Novelist. Fumiko Enchi was the pen-name of Fumiko Ueda, one of the most prominent Japanese women writers in the Shōwa period of Japan, first daughter of Japanese literature scholar, Kazutoshi Ueda. Her literary career began in 1926, with a one-act stage play Birthplace published in the literary journal Kabuki, which was well received by critics, who noted her sympathies with the proletarian literature movement. This was followed by A Restless Night in Late Spring, which was published in the September 1928 issue of the magazine Women's Arts and performed at the Tsukiji Little Theatre in December 1928. In this play, two female artists, Kayoko and Mitsuko, are caught up in a conflict on their different perspectives towards art and politics. This was Enchi's first play to be produced on stage. In 1930, she married Yoshimatsu Enchi, a journalist with the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, with whom she had a daughter. She then began to write fiction but unlike her smooth debut as a playwright, she found it very hard to get her stories published. Although from 1939, the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun began publishing a serialization of her translation of The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, her early novels, such as The Words Like the Wind (Kaze no gotoki kotoba, 1939), The Treasures of Heaven and Sea (Ten no sachi, umi no sachi, 1940) and Spring and Autumn (Shunju, 1943) were not a commercial success. She also continued to struggle with her health, having a mastectomy in 1938 after being diagnosed with uterine cancer, and suffering from post-surgical complications. In 1945, Enchi's home and all her possessions burned during one of the air raids on Tokyo towards the end of the Pacific War. She had a hysterectomy in 1946, and stopped writing till around 1951.