What Fumiko Hayashi's "Hōrōki" (Diary of a Vagabond) Taught Me About Living Today

Fumiko Hayashi's Hōrōki (Diary of a Vagabond, her 1930 debut) is the book behind this personal record of habits I've actually started at 66. I finally finished reading it, a book I'd been meaning to read for a while. Written as a diary from the late Taisho into early Showa era, it follows the young Hayashi as she drifts from job to job, sometimes struggling even to afford a bowl of udon — all while striving, day after day, toward her dream of becoming a published writer.

Just living through today

Hayashi's diary barely mentions tomorrow's plans or any long-term outlook. What's there, instead, is a relentless record of today alone — what she ate today, who she spoke with today. It's a way of living shaped by necessity, but it struck a surprising chord with me.

At 66, I believe planning for later life matters, but reading this book made me ask myself whether I'd been neglecting "today" in favour of the plan. Now, when I find one rosebud open in the garden in the morning, I try to treat that as harvest enough for the day. A single open rose carries a more solid, tangible feeling than a dozen items on a to-do list.

An illustration imagining a morning when a single rosebud opens in the garden.

Tasting the small sweetness

Even amid poverty, Hayashi's descriptions of eating a boiled egg or a dumpling are strikingly vivid — there's a small celebration in them, beyond mere hunger satisfied.

Lately I try to eat the first bite of every meal with real attention. When eating becomes routine, the act of tasting itself gets forgotten. On mornings just after picking asparagus from the raised bed, even a plain boiled serving tastes surprisingly sweet. Reading Hayashi's diary reminded me that the effort of growing and the patience of waiting are exactly what make that first bite special.

Treating money worries as feelings, not figures

Money worries appear again and again throughout this book, almost obsessively. And yet, by writing them down in such detail, Hayashi seems to gain a certain distance from the worry itself.

Since I started learning about investing, I've come to see money anxiety less as a question of "how much is missing" and more as a question of "how do I handle this feeling of unease." Rather than checking the numbers for reassurance, I now try to write the anxiety down first, in a notebook. It's not so different, at root, from what Hayashi was doing in her diary.

Small habits of caring for the body

The young Hayashi had almost no room to care for her body — hunger and exhaustion were simply daily life, with no time to notice something as small as a jar lid feeling harder to open than it used to.

At 66, I try to do the opposite: to listen closely to exactly those small changes. These days, when my shoulders or knees feel tight, I turn to light therapy. Rather than any single major treatment, I've come to feel that it's these small acts of self-care, layered day after day, that do more for healthy longevity.

An illustration imagining a quiet moment of self-care with sennenkyu.

Continuing to write keeps me whole

Hayashi's diary is also a record of relentless, unrewarded days — poems and stories sent off to magazines, rejected again and again. Still, she never stopped writing. Writing itself seems to have been what held her together.

As I notice my memory and concentration slipping a little with age, keeping this blog has come to mean more to me than simple publishing. Writing edits and preserves each day's life as a record. That feeling, I think, isn't so far from what Hayashi must have felt at her desk in a cramped rented room.

Holding farewells as impermanence

Hōrōki is threaded through with encounters and partings, one relationship after another that doesn't last, each time leaving Hayashi wounded before she moves on to the next day. The Buddhist idea of ai betsuri ku — the suffering of separation from those we love — feels like one of the book's central themes.

Living between two countries myself, being apart from people and places I care about is never entirely someone else's story. Partings that felt unbearable when I was young now sit with me a little differently, held within a sense of impermanence — that everything is always changing. Not erasing the sadness, but simply having a container large enough to hold it: that capacity seems to grow, quietly, with age.

Two "diaries of a vagabond," Britain and Japan

Britain has its own book of hard early years: George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. Sharing something of the same theme, Orwell writes with the detached eye of a social observer, while Hayashi's diary stays much closer to raw, unfiltered emotion. Reading the two side by side made me think again about how differently poverty took shape in each society.

An illustration imagining a boarding-house street and night market in late Taisho to early Showa Tokyo.

Fumiko Hayashi's idea of happiness

Finally, I'd like to note down Hayashi's own idea of happiness. (From Hōrōki)

"There's a leisureliness to it, as if I could simply keep riding this train forever, bound by nothing. Just yesterday I hadn't even thought of taking a train back to Okayama, which is exactly why it feels so wonderful now. Whatever comes later will come later — life's course will shift and change again, somehow. Somewhere ahead, I think, there's a life with no music stand to follow — nothing fixed. I have no idea what my fate holds, but surely the god of fate has some plan in mind. There are plenty of moments that make me shudder, but this happiness of simply being able to ride this train — that alone is something to be truly grateful for."

*The wind blows on, the clouds shine on — the happiness of being alive drifts, vast and boundless, like a gull upon the waves.

The happiness of being alive — you know it well, and so do I.

A flower's life is brief, filled mostly with suffering, yet the wind blows on, the clouds shine on.*

(From a letter to Hanako Muraoka)

Rather than the "unlucky woman who loved too many men" she's often described as, I've come to think Hayashi may actually have been a happy person.

The book I mentioned here:

Fumiko Hayashi, Hōrōki (Iwanami Bunko edition)

The book has also been featured on NHK's "100 Minutes de Meicho" programme (July 2023 broadcast text, Japanese-language only) — a good next step for anyone who'd like to learn more about Hayashi and the era she lived through.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (Penguin Modern Classics)

(This site is a participant in the Amazon.co.uk Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program.)

---

Fumiko Hayashi: her life and her era

Fumiko Hayashi was born in 1903 in Moji, Fukuoka Prefecture (accounts of her birth year vary, and she herself was known to misstate her age). Raised by itinerant merchant parents, she moved constantly among towns in Kyushu as a child and never had a fixed hometown. After graduating from Onomichi Girls' High School, she moved to Tokyo alone, following a boyfriend from Innoshima who was attending university there — only to be abandoned by him the following year. She drifted through factory work, office jobs, waitressing, and street peddling while struggling to get by. Hōrōki was written from four years' worth of diaries kept during this period; serialized in the magazine Nyonin Geijutsu beginning in 1928, its raw, unvarnished voice drew wide attention, and the book became a bestseller once published in full.

The late Taisho into early Showa era was marked by the post-earthquake recession following the Great Kanto Earthquake, layered onto the hardship of a working class flooding into the cities. Hayashi herself, without ever formally marrying, went through several relationships with men, learning firsthand how difficult it was for a woman to become economically and socially independent. The empathy for the powerless and the fierce attachment to life that grew out of this environment run consistently through her later masterpiece Floating Clouds (Ukigumo) as well.

Known for her remarkable productivity and drive, she even travelled as a war correspondent to Indochina and China — an unusually wide range of activity for a woman writer of her time. Yet the fear of poverty is said never to have fully left her, and she kept writing prolifically until the end. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1951, at the age of 47.