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2016 11 24

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A Guide to the Works of Haruko Shogenji, One of

Japan’s Leading Authors of Children’s Books

Koichi YOKOYAMA

This paper is a complete guide to the 72 books written by Haruko Shogenji (1914-2015), one of

Japan’s leading authors of children’s books. According to the trilogy of her autobiographical novels, she

spent most of her childhood in the Tohoku region, and then, due to her father’s job transfer, her family

moved to Kyoto, where she was bullied by her classmates, which was to turn into several novels, then

they went to Korea under Japan’s colonial rule, where she felt uncomfortable, thinking it wrong to live

happily in the foreign land. Experiencing the misery of World War II, Shogenji wrote, in her early career,

about a girl who felt miserable with her family members staying at their relative’s home, always hungry

during the war, and about a boy who lost his parents in an air raid, suffering a lot to live on his own.

Some idealism after the war seems to have permeated all her works. Haruko Shogenji was good at

describing the sensitive workings of children’s mind; their happiness as well as their sorrow. She wrote

not only realistic fiction but also fantasy, for example, about ancient Egyptians she was very interested in.