User:Patrickortez/career

Literary career
While in her teens and a freshman in the English literature department of Japan Women's University, she wrote a short story, "Mazushiki hitobito no mure" ("A Crowd of Poor People"), which was accepted for publication in the prestigious Chūō Kōron (Central Forum) literary magazine in September 1916, and which subsequently won a literary prize sponsored by the Shirakaba (White Birch) literary circle.

Leaving the university without graduating, she traveled to the United States together with her father. She studied at Columbia University and met her first husband, Araki Shigeru. The couple would divorced in 1924. Her semi-autobiographical novel Nobuko (1924–1926) relates the failure of this marriage, her travels abroad, and finding independence as a single woman. She contemplated dedicating Nobuko to Yuasa Yoshiko, with whom she had been in an intimate relationship since 1924.

Russia
In 1927, they traveled to the Soviet Union where they continued to live together for three more years. In Moscow, they studied the Russian language and Russian literature and developed a friendship with noted movie director Sergei Eisenstein. On their return to Japan, Miyamoto became editor of the Marxist literary journal Hataraku Fujin (Working Women) and a leading figure in the proletarian literature movement. She also joined the Japan Communist Party, and, after separating from Yuasa, married its secretary-general, the communist literary critic Kenji Miyamoto, in 1932.

Imprisonment
After 1932, with the government enforcement of the Peace Preservation Laws and the increasingly severe suppression of leftist political movements, Miyamoto's works were severely censored and her magazine was forbidden to publish. She was repeatedly arrested and harassed by the police, and spent more than two years in prison between 1932 and 1942. Her husband Miyamoto Kenji spent from December 1933 until August 1945 in prison. During the war period, although she was mostly unable to publish, she wrote a large number of essays.

Post war
In the post-war period, she was reunited with her husband, and resumed her Communist political activities. This period was also the most prolific in her literary career.

Within a year of the end of the war she published two companion novels, The Banshū heiya (The Banshū Plain) and Fūchisō (The Weathervane Plant), both descriptive of her experiences in the months immediately following the surrender of Japan. The pair of novels received the Mainichi Cultural Prize for 1947.