lizardjay

Fujikage Seiju was born in 1880 in Niigata on the north coast; her birth name was Uchida Yai or Yae (she had an unreasonable number of names throughout her life). Her father was a sushi chef, and it may have been through his catering connections that she was adopted early on into the geisha quarters, where she learned to dance and play the shamisen at an early age, as well as becoming literate at a terakoya. She made her debut as a dancing girl at age thirteen.

When she was nineteen, she went to Tokyo to study with the Kabuki actress Ichikawa Kumehachi, taking the stage name Uchida Shizue; she also studied poetry with Sasaki Nobutsuna, along with Hasegawa Shigure among others. In 1903 she appeared with Kumehachi in a production at the theater run by Kawakami Otojiro and his wife Sadayakko; advised thereafter to switch to Japanese dance, she became a disciple of Fujima Kan’emon II. In 1909 she was given the right to call herself Fujima Shizue. Unable to support herself as a dancer alone, she also worked as a geisha under the name of Shintomoeya Yaeji, becoming known as “the literary geisha.”

In 1910, at age thirty, Shizue met the writer Nagai Kafu, then a professor of literature at Keio University. They had a child, who was adopted out, and subsequently married in 1914; however, Kafu’s persistent infidelity drove Shizue to leave him within a year of the marriage, starting an off-again on-again relationship which was to last until their final parting in 1937. Kafu made use of her love life in his writing.

In 1917, she founded the Fujikage-kai dance study group, in effect a production company; originally a joint effort with two other disciples of Kan’emon, it quickly became her own group, and she gave up her geisha work two years later to concentrate on performing and producing a new form of Japanese dance, including new explorations of dance in folklore and children’s songs. Collaborators with the Fujikage-kai included luminaries of the era in various fields, such as the artist Wada Eisaku, the writer Kitahara Hakushu, the composer Yamada Kosaku (younger brother of Tsuneko Gauntlett), the singer Sato Chiyako, the critic Katsumoto Seiichiro (also a lover of Shizue’s, until he fell in love with the novelist Yamada Junko), and the actresses Okada Yoshiko and Mizutani Yaeko.

In 1928, Shizue took the Siberian Railway to Europe, where she visited London in company with the writer Yoshiya Nobuko and performed at the Théâtre Femina in Paris. Thereafter, her Fujikage-kai performances incorporated European music and dance influences as well as traditional Japanese ones such as nagauta. In 1931 her erstwhile teacher refused to let her use the Fujima name any more (they were to mend relations in 1940), and she took the name Fujikage Shizue, also leaving the Japanese Dance Association.

During the war she was compelled to conform to patriotic dance themes such as Japan’s theoretical 2600th national anniversary. She fled to her birth prefecture of Niigata to avoid the worst of the postwar chaos, returning to Tokyo in 1946 to continue the Fujikage-kai productions; she also performed with her disciples for the Occupation army. In 1957 she retired from active performance, passing on the name of Fujikage Shizue to her disciple Fujikage Miyoe and taking the name Seiju instead (“quiet tree” as opposed to Shizue, “quiet branch”).

After Nagai Kafu’s death in 1959, she made a commemorative habit of eating katsudon, his favorite dish, on the 30th of each month. She received numerous national honors before her death in 1966 at the age of eighty-six. The Fujikage-ryu modern dance style remains an official institution today; the title of Fujikage Seiju was passed on to the third generation, her granddaughter by blood (birth name Sado Ichiko), who died just one month ago as of this posting.

Sources
Nakae