Here is part of an article I found on Fumiko Enchi online. It gives a brief biography. After we read Freud's Five Lectures and went into "Macbeth" we talked about the different ways we could analyze literary texts through a Freudian perspective. We talked about sublimation and the author's biography having to be psychoanalyzed before understanding the text. This talks about Enchi's relationship with her family and her battle with diseases so it may be helpful:

he following biographical sketch is adapted with deletions and additions from Sachiko S. Schierbeck, Japanese Women Novelists in the 20th Century: 104 biographies, 1900-1993. Copenhagen: Museum Tusalanum Press, 1994, pp. 112-118.

ENCHI FUMIKO (1905-1986) was born in Tokyo on October 2, 1905 and died of heart failure on November 14,1986. Her father was Ueda Kazutoshi (1867-1937), a distinguished Japanese linguist. Her grandmother (of male-lineage) was an avid partisan of Kabuki and a good story-teller. Enchi attended the girls' middle school of Japan Women's University from 1918-1922; she received private tuition in English, French. and Kambun (Chinese literature) until her marriage. She also attended the lectures of Osanai Kaoru. the founder of modern Japanese drama. In 1930, she married Enchi Yoshimatsu. a journalist with whom she had a daughter. She had two major operations, a mastectomy in 1938 and a hysterectomy in 1946.

As a young child Enchi was taken to the Kabuki theatre and listened to the gesaku novels of the late Edo era. A precocious girl, she read everything from the Genji monogatari to Edo gesaku and modern novels in adult magazines. At 13 her reading list included the works of Oscar Wilde, Edgar A1lan Poe, Hoffman. and the writings of lzumi Kyoka (1873-1939), Nagai Kafu (1879-1959). Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1868-1965), whose sado-masochistic aestheticism particularly fascinated her. Her interest in the theatre was encouraged also by her father. In 1926 her one-act play. "Furusato" (A Birthplace), was published in the journal Kabuki and was received favorably. Another one-act play "Banshu soya" (A Noisy Night in Late Spring, 1928) was acclaimed when it was staged at the Tsukiji Little Theatre. After the birth of her daughter, Enchi turned to novel writing. Her earliest novels such as Kaze no gotoki kotoba (The Words Like the Wind, 1939), Ten no sachi, umi no sachi (The Treasures of Heaven and Sea. 1940) and Shunju (Spring and Autumn, 1943) did not sell well.

During the war Enchi lost property in the bombing and afterwards she made a slow recovery from a cancer operation. In this period. she published little. Around 1951 she reestablished herself as an author writing of the suffering of women. In 1953 the title story of Himojii tsukihi (Starving Days), which had first appeared in serial form in 1951, won the Women's Literature Prize. It is a violent, harrowing tale of family misfortune and deprivation. both physical and emotional. The highly praised novel, Onna zaka (The Waiting Years, 1949-1957) won the Noma Literary Prize. It analyzed the plight of women who had no alternative but to accept the demeaning roles that the patriarchal family system had assigned to them. At the age of 15 the protagonist Tomo is married to a government official. When he becomes an influential man, he begins to have affairs, and persuades the childless Tomo to let him have a young mistress living in their house. Many of Enchi's most memorable characters are mature women who have either lost their reproductive function, or their beuaty, or both and as a result seethe with anger, passion and even erotic desire. With the qualities that society values most in a woman, her sexuality and her capacity to reproduce, absent, she has little on which to base claims of authority or legitimacy. Tomo's husband does not stop the humilation of his wife by placing just one mistress in his household, he adds another. He even stoops to seducing his own daughter-in-law, his brutish son's wife, much to the horror of Tomo and the other two concubines. However, Tomo maintains her position as the mistress of the household, even showing these defenceless young women compassion. On her deathbed, Tomo insists that she does not want her body to be buried; it should simply be dumped into the water. Her husband shudders as he listens to her, realizing at last the torments she has suffered for forty years. The text ends with these two sentences:

His body had suffered the full force of the emotions that his wife had struggled to repress for forty years. The shock was enough to split his arrogant ego in two.

With these words, powerful blow was delivered against the patriarchy and its abuses. Anger and resentment long suppressed surfaces with such force that it can shatter a husband's ego. As Nina Cornyetz notes in her study Dangerous Women, Deadly Words

Known as a writer of pyschological fiction, Enchi's narrative project more accurately combined a fiction or archetypes with vacillations between "gestalt" interiority ad "individual" interiority. . .For Enchi, "psychological interiority," as written in a text, was both deeply individual and personal but nonetheless inseparable from the collective, sociolpolitical experience of being a woman in modern Japan" (101).

In other words, while Enchi clearly does probe the interior psychological spaces of her female characters, she is also interested in placing them squarely in the current of Japanese history and society. The Waiting Years, in particular, is centered on the period in which the prewar patriarchal political and social order was constructed, i.e., between the 1880s and the 1920s.