Shizuko Gō

Gō was born Michiko Yamaguchi in Yokohama, Japan on April 20, 1929. She graduated from Tsurumi Kōtō Joshi Gakkō.[1] During World War II she worked in a factory instead of going to college, like many other people her age at the time. After the war she contracted tuberculosis, and was sent to a temple in the countryside to heal by her family. After two years. Gō had recovered enough to find a job and return to her normal life. She began writing in 1949. However, her tuberculosis recurred regularly until she eventually had to have a lung removed in 1955. She married Ikuzō Ōshima soon after the surgery, and stopped writing to raise her family.[2]

Gō began writing again in 1968, after the Japanese Self Defense Force announced its new budget. She wrote her best-known novel, Requiem (れくいえむ), after the announcement. It is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place during World War II, and follows a young woman who works in a factory and contracts tuberculosis. The story was originally published in Bungakukai in 1972, and won the Akutagawa Prize.[2] She wrote several other novels after that success that also had anti-war themes. She even went to the Philippines in 1984 to conduct research for her 1986 story Midoriiro no Yami (緑色の闇), which was about a Japanese family in Manila during World War II.[2]

Gō became more politically active in the anti-war and peace movements, especially in 1982 when she wrote a piece in the Asahi Shinbun against the United States and Japan's military exercises near Mount Fuji.[2] She also wrote about Japan's inconsistent and corrupt education system in some of her fiction and nonfiction works.[2]

Gō died of old age in Yokohama on September 30, 2014.[1]

• Requiem (1972)
• Chiisana Umi to Sora (小さな海と空), 1975
• Wagaya no Doronko Kyōiku (わが家の泥んこ教育), 1976