbi better known to cdrama fans by its Chinese pronunciation of danmei novels, and Anne and Louis essayists. Shige died in 1936 at the age of fifty-five.

Sources
Nakae
https://forbesjapan.com/articles/detail/50669 (Japanese) Includes photographs of Shige in her youth.