Ito Hiromi is one of those women whose presence reshapes a landscape quietly.
She made her literary debut in 1978 with The Sky of Grasses and Trees, a work that would later be recognized as a turning point for women’s poetry in Japan. Throughout the 1980s, she became a central voice in a generation of female writers—though she herself never sought the center.
Poet, essayist, translator, mother, caretaker, solitary traveler between cultures—Ito has spent more than four decades writing from the most intimate place she knows: her own life. She writes about the body aging, about desire without romance, about marriage, separation, care, grief, and freedom. Her feminism is not theoretical. It is lived, embodied, and often uncomfortable—and precisely because of that, deeply honest.
At OSUGA, we are drawn to women like Ito Hiromi not because they are flawless, but because they are unafraid to be real. Her insistence on naming the body, honoring desire, and choosing her own way of living mirrors our belief that female experience does not need permission to exist.
To understand Ito Hiromi is to follow one simple thread through her life:
She has always chosen distance—not to escape life, but to live it fully.
Staying Away From the Center
From early on, Ito knew she did not belong to small circles.
By her teens, closeness already felt suffocating. Family expectations, social roles, the quiet pressure of “how a woman should live”—all of it made her want to leave. So she did.
She married young. She moved away from Tokyo to Kumamoto in her late twenties. Later, she crossed an ocean and settled in the United States. Each move took her farther from the cultural and emotional center—and closer to herself.
“I imagined myself living like a coyote,” she once said. And she has. Solitary, alert, free.
Ito is not someone who gathers people around her easily. She has always lived mostly alone, writing, observing, walking her own path. Even when she returned to Japan in 2018 to teach at Waseda University, she refused to live in Tokyo. Instead, she commuted from Kumamoto, protecting her distance as something necessary—not coldness, but space to breathe.
The Body as a Place to Tell the Truth
If distance shaped Ito’s life, the body shaped her writing.
She has never turned away from physical reality. In The Menopause Diary, she writes about weight that will not disappear, hormones that rebel, a body that no longer obeys. In Things That Have No Heirs, she documents the deaths of her parents and the long, exhausting intimacy of caregiving. In The Woman Growing Old, she writes about returning to Japan and learning how to live alone again.
She does not beautify aging. She stays with it.
Once, she introduced herself like this:
“I aged very quickly. My body softened and sagged. My face and neck filled with wrinkles. My eyes drooped. My hair turned white.”
There is no bitterness here. No performance of acceptance. Just a woman standing inside her own body, telling the truth as it is.
Love, Conflict, and the Right to Speak Honestly
Ito has lived through marriage, separation, and long companionship. In her final relationship, she was partnered with an older, celebrated painter—a man fiercely devoted to his work, often to the exclusion of everything else.
They fought often. She thought about leaving many times. But when his death approached, the desire to separate disappeared. After he died, she missed him deeply. And then she said something almost no woman is allowed to say:
“Thank you for dying.”
Not because she did not love him—but because the story had reached its end. They had both lived fully. Neither had failed. That was enough.
Ito believes that the most painful thing in life is not conflict, but dullness. A relationship, even a difficult one, can still be a form of vitality.
Parents, Daughters, and What We Choose to Pass On
No matter how far Ito traveled, her parents believed she would always return.
And she did—again and again.
Flying back and forth between the U.S. and Japan to care for her aging father, she felt crushed by guilt she never consciously agreed to carry. Confucian values, she realized, do not need to be taught. They exist in the air, in food, in habit.
“You could say they’re in the soy sauce,” she joked.
Her Western partner could not understand this obligation. She stood between two worlds, pulled apart by incompatible expectations.
But when it came to her own daughters, Ito made a different choice. They grew up in the United States, free from the idea that they must one day return to care for her.
“I didn’t want to pass my suffering on,” she said. “One value system is enough.”
Finding Feminism Without a Manual
Ito Hiromi did not learn feminism from theory. She learned it through language.
In the late 1970s, while translating American women’s poetry, she encountered words Japanese culture refused to say aloud—especially about sex. When she softened explicit terms into polite language, her mentor stopped her.
“No,” she said. “Say it.”
That moment changed everything.
Ito began frequenting feminist bars in Shinjuku, listening to women argue, think, and speak freely. Later, at international gatherings of women writers, the same question emerged across languages:
How do women write sex when grammar itself makes us passive?
Ito’s answer was radical in its simplicity. She would treat desire as biology. Hormones as fact. Sex as something natural, not romanticized, not hidden.
She chose clinical terms not to erase desire—but to reclaim it.
“I Am Me”
Ito Hiromi does not try to represent all women. She refuses that role.
“There are too many ways to live,” she says. “So I can only insist on one thing: I am me.”
Her feminism is instinctive. It lives in refusal—in rejecting words she finds degrading, roles that feel false, and narratives that ask women to shrink themselves.
When she speaks to younger women, her advice is simple and unwavering:
Remember that you are you.
You have your own will.
Keep asking how you want to live—and keep moving forward.
At OSUGA, we believe this is where true sexual and emotional freedom begins—not with instruction, but with self-recognition.
Ito Hiromi has spent her life walking away from the center.
And in doing so, she has shown many women how to finally stand at the center of themselves.
